Jacko: The Great Intruder

by Thomas Keneally

  Again I drove in from the northern beaches of Sydney into the centre of the city, over the Harbour Bridge. Later, in Jacko’s and my absence, they would build a tunnel, but for the moment that arched bridge had to carry all the Sydney-bound traffic. Off to the left, the immensity of the Harbour and the white-sailed Opera House were a case of art and nature cajoling each other. That Monday, however, I crossed into Sydney like a man going towards public humiliation. I feared being no more than a joke at Bickham’s table and even in his inevitable biography.

  The traffic conspired against me by being light, and within fifty minutes of leaving the beach I was collecting Chloe from Francis’s terrace house. For the possible encounter with Bickham, she was wearing an emerald green business suit, which didn’t go well with her high tan and her ample but sun-kippered look. The suit, just the same, signified serious planning and the taking of thought.

  —You look bloody lugubrious in the service, she told me.

  It was a short drive to the park. We found a place to put the car, in the park itself, down near the Showgrounds and the Sydney Cricket Ground. The earth of Centennial Park, as we entered it, was green and heavy from recent rain, and had that heavy plum jam smell which reminded me of the sodden Rugby League fields of my childhood.

  —This is where he’d walk? asked Chloe closing one eye to focus on me.

  —It’s the end of the park closest to his home.

  —Well, that’s not exactly what I asked you eh.

  —I’m not trying to cheat you, Chloe. If he walks, it will be around here. Now listen, I don’t want any accusations if he doesn’t turn up. I’m doing my best.

  —Jesus, you bloody Sydney people have such thin hides.

  We strolled up a path which fringed the bridle track, and then out onto the pleasant greensward, designed in the British manner with lots of imported trees. The park was founded on the hundredth anniversary of European settlement, 1888, by a colonial government which had a nostalgia for the centre of Empire, for England and its flora. It was this fact which had made it possible for the photographer to get that undifferentiated European look into the portrait of Bickham.

  Chloe kicked the park’s heavy sod with the toe of her shoes.

  —Jesus, if all Australia was like this, we could run four cattle to the acre.

  Hooded for a severer sun than this, her eyes squinted out over the parkland – open ground screened by trees at the Randwick end, pleasant hillocks at the Paddington. Those two poles had been, honoured in test matches at the Sydney Cricket Ground, where bowlers, pace or spin, operated from either the Paddington or the Randwick end. We were bowling up from the Randwick end, trying to take the wicket of the sublimest novelist of the age.

  He was nowhere in sight at the moment, and I reassured Chloe that we were a little early. I filled in time by asking how Stammer Jack was.

  Chloe said, About as good as he’s entitled to be. I’ve got to go back for the Brahma Breeders Ball, you know. He might have a stammer, but there are other parts of the bugger that act more directly eh. There’re a couple of tarts in Hector gof their eye on him. He’s a very attractive man in a dinner suit, Jack Emptor.

  I wondered what any seducing woman would think, if she got Stammer Jack alone, of his purple, demi-gangrenous ankle.

  —You notice I don’t have any Wodjiri women working in the house? He’s got too much of a weakness for the bloody Wodjiri women. He and his father before him.

  She looked behind her and grabbed my arm.

  —Jesus, is that him?

  I turned and was sorry to see that it was. No one else in Australia wore quite the same knitted cap of the kind Michael Bickham had worn in the photograph in the exhibition. And then there was Khalil’s chunky form beside him in windcheater and suede cap. They were making slow progress, but seemed to be enjoying the day. Moving in from the Randwick end. Bowling for the Immortals XI.

  —Let’s not turn around straight away, I pleaded. It’ll look as if we’ve been lying in wait. Let’s walk up to the monument there, and then turn around.

  —He might turn around too and bugger off.

  —No, no, I said, hoping she was right in her fears however.

  I steered her towards the modest stone gazebo where in 1901 the Commonwealth of Australia, whose citizens Bickham so despised and glorified, had been promulgated.

  —Even if he does, I told her, we can come back another time.

  —I’ll be bloody ropable if you’re wrong, she warned me.

  She stumped along at my side, grimacing as if her shoes hurt her, as they probably did.

  We reached the little monument, with its modest circle of columns.

  —Any other nation would have built a pantheon, I said, being philosophic to delay things.

  —Oh yeah, she said, but she was impatient with my reflections on Australia’s modest nationalism.

  —Michael Bickham doesn’t give us much credit for building sensible monuments, I said. He doesn’t give us much credit for anything.

  —Why bloody-well should he? Chloe asked.

  We rounded the monument, reading the names of the states carved on its brows.

  —Bloody Territory doesn’t get a mention, Chloe complained, but more for form’s sake. If Sydney people could omit the name of the Territory from this ceremonial plinth, they could certainly sabotage her chances of meeting Bickham. I decided to distract her with a bit of harmless information.

  —The Territory wasn’t federal then. It was part of the State of South Australia in those days.

  —It’ll be part of the state of madness if I don’t get back there soon.

  When we’d finished our circuit of the plain stone pergola, I was disappointed to see gaunt Bickham and his four-square lover still trundling along, making calm but steady time from the direction of the Sydney Cricket Ground, that venue of oafish enthusiasms so despised by the continent’s Prophet Elijah, Michael Bickham.

  Chloe advised me, Keep your bloody nerve, son.

  We strolled along, counterfeiting ease, on a compass bearing which assured an encounter. I saw Bickham and Khalil pause, but even if they turned back, we would overtake them at our current pace. They did not turn back, however. We were close enough now to pick out the great asthmatic writer’s shoulders raised in that involuntary and poignant hunch which characterizes a man who cannot get enough air. Yet he came on, intrepid as his devout readers would want him to be.

  We were fifteen yards apart when Khalil noticed us. I saw his eyes flutter in a way which said, Michael won’t like this. But next they grew genial and he smiled. By then I could hear Bickham’s painful breathing. It shamed me. I knew that this unilaterally planned meeting was not right. But Khalil had already begun murmuring at Michael Bickham’s shoulder, and the great writer, propping and putting undue weight on his stick, glowered down under his lids at us. He looked gaunt and blue-grey enough to have been dying, though somewhat more slowly than Francis Emptor. His eyes were clear and dreadful in their severity.

  —Hello, he groaned very loudly. He greeted me by name. I felt berserkly flattered.

  —Hello, I said with the rushed gratitude of someone much younger. Knowing the kindness wasn’t deserved, I burned with an adolescent confusion.

  I said, This is Chloe Emptor, Michael. You might remember I once asked you to sign a copy of The Mother as Aphrodite for her.

  —I sign so many, he panted.

  In his rigorous honesty, he was a consistent bastard.

  —Of course, I said like a neophyte, like someone who didn’t himself frequently have books of his own thrust on him for signing. But we were all neophytes beside Bickham.

  Now the vocal and normally bullying Chloe Emptor had been struck silent.

  —This is a lucky surprise, I said, feeling idiotic and sending more blood still to my face to back up the lie.

  —I must sit down, said Michael Bickham to Khalil, and indicated a park bench.

  I hoped that this was his dismissal of us. I woul
d never be able to read him again without feeling a blazing remorse.

  As he turned towards the bench, Michael Bickham’s breathing sounded more and more alarming. As great a writer as he should have been entitled to take an afternoon’s tortured walk without being intruded upon by a fan and a lesser writer, bonded together in conspiracy.

  But Chloe felt no disgrace and followed him to the bench. She must have chosen to think that somehow he was inviting her to sit down with him for a spell. Of course, it was a very Northern Territory sort of assumption: that he was going to sit down the better to chat with us, not the better to dismiss us.

  Soon the three of them were settled together on the park seat. I remained standing on the flank, a sentry who might flee at any shock. Chloe smiled up at me briefly, winsomely, yet with what I could see was an intense form of thanks. I noticed pockets of oxygen-starved blue under Bickham’s eyes. In an habitual yet anxious way, Khalil himself inspected the novelist’s face. Then he too looked up at me, as one spouse will look up at an acquaintance to appeal against the foibles of his partner in life.

  —He always comes too far, Khalil complained.

  —Don’t talk about me in the third damned person, the Nobel Laureate gasped. Give me my inhaler please.

  Khalil produced the thing from the pocket of his windcheater, a little grey tube with a mouth piece. To think of such a fantastic life dependent on a little tube of vasodilator! Bickham exhaled the scant air he had to work with, and put the spout of the inhaler in his mouth and depressed the tube. He seemed to be panting more at the end of the process, but perhaps that was because he had drawn in the medicine so strenuously. Now, however, he turned to Chloe with a sort of strangulated courtliness.

  —Is your name the same as the Latin word?

  —Yes, Mr Bickham, said Chloe.

  Her voice too was so gagged that for a moment I thought she was locked in a reverent mimicry of poor Bickham’s condition.

  —Caveat Emptor, gasped Bickham. And you’re from the Territory?

  From the flank, I said, Chloe’s got a remarkable library up there on Burren Waters.

  —Are you all right, Bickie? asked Khalil, still inspecting Bickham’s clear-eyed but ravaged face. Would you like another dose from the inhaler?

  Bickham cocked his head and focused for a while upon his breathing, gauging its volume.

  —Things aren’t too bright in that department, he admitted. Yet I feel no panic.

  Khalil warned him. Doctor Ho told you not to assess yourself by subjective standards.

  —I will take the inhaler again.

  Again we all watched him exhale, inhale, hold his breath. If his breath did not return, every news service in the world would take note of it, and of our disgrace as well.

  Khalil said, Michael and I have met a young man named Emptor at the opera.

  Breathless Bickham cast his eyes up and smiled not totally pleasantly at the memory.

  Chloe said, That’s my son. But I don’t know where he got that ermine cape stuff from eh. Mean to say, he grew up a few hundred miles west of Hector. You don’t get too many ermine capes up there.

  —Not with the climate, Michael Bickham managed to say with his first returning breath.

  —That’s the thing, Mr Bickham. I’m like the old lady in The Mother as Aphrodite. Helena of Holloglo, you know. How she decides when she’s dying that it’s her children who’ve killed her. That they’ve been killing her since conception. That hit me like lightning. And I always wanted to meet you so I could ask: how did you know that eh? I wanted to ask you, are you talking about some sort of universal law, or are you just talking about that character? I’ve been thinking for years: in what way did he know it? That feller Bickham.

  Bickham laughed. He laughed at her calling him that feller Bickham. The most patrician mind in the antipodes had surrendered in part to rough but willing Chloe Emptor. As Jacko would later open remarkable doors in America, she had penetrated, at least a little way, Bickham’s remarkable door.

  —That’s an old book, he said, dismissing his novel. But I think I knew it both ways. As a figure of speech and a law.

  He paused, but you could tell he intended to keep on talking.

  —It applied to Helena, it applies to all women. Their children exist to assail them with chronic confusion. To murder them by bewilderment. Mind you, it is what you could call the reciprocal service. As the humorist has it:

  They screw you up, your mum and dad.

  They don’t intend to, but they do.

  They give you all the faults they had,

  And add some new ones just for you …

  To hear Bickham reciting this ironic doggerel filled me with a kind of vertigo, and a sort of delight too.

  He turned painfully to me, Don’t tell the Australian Culture Police that I recite low rhymes.

  He seemed to have enjoyed delivering these sentences, and had rushed them out, but his breathing seemed somehow worse than when we first met him. Weariness rose in his eyes. His face was grey, and the cruel triangles of blue had deepened under each eye.

  —Walk with us, Mrs Emptor, Bickham was able to say. I believe I must go home to my oxygen cylinder.

  Even rising from the bench caused him to gag and rasp and cough. He began to move off, and behind his back Khalil confided in Chloe and me.

  —Sometimes the lack of breath makes him euphoric. Could you help me get him home?

  Chloe fell in on Bickham’s left side and reverently took his elbow. I told Khalil I had a car nearby if he needed it, but Bickham overheard and said, All that … fussing around … with seats … and seat belts … I’m better … as I am. Mrs Emptor … what were we discussing?

  —There’s no need for you to say more than yes or no, Mr Bickham, Chloe told him, tears in her eyes now. But I really wanted to know and I’m not clear about it yet. When you had Helena in the novel realize that her children were what she was dying of … do you think I’ll feel like that by the end? A bushie like me? Do you think my children feel that way eh?

  Bickham paused a second, pointing his awful face to the sky in what I saw as a speculative way, as if Chloe had raised a possibility he might exploit one morning at his desk.

  Chloe said, You see, I’ve had the feeling for quite a time that my children are really killing me, and one of the poor little buggers is killing himself in the process!

  —Killing himself? asked Khalil in alarm, as if self-destruction might be contagious.

  —Frank. Cancer, Chloe murmured to Khalil, though not wanting the great modernist to hear or be burdened.

  Khalil, wide-eyed, absorbed the news and reached behind Bickham to touch Chloe’s elbow. Even then I was astounded. I had thought Chloe would terrify Bickham and Khalil, but within the limits of Bickham’s emergency, she was somehow a success with them.

  Given his problems with breath, Bickham had to keep his chin up and so he did not see Chloe weeping at his shoulder.

  —If it were so … Mrs Emptor … there’s nothing you can do … Nothing the child can do either … We can’t reinstitute the process … A man cannot … enter the womb again …

  Chloe was wavering and stumbling with sorrow and bewilderment. I therefore came up to her left elbow to keep her upright so that she could perform the same service for the Nobel Laureate.

  —Let me say … I am not … a sociologist, Mrs Emptor. It could … be just a metaphor … for all I know.

  Chloe got her sorrow back under rein.

  —I don’t think I’ve been the same woman since I read that passage. I’ve been what you could call creatively insane eh? That’s what books are for.

  —Definitely … to make … us utterly … bonkers. Oh … dear.

  Even at our minute, sub-processional pace, Bickham had run out of impetus. He stopped by an evergreen and put his forehead against the bark. He seemed to be in a bad way but, as Khalil had suggested earlier with all that talk about euphoria, to be unaware of it.

  —Oh Jesus, oh Jesus,
cried Khalil. Why do you put me through this, Michael?

  Michael Bickham was beyond answering. We heard his breath dwindle. His knees yielded. Soon he was kneeling, his cheek now against the trunk of the tree, his eyes closed, his respiration sawing frantically. Khalil had also gone to his knees, embracing Bickham, trying to tear him back from his crisis of air. Appealing to the novelist of the age, Khalil spoke the banal, suburban pleas which any spouse would utter to an almost wilfully ill partner.

  —Michael, Michael, for Christ’s sake, what can I do? Stay awake, darling boy! Stay awake!

  Chloe was addressing herself more effectually to the fallen novelist. She too was on her knees, but feeling for his pulse. Reasonably enough, I believed that this tragedy was my fault and that I could not expiate my culpability; but I felt also that it showed a perversity of Bickham’s. On some stupid level, I believed he was trying to prove my fatuousness as a writer by perishing at my hand. He was trying to reduce me to an assassin, locate me eternally and merely as a comic-disreputable figure in his last few seconds.

  —I’ll run and call the ambulance, I offered.

  Studying Bickham’s face, Khalil cried over-his shoulder, The nearest phone box is right down there near the Showground.

  I saw that this was a long, long sprint. Was I capable? Yet I must be. I must be the Pheidippides of the age, bringing the news from Marathon; not joyful though, heinous news. Perishing if necessary after giving the message.

  —The house is closer, I said. Do you have the key to the gate and the house?

  I was trying to make the decisions that counted. But it was Chloe who had the manner of command.

  —How close to the house? she asked.

  Khalil gestured, panic-stricken, behind him.

  —Over there, over there.

  —Oxygen eh, stated Chloe.

  Khalil raised his face to the sky. He was pleading with the Maronite God to bring the cylinder closer to hand. Chloe jostled his elbow.

  —Come on, Khalil, point the bloody place out eh.

  Khalil turned on his knees and aimed his hand at the big Victorian house behind its wall and in its garden.

  —There! There!