Quipu

by Damien Broderick

  Listen, it’s nice to see you, uh, but what are you doing here?

  I’ve been in Ballarat, Quintilla tells him, as if this is sufficient explanation.

  Joseph is not a hike for nothing. He works out in his head that there must be more to the case than this. He lowers his gaze to the desk, nodding, nodding. He looks up.

  You came back by train.

  Yep. Horrible. Nothing to look at for hours.

  To Spencer Street station, then. Which is only a block away, just down the road but a full half a mile or more from the heart of the city. It makes a twisted kind of sense that Quintilla would prefer to cross the street and search here for a drinking companion than seek out a more suitable chum at a greater distance.

  At 5.15 Joseph abandons his pile of envelopes, heaves against his besuited bosom the heavy new carpet he’s bought during his lunch break, and takes Quintilla away. His mind is paralyzed by shock and alarm, so he trundles them home by crowded, knock-off hour tram. It does not occur to him until several days later that they might have taken a taxi, or even, after all, gone straight to a pub.

  Further sensation on board the tram. Quintilla is wearing a garment that might fairly be deemed short. Wispy, it alternately hugs and billows. Its hues are not muted. Her hair of course is thick and tawny and wonderfully long, like that of the lion of the gender other than her own. They stand in the breezy open doorway of the tram, pressed by office staff and late shoppers, and while Joseph tries pitifully to think of something to say passing cars skid and honk. Two youths leer across her chest in the aisle of the tram, the better to exchange loud remarks of a complimentary nature.

  Have dinner with us, Joseph offers. Martha is a fantastic cook.

  They arrive to find low-grade squalor. The baby is being fed, washed, de-crapped. Martha and the others are exhausted from their day’s toil. A pair of dreary visitors skulks in to use the spare room for a bout of dull illicit fornication. Magic flees.

  Quintilla sits without a word in the living room for a quarter of an hour while Joseph dithers and moves his tongue pointlessly around the cavity of his mouth. Finally she pisses off. Nobody seems to care. Martha and her lawful husband grumble at one another and prepare for an evening of fun.

  Joseph stares at the living room wall with its crayoned outline of a Douanier Rousseauvian jungle all aglint with eyes and feral teeth he knows will never be completed, and finishes the night babysitting two torpid infants while their various parents cavort at the boozer.

  1970: conferenceville

  Randwick Saturday 24 Jan

  My dear Joseph

  Sitting with a cuppa & a ciggie, I ponder yesterday’s Activists’ Conference. Three or four hours of hot discussion. People from Melbourne, Canberra, Adelaide and Sydney. We started by explaining to the audience why, at this stage, we are having closed meetings—due to our socialization, the presence of men inhibits us from free expression. A major conference is planned for Easter.

  A couple of Melbourne radical women from the Bakery started out with Maoist skepticism but ended wildly enthusiastic when they realized it was not a paranoid anti-male faction. I gather that even some of the ladies in and around your household are interested—that should topple a few gods!

  Subsequently we learned that the Anti-Vietnam activities over the road (in another part of Resistance) had wound up in a harangue about the divisiveness of us Women’s Liberationists.

  The whole left movement is in uproar. How dare we hold an independent conference that clashed with something the Holy Males had decided was more important!

  At the end of our session a few of us went across and found these amazing scenes of yelling and denunciation. There was no absence of men’s voices in our defense, I add. We jumped in and declared this the inaugural mixed session of Women’s Liberation. Meanwhile Albert Langer, Hero of the Student Revolution, was going out of his mind over the Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm—not political, he claimed. I jumped up and said this was a bullshit objection. Psychosexual factors are certainly critical in attaining liberation for men as well as women. Bob Gould, who owns a radical book store, defended us, although he says he’s still proud to be a male chauvinist. He informed us that it is a distinctly painful personal change to have to get your own cup of tea, and do your own washing—and your lady’s to boot!

  Albert thinks we’re splitting the left. He fails to see that in Resistance no woman opened her mouth. We will come back to the active Left far stronger for an absence while we gather strength, consolidate our true identities. And come back not in a supportive role but as an equal force.

  Poor old Albert sat mopping his brow between fits of hysteria.

  And don’t think I’m letting you off the hook. Before you and your cool logical quipu friends go into similar outbursts of reflex condemnation…think, observe, listen. Then state your opinion. We shall see what we shall see.

  I went off looking for a temporary teaching job, but you need a degree. I can’t even get a reference from the last place I worked at—they thought I was unstable. Have to forge something.

  Went to see a psychiatrist I was referred to from Melbourne. He was okay, supplied me with Stelarzine and sleeping pills. Told me to come back in a month for another peer.

  Lanie gets back in four days and she, I and Sarah (one of the Liberation committee) are renting a house together in Rozelle (nice little lesbian set-up, I hear you mutter.) You can come and stay as long as you like, if your job vanishes—except when we’re having closed sessions, naturally.

  fondest love

  Caroline

  1983: a nice chat

  DUD BASH is a special issue (but then, so is every issue) (though hardly ever a March, 1983 issue) of ATYPICAL QUIPU,

  not A Typical quipu by any means,

  a catch-all bucket as our computing cobber Ray would say for the piles of letters that spill from my crusty desk. Edited & published by Brian Wagner, the Miss Lonely Hearts of Melbourne hikedom. Can be had for love or money, from the address listed on the back. A large X means you’re on my shit-list and this is the last issue you see unless you Act Fast.

  ::Kicking off with a lament, Joseph Williams (yes folks, you read it here first) the last lark of summer—::

  goforit! goforit! goforit! goforit! goforit! goforit! goforit! goforit!

  Your unsought advice to the socially bankrupt, broadcast on national radio and followed up across four or five beers in a particularly unsavory Carlton pub, got put to use this afternoon, Wagner. I suppose you’ll want to dine out on this sorry tale, so stick it in your rancid sheet. Who has pride? Oy vey. (By the way, did you know that Antonio Egas Moniz, who invented the lobotomy performed by his surgical colleague Almeida Lima, was murdered by one of his post-operative patients whose impulse control had been removed along with his frontal lobes? No shit, as you might well put it, Brian.)

  Get out of the house more, you told me. Go to the Lemon Tree and order strange drinks. Chat up the lady advertising executives hanging about there in low cut blouses. Follow them to hot tub rorts in South Yarra. Smoke marijuana and lean against a wall at a dark party. Seek out sleaze bunnies and have my body oiled and pummeled by jaded housewives in search of bent thrills.

  Luff, luff, you said to me in your Peter Lorre voice. Ve haf conquered science, vot do ve need of luff?

  It’s easy for you to say that, Brian.

  My life works by a completely different principle. I will give you an example, because it is still smarting.

  I’m pedaling back from Readings bookshop in Carlton, right. Very hot day. Slogging along Drummond St., which has a median strip and not too much traffic. The lure of the library tugs me to the right at Newry St. (I have tickets to something like seven municipal libraries and generally keep them in heavy use, as we encyclopedists will). The door is shut. Wrong afternoon. I wheel the bike up a block, get a carton of coffee-flavored milk and two blue plastic straws. You never know when one of them will develop a dysfunctional kink in it.

 
On the other side of Rathdowne St. is Curtin Square, which has trees, grass, public toilets marked BOYS and GIRLS, a “recreation center” of sinister mien, and a sandy patch full of clapped-out steel equipment for kids to slide and jump about on. I go the other way, having a fear and hatred of children whatever their size or age, perch my bike against the bole of a tree, and sit down in its fairly defective shade.

  In this same corner of the parkette is a group of four: two women reclining, two half-naked youths booting a soccer ball around in their near vicinity.

  I drink the milk, stare at trees, regard with quiet pleasure my remaindered John Fowles’ Mantissa ($4.95 hardcover). Shortly I decide that what I witness is not, after all, a foursome, unless it’s composed of mothers and sons. (I’m short-sighted. No I’m not, I just don’t pay close attention to the non-print world.) The boys are now discerned as being about 14 or 15 (but why aren’t the little swine at school? It’s not a public holiday, even though the library is shut. And it’s only about 2.30 in the afternoon.) One of the women is maybe 40ish, the other five or ten years younger.

  As you can tell by sticking your head out the window, it’s been bloody hot. So these women are taking the sun, and dressed accordingly. (So am I, for that matter, in shorts and sweaty shirt.) The boys tire and leave. The women ignore me, but that’s okay. I’m fifteen or twenty feet from them, behind and to their left. Neither is wonderfully sexy, though both are displaying their legs and shoulders to a marked extent; the younger woman, resting on her elbows and reading, has hoiked her dress up to her bum and waves her feet in the air in a careless manner.

  After a time, one of the hazards of Curtin Square puts in its regular appearance. A gaggle of thirty or so council oafs heigh-ho past, brooms at the camber.

  “Haw hullaw,” they cry. “Yuk yuk snort.” They bash one another about the back and shoulders, bugging their eyes at the revealed flesh, grabbing manly arses of opportunity and beating their hands up and down for each other’s information and amusement in the vicinity of their crotches. Adding to this sport, one rogue hollers, “Watch that bloke on the grass perrrrvin’ on yuz, girls. He’s up to no good.”

  This was all your doing, Wagner.

  The whole thing irritates me while it happens, primarily because stupid people scare me and secondarily because the charge is vaguely justified. So I become acutely uncomfortable.

  In fact none of this ugly buffoonery attracts attention to me from the women, either favorable or the reverse. “Piss off, arseholes,” yells the younger woman in a gravelly voice. They continue their studies (several unidentifiable books, Cosmopolitan, a Women’s Weekly for godsake).

  I crush my carton and toddle across the grass to deliver its remains dutifully to a bin, then find a bubbler and fire some water in after the milk, wash the coffee stains off my chin and the sweat from my brow. I stroll back to my bike.

  Now it is important that you understand the next point, Brian. My emotion is not, and has not been, predominantly lustful. It is your failure to grasp this general fact that makes your sex-drenched scenarios so irrelevant. The propinquity of these wenches has lulled me with a soothing boojwah sense of God in his Heaven and ratepaying Carlton wives lethargic in their municipal park.

  However, since I have been called on perving, and in line with your advice to strike up conversations with nameless strangers whenever possible, I decide that I ought to be civil and address my person to these ladies.

  So up I hop. The older of the two is in shade, meager though it is. I’d prefer to speak to her (the direct rays of the sun tend to roast my skull, precipitating migraines and burning my nose) but that would call for an extra couple of steps and a self-conscious about-turn. So I sit down on the grass near her friend, who is facing me reading an enormous black academic volume. She has got to about page xi.

  “If you started in the middle,” I say, “you’d get through it twice as fast.”

  Certainly she’s registered my arrival. There is no reaction whatever. But I cannot just get up and leave. I feel like a flustered flasher. After a loooong pause she looks up and says, “I beg your pardon? Did you say something?” You sniveling boorish turd.

  This was not the way you described the procedure, Wagner.

  Trapped. The other woman has not turned, or even lifted her head. Lamely but doggedly I say, “Well you see, I noticed that your book is still hardly broached.”

  But by now she’s back to studying the black marks on the pages with fierce scholarly intensity. After another stomach-crampingly attenuated interval she looks up and says, “I’m sorry. What did you say?” And is instantly back to staring at the page.

  There is no overt hostility, no piss off arsehole, not even a killing snigger or shared look of disdain between them.

  I sigh. “I see that you fully intend to disregard my specialist speed-reading advice.” No response at all. I groan slowly to humiliated feet. “Aw shit,” I say, “and a very pleasant afternoon to you both.”

  To my bike, through the fence, across the footpath, over the lefthand side of Rathdowne St, up and across the median strip, on to the other lefthand side of Rathdowne St, boiling with rage, and away.

  It was a great plan, Brian. Next time I’ll just stay home and blow the top of my head off.

  ::Joseph, Joseph, what a heartbreak old nervous nelly you are. Leaving aside the question of your abysmal dialogue, which no doubt you polished to a gleaming edge during those Edwardian longueurs while you gazed at the leaves and the spare unsucked straw in your Big M carton, hardly crucial since, if it were, the jocks who mumble their lips as they read would have been snookered out of the Darwinian Pool Game long since in favor of those of us or some of us at any rate with rather more advanced horsepower, no the trouble Joseph is that you waffled off there at the end instead of standing your ground.

  ::Suppose you’d hit your dreary interlocutor with a line like this (and you could have spent some time getting it straight, since she was patently as tongue-tied as you, and it hardly matters whether by genes or design):

  :: “Surely you’re not actually a mental defective,” you could have told her. “Your head looks too big.”

  ::Naturally, this tack could lead to nasty bruising.

  ::Why not the blunt, candid approach: “Don’t be a bitch. I’m just being friendly.”

  ::Actually, old chum, as you say it was my mistake. You’re a natural bleeder, Joseph. We need to toughen you up.

  ::Seriously, Joe, it’s good to see you back to quipu activity. You’ve been hiding in your tent too long.::

  1970: a flying fuck

  Rozelle

  Chez Contentment

  11 March

  My dear Joseph

  Thank you for the plane trip back to Sydney—it was better than acid. And a lot better than hitching all that way.

  Alone in yet another house (not Lanie’s and mine, I mean) and quite happy to be alone, listening to the ABC—nuclear power stations, state of engineering, and now the gentle abyss of musical notes…

  I’m staying in Alan’s peaceful old terrace, sitting on the balcony regarding the breathtaking view of the harbor. It won’t last, though I would be glad to live here alone forever. But Alan will not be in America forever, and in fact his wife Jane will be moving back in here next Saturday. Nothing like the arrival of strange bird of alien plumage to bring the estranged wife flapping back to the nest.

  So really I’ll be glad to leave. Alan’s domestic upheaval is only now starting to bite. There’s nothing placid about Jane—she’s rung here twice in his absence.

  My room at Rozelle will make me happy. It’s small, narrow, with a sink and cupboard under a window looking down over the backs of shops. I hope for peace and good study. Lanie has the best room, fireplace and balcony, but noisy with street clatter. We haven’t moved in yet—get the key on Saturday. Sarah’s not coming in after all. We’ll have to advertise in the Sydney Morning Herald.

  Actually my trip to Melbourne devastated me. A butter
fly with maimed, scorched wings. Will I ever be able to fly? Why why why. It was okay the first couple of days. A little tense. I suppose it all fell in on me when I got back from my parents. They do it to me every time. It’s so dreary and boring—I’m sorry, Joseph, I’m really sorry. I hate what I do to you, what I make you. It’s pointless seeing me. I’m dreary, draining, dragging-down dead-end person—also I’m becoming extremely ugly—at the best of times wretchedly plain. This is literally true, not paranoid. The moth who used to be a butterfly.

  Sorry about all this but I don’t care what I say with you, I have no pride, in fact I don’t give a flying fuck. That was good, lying on your bed reading to the rhythm of your typewriter, gazing out the yellow curtains, looking at you typing some silly thing for Brian’s quipu and you not knowing and not caring and the air warm and touching my skin, the ceiling high and the door closed just you and me and that typewriter holding us together.

  You thought I was bored and wanted to go out—it wasn’t so. I’d have liked to dance for an hour maybe with you, with music blasting from all sides. You should try dancing, it’d help loosen you up. You’re not as clumsy as you think. So what else is new?

  I’ve started at university and still don’t know anyone there. This pleases me. To be a shadow is a good feeling. To be lost is to my liking.

  The lectures are disappointing, if you can be disappointed about something you expected little from. The staff are drab, humorless conservatives, “academic” scored all over their blank, flabby faces (thinking they’ve walked out of C. P. Snow). So what’s new?