Quipu

by Damien Broderick

  I am aware that Joseph Williams, for example, will not be startled by this point of view. Against his nihilism, I have argued in support of Ballots, Involvement, Close Attention To The News and all that stuff which I gather my American readers imbibe in, er, “Civics Class.”

  My faith in due process is now fairly shook. Even during the Vietnam war I never entirely lost hope in rationality. When Gough Whitlam became Prime Minister of Australia in 1972 and pulled the troops out of Nam, I felt my faith was justified. Now that we seem to be on the verge of a coup (and what else can you call it when a wealthy minority Opposition gets ready to throw out the elected Government?) I have changed my mind. The world is a nest of fantasy. There is no truth in it.

  So I have decided to tell you something that is true, for which I can vouch from my own intimate experience. I will tell you how I encountered my first Quipu, and how this pivotal moment in my life explains the absence thereafter in my bed of all the numerous beautiful women who once thronged that place. Okay?

  It was in the early 1960s. I do not care to be more precise, lest I incur the jeers of callow newcomers. I sat in my penthouse apartment above Collins Street. My green martini olive gazed like a bland eye. I swirled the glass lazily, set the insouciant fruit bobbing, and winked sardonically back at it.

  I felt at peace with the world that year and that day, and with good reason. The conservative parties ruled the land. No one had heard of Women’s Liberation. (Seriously, Marjory, just joking. If you don’t believe me I’ll send you my I AM A HUMORLESS FEMINIST badge.) In the kitchen a luscious long-legged model named Asquith Lancaster was humming softly. With some satisfaction I congratulated myself yet again on my good taste and good fortune.

  I stretched, and every muscle in my lean athletic body tensed and relaxed, even though aerobics had not yet been invented. My silk pyjamas rustled. Recessed lamps suffused peach light, and the conditioned air was intimate with Asquith’s perfume.

  Only unwarranted modesty would permit me to deny that my apartment, twenty floors above the scuttling lights of the inner city, was a testimonial to my exquisite taste. Worth Avenue had supplied most of the interior. My decorator had flown to Australia specifically to do the place out. The bric-a-brac I’d picked up in my wanderings perfectly complemented the Lanfranchi decor.

  From above the marble fireplace, a samurai sword cast a paradoxically gentle wash of light into my eyes. It always amused me to recall how it had come into my possession. The small, astoundingly nimble old Japanese martial arts expert had found me besottedly engaged with his unmarried daughter. With terrible rage, but awesome control, he suggested a method whereby our mutual honor might be satisfied. It was a frightening moment; as the saying is, my cojones were on the line. When his naughty daughter giggled merrily, however, I knew that the outcome was assured.

  Three times I heard hajime, the call to begin, and three times it was not I who at last called for quarter. There is much to be said for a strict diet of animal proteins. On the following morning, in the bright Tokyo sun, the old gentleman presented me with the precious heirloom that mere hours before had threatened that portion of me by virtue of which, ironically, the sword was forfeit and satisfaction contrived.

  When Asquith glided into the room with our coffee my gaze moved as if by metaphor from the ancient polished curve to her own graceful form. Her heart-stopping beauty momentarily stopped my heart, as, delicate and daring beneath the luminescence of her floating peignoir, her incomparable beauty subdued to a mere backdrop the apartment’s elegance.

  Without a word I placed my half-finished martini on the cherrywood table as she put down the silver tray, fumes of coffee rising, and I took her into my arms, her face nuzzling my chest, my own lips moving across the ebony of her hair. The doorbell rang.

  “What is it now?” Asquith asked nastily. “Your secretary?” She looked at her tiny Swiss watch. “Special delivery from Fortnum & Mason’s? Perhaps your interior decorator?”

  Though I fumed, I allowed no trace of my annoyance to show. The bell rang again, and I drew a monogrammed chinese gown about my shoulders. “I’m truly sorry, my dear,” I told her with a boyish smile. “I left unequivocal instructions with the porter that we should remain undisturbed tonight.” I went across the thick pile of the carpet.

  A demented, unshaven man stood with his finger on the bell, dressed in shoddy, grubby clothes. At his feet was a sturdy wooden case, plastered liberally with injunctions concerning its handling. I looked again from box to face. My first impression had been correct. It was the face of a complete fool.

  “Joseph, what are you doing here?”

  “Hello, Brian.” Joe Williams had never been to my apartment before. I watched a sequence of expressions as he gazed through the half-open door. All involved a measure of greed or lust. “I’ve been in Peru working on the Paqari-tampu dig. I’ve got a present for you.”

  “Is he coming in?” Asquith asked. I was gratified in my proprietorial enthusiasm by the convulsive spasm of Joseph’s throat. As I shook his hand it was his head he shook numbly, staring at her. After the thin high air of the Cordillera Oriental, he had stumbled on heady perfumes too rich for his parched sensibilities. “No. Plane flights. Very kind. Tired. Finlay.”

  “This is Joseph Williams,” I told Asquith, and gave him her name in return. “He’s been doing some archeo-linguistic work with my friend Ray Finlay. He appears to be letting us know that Ray sent this crate to me, and I would hazard from this inference that it contains something too delicate or precious to consign to commercial carriers. Would that be the gist of it, dear fellow? Are you sure you wouldn’t like a drink?”

  Asquith was at Joseph’s elbow, a narrow enough squeeze in the doorway, with a long scotch. He took it and a hearty snort without demur. We wrestled the crate inside while Asquith topped up his glass. I helped him lever the top off. Splintering, the metal-lined wooden top laid bare an enormous supply of packed cotton waste. Joseph drank down his second scotch.

  “We thought at first it was a Psammead.” He sniggered and leered at Asquith.

  “How lovely!” She beamed and clapped her hands. “A sand-fairy! And in the mountains of South America! I thought they were mythical beasts.”

  “Science has learned much in recent years,” Joseph told her as she refilled his glass. I removed a large wrinkled leathery object from the box and held it out with some distaste.

  “Ugh. An ancient Peruvian soccer ball?”

  “Certainly not,” said the syntactical archaeologist. “It’s an egg. A fossil egg. Raymond thought it might grace your collection of objets trouvés.” He leaned over to point out a salient feature and fell on his face. The massive pile of the carpet spared him any lasting injury.

  “Another?” murmured Asquith, presenting decanter and ice.

  “Nope. Must be off. Your hospitality.” I noticed that he was peering fondly into Asquith’s décolletage, and steered him into the gloom of the corridor.

  I set the egg in a silver bowl on the mantelpiece, contemplated it for a moment with intense fascination, and cleaned away the cotton waste and shreds of crate. Asquith made fresh coffee. We drank it fresh and sweet, from a single cup, gazing at each other. I took her to bed.

  “Twice or thrice had I loved thee,” I cribbed from John Donne, “before I knew thy face or name.” Asquith breathed warmth into my poetic mouth. Her moist tongue touched the edges of my teeth. A cool flame licked at my dazed mind. I crushed her savagely against me and bit her earlobe, remembering as a sort of prospective metaphor the endless night on the combat mat in the Tokyo dojo. A vivid noise detonated in the living room.

  There was a slow pungent exhalation of air six or seven thousand years old.

  My heart leaped like a wounded thing. Asquith stiffened, which was a great deal more than could be said for me.

  “My dear,” I said, “can you reach the lights.” In the darkness there was an irritated bumping as my beauty twisted the rheostat. Even as the lights came u
p there was a ghastly squawk and such a scratching of horny feet on painted ceramic tile as I had never heard even from game-cocks in a crisis of murderous rage.

  Asquith did not stint herself. She screamed her head off.

  I catapulted off the bed like a marionette jerked by some higher agency, following with my eyes the line of Asquith’s shaking finger. On the fireplace tiles in the living room, surrounded by torn leathery shards, blinking beady eyes in the light from the bedroom, a small crabby creature preened its wings and tore at the carpet with its feet.

  “Oh my God,” Asquith said. “It smells awful.”

  “It’s been in the shell rather a long time,” I pointed out.

  “You know what it is, Brian.”

  “It is difficult to believe.” I went closer, holding one of my new love’s hands behind me. The anatomy was indubitable. This was no Psammead. “It’s a genuine paleomorph,” I said. “Let us hope it is the domesticated and not the feral variety. Truly incredible.” I think I was lost from that moment, enchanted and committed.

  You know how it is with cats. No one owns a cat. It is a condition of mutual respect. It is impossible to con a cat with insincerity. By the same token, cats are incredibly jealous. Watch the way a man’s cat acts when a beautiful woman enters the room. If you’re attune to it, the air is singed with unvoiced antagonism.

  Just about the worst thing a woman can do, in such a situation, is to praise the cat, ruffle it dutifully, and then pretend it isn’t there. Almost inevitably she will be edged out of your life, and you’ll never know quite what it was about her that you disliked.

  Asquith did not do that worst thing. She pulled her hand out of mine and stormed across the room. In her white face, her cheekbones held two burning points of anger.

  “This is no better than a mad-house,” she told me. Carefully avoiding the engrossed creature peering up at her, she pulled her long dark cape over her shoulders. Her voice was high, not in the least pretty. “I don’t know why I came here in the first place.” She found her purse. At the door she turned. “You can sleep with your bloody horrible old mythical creature.”

  A small, fierce gout of flame singed the edge of her cape as she swept from the room, and the Kwee-poo (for such it was, dear friends) yawned a jagged mouth of teeth and came meaningfully across the carpet toward me.

  1977: kidnaped

  Without a radiator (the Finlays do not run to luxury), wrapped up against the icy air in skivvy, pullover, cord trousers undone at the waist, and blanket, Joseph Williams lies in his guestroom bed, watching gray and white images on the 14-inch screen and waiting for the phone to ring and tell him his father has died at last.

  Cliché encompasses everything vital in our lives, he thinks. Leave aside the drama, at once heightened and flattened, on the silly television set. All that he has read (and most of what he has read is trivial, fatuous, palliative), all of it has given precise accounts of just this burning emptiness in his viscera, this needle thrust, this ache behind the eyes and in the antrums. When his mother died, when Caro left him, he wept without hesitation, swallowed by the spontaneity of his grief. For his old, parched, eaten father he feels no empathy, no true link, not even any longer the irritation that used to enrage his mornings and evenings. His father is dying of lung cancer, stinking in his hospital bed, and Joseph can do nothing more cogent than stare at the Finlays’ spare monochrome TV set. As usual, he hasn’t even got anyone to talk to. Ray is away for the weekend at an AI conference, Terry the geologist is off in the center of the Dead Heart belting the deep crust with shock waves and listening for the cry of oil, Marjory is presumably delving into linguistics in her study.

  Joseph’s hand slips down under the blanket, reaching for his lonely prick.

  There is a tap at the door, which opens immediately.

  1976: an invitation

  26 October 76

  DEAR JOSEPH

  I AM WRITING IN BIG LETTERS IN CASE YOU SEARED YOUR RETINAE INTO BLISTERED LAVA DURING THE EXCITEMENT OF THE ECLIPSE.

  On second thought, that is not likely, since as a person of Tested and Accredited Genius you would be conversant with the dangers and risks of the Scientific Method.

  Our dog did not Howl, even though we showed him the Eclipse on Telly. Perhaps he has lived too long with Man, and his Feral Nature has been covered over by a Thin Veneer of Civilization.

  Actually he is not our Dog but Terry’s. Terry is the geologist who shares our Home. Actually the Dog is not a He but a She.

  My Husband Ray’s two Cats were very bad the other night. They ripped the Chicken Remnants out of the Garbage Bag, tunneling through the plastic with their Teeth and Paws. Bad Pussies! It might have been the Eclipse.

  Where was I? Ah yes, thinking about something Ray said tonight. He told me that you were feeling really pissed off with life but (like Mike Murphy) at least prepared to write about your misery. What he actually said, if I remember correctly, what that in your confessional self-revelations was the true heart of Australian hikedom, appallingly vulnerable, defensively brittle or silly, sprung from a hundred familial herniations into a tenuous, desperate recension of the same unbearable dynamic (paradoxically), yet finally risking that huddled core of wounded self in a most unsure and uncertain hope of resurrection. I’m pretty sure I’ve got that right.

  In short, me and the hubby would like you to pack your bag and come across on the tram and stay with us for a week or so. We’ve got a spare room and a spare cat, so get your arse into gear and take a week off from your depressing surrounds. No excuses will be tolerated.

  your Friend

  Marjory Finlay

  1977: repeat offensive

  22 August 77

  Dear Joseph

  We haven’t seen you for a long time. Have you gone mad and been destroyed under the Rabid Dog’s Act? Think yourself lucky, at least, that you do not share the parlous condition of the brain-swap bloke I watched last night in The Revenge of Frankenstein. He’d been bludgeoned a number of times across the cranial wound with a stout chair. It was likely, the criminal surgeon mused, that this had damaged a brain cell.

  I notice on my calendar that it’s now ten months since we offered you a room and a cat for a week or so. It’s no wonder you persist in your Slough of Despond when you refuse to take up these unparalleled opportunities to taste my crook cooking. We expect to see you on the doorstep before the week is out.

  sternly,

  Marjory Finlay, M.A.

  1977: won’t you dance

  Guiltily, Joseph snatches his hand from beneath the blanket and stares fixedly at the television screen.

  “Worth watching?”

  “No. Quite amazingly cretinous, in fact. It makes you wonder.” What is this he’s babbling? He would be hard pressed to identify the channel, let alone the program. His erection has subsided; he looks across at Marjory, who settles herself comfortably on the end of his single bed.

  What he sees causes a series of distinct physiological alterations in his body-chemistry, each as banal and stereotyped as the mood of pent mourning for his dying father had been two minutes earlier. Thankfully Marjory is not looking him in the face. His skin warms, then cools.

  A mad surmise leaps in his chest.

  She has arrived in his bedroom, when all is said and done, as close to naked as it’s feasible to be, given the chilly air. Joseph has never seen either Ray or Marjory in their night wear, and on a subliminal level has supposed that, like him, they go naked in summer and leave their underwear on in winter. Evidently Marjory is more conventional than that, for here she is in a strikingly translucent nylon nightdress, high at the throat and falling to her ankles but hardly hiding her wonderful full breasts and the bifurcation of her lower limbs.

  Cliché or not, Joseph’s heart squeezes in syncope, a long pause, a lollop, a bloodless moment for his brain. His erection surges back.

  “Feel free to change the channel,” he says. If she does that she will be obliged to learn forward, w
hich will cause her breasts to move free of her ribcage into the line of the blue radiation burning like ice on the screen.

  Jesus, Joseph thinks. I am reacting like a smutty schoolkid who’s never seen the curiously arousing weird forked hairy thing he scribbles so drivenly on lavatory walls, behind the doors, in the back of his homework book. Some ludicrous censor in my mind is interposing itself on the raw reality of what I wish, like the psychic manifestation of a Victorian chaperone.

  Marjory leans placidly against the wall. She has said something about whatever he’s watching suiting her. When a ghastly commercial capers across the screen she gives him a quick smile of complicity.

  It was Marjory who asked him here, after all. Neither of those letters had Ray’s mark. If anything, she insisted. Badgered him. It seems impossible to believe, but could she even then have had this in mind? Or is he inventing the whole thing, the musky tang in the air, the straining forcefields between them across the Invicta blanket he’s tugging to his chin.

  “Marjory,” he gets out, interrupting something she’s started about his work, his parents, whatever it is.

  “Joseph,” she says in turn, after a moment, with a touch of mockery. It is almost enough to bring him unstuck, to nail his tongue. He waits for the trembling in his legs to come under control, certain that she must feel the humiliating tremor through the frame of the hard-sprung bed.

  “Well, it’s just that, Ray isn’t here, and I’m all alone after all, and I wonder if we might not more profitably employ ourselves at some more sensual task than watching replays of last Saturday’s football.”

  The door is closing in a blur before he can untangle what happened. Was that a strangled laugh? An incredulous snort cut short too late? Joseph covers his head with the blanket, cold as ice, shaking with fright and self-detestation.

  The images tumble pointlessly on the screen. The door opens again. In comes Marjory puffing ostentatiously on a cigarette. She rarely smokes, considers it a habit foisted on people by unscrupulous capitalists. She chucks the opened packet to him, matches from the other hand. A heavy dressing gown covers her chubby flesh, closed with a safety pin across her ample breasts.