Quipu

by Damien Broderick

  Rozelle

  2 May

  My dear Joseph

  Life hums. I clatter nappies.

  Moratorium street theater is losing impetus. I’m pessimistic about the whole thing. Still, one must not think but act, my policy henceforth.

  I saw Polanski’s Cul de Sac: sick humor, drawing out sadistic vibes from oneself and the others in the audience. I always feel disturbed after that type of film. My sister.

  Antony is silent since I wrote denouncing him. I’m crabby. I suppose I’ll have to venture there in a week or so for a grand confrontation, to be thrown out bodily, no doubt, in a stream of abuse.

  Everyone here at Cockroach Follies enjoyed your stay and welcomes your return anytime. Lanie was astounded by your frivolity, having taken you previously for a grim monster of High Intelligence. You’ve cracked that social barrier at any rate.

  She’s discovering the chains of liberation. Took a boy from work to dinner and to bed. Nice. He asked her to live with him. Horrors! Make an honest fella out of him.

  I am incredibly sane.

  How are the local ladies? Make a move, my boy. I am investigating electric blankets—one body is not sufficient these chilly nights.

  The grass grows without cease. The bathroom window is still broken. The living room floor is subsiding. The stove is in A-1 condition after springing a gas leak which nauseated us all for two days.

  thinking & Dreaming Sometimes

  Caroline

  P.S. Suppose life is a man carrying flowers in his head.

  1975: but a good kwee-poo is a smoke

  * * *

  WORD SALAD:: Lettuce from my chums

  * * *

  ::The great Ray Finlay broke his dogmatic silence only for the express purpose of doubting my word. My word. ::b. wagner::

  Congratulations on your timing, Brian. Impeccable as usual. On the very night that the nation totters into constitutional crisis, with our non-elected demi-monarch booting out our elected leader and instating a wealthy grazier more to his liking, what is the editor of HOT AIR telling us? Urging us to the barricades? As it happens, no. We find him at his mimeo cranking out [a] Mike Murphy’s incoherent mumbles about the rapturous time he had at the Canberra Convocation worshiping Leon Kamin from afar (why didn’t you just go up and talk to him, Mike? It’s only Governors-General that bite without warning), followed even more boringly by [b] the editor’s own piece of tripe. If we wished to waste our few spare moments on the works of E. Nesbitt, Brian, we’d trot off to the nursery and read the originals, which contain less heavy-handed tributes to the jackoff material you presumably studied so closely as a pimply youth.

  ::I could just recommend that you take a flying jump up your own botty, Ray, but I am a man of classy reserve. Instead, I am resolved to pay you back in the coin you so gratuitously besmirch. We shall come back later to your interesting suggestion that the coup against the Labor Government failed to attract my attention, you shitface.

  ::As it happens, more than one dazed and fascinated subscriber to HOT AIR has insisted on elucidation. To be brief, they clamor to learn what became of my beautiful if ill-tempered lover Asquith Lancaster and my curious hatchling, the palaeomorph Kwee-poo. For all these faithful readers, I add this postscript to my tale—

  ::I surveyed the Kwee-poo from a safe distance. “So much for orthodox science,” I muttered, remembering with new respect that Scientologist who tried to join our number after having his IQ raised and his thetan cleared. This incendiary creature was like no beast whose bones graced the world’s museums. It strutted and crowed about my penthouse, thoroughly at home, emitting at irregular intervals fat little puffs of bluish flame.

  ::I confess that I was at a loss to know precisely what to do. I edged about the room making friendly noises and keeping one eye prudently cocked on the fire extinguisher. Eventually I blundered into the couch and collapsed heavily, brooding regretfully on Asquith’s abrupt departure. The Kwee-poo snuffled in amicable fashion about my suede-slippered feet. I cautiously drew my legs up under my chin. For a moment the Kwee-poo searched inquisitively before sitting on its haunches with its snout between its claws, watching me with bright-eyed interest.

  ::Naturally, I laughed. I smote my knee with delight, and laughed again.

  ::The Kwee-poo bounded back several feet, smouldering a small area of carpet, and began to cry.

  ::I was shocked. An unwonted and unwanted sense of solicitude for the small beast crept into my breast. I tried to stifle it. Why was the wretched animal howling, anyway? God knows. Well, why do babies cry? Because they are hungry, or because their nappies are wet. I looked carefully. This Kwee-poo had no nappy. Ergo, it was hungry.

  ::Tentatively, I stroked its horrid head. The unhappy howling did not abate. I stood up, fetched a Ming bowl from its stand. Into the venerable vessel (though perhaps no more venerable than this shelled creature) I emptied the contents of the newly opened decanter of scotch. I stepped back a discreet distance and adopted an attitude of scientific dispassion.

  ::The Kwee-poo ceased its sniveling and edged forward. A bright purple tongue slipped out and lapped. The entire snout disappeared into the whiskey. There was a violent guzzling. The whiskey disappeared into the snout.

  :: “And such a young Kwee-poo,” I thought, disapproving on principle.

  ::The effect was delayed but worth waiting up for. Supine for several minutes, the creature abruptly bounded backwards into the air. There is not a great deal of airspace even in a luxurious penthouse. Wings snapped and caught. The animal soared, cleared the chandelier, sailed to ground in a nose skid that brought it grinding along the carpet to my feet. Blindly, it tucked in its wings and claws and went to sleep.

  ::The following morning I rose early and telephoned my butcher. He sent up ten pounds of excellent minced steak. It was the least I could do for a Kwee-poo with a hangover.

  ::Of course, Asquith maintained her grudge. She considered it obvious that the Kwee-poo disliked her and that it was her duty to reciprocate. To me, nothing was obvious but my continued enchantment with her beauty and her spirit.

  ::Two weeks later, suave in cobalt silk nightshirt, monogrammed in silver thread, I stretched on my couch and sipped the evening’s first ante-meridian nightcap. Asquith was outrageously attractive in a soufflé of a garment that revealed only her face and her mobile hands. She sat at a bedroom mirror brushing her hair. Rather brash jazz, of a kind I detested but suffered on Asquith’s account, tooted from concealed speakers and blended with the Samurai sword to lend the penthouse a neo-colonial air. The Kwee-poo purred at my feet, and I scratched its cold nose with a negligent toe.

  ::Humming softly to the music, Asquith came into the room and turned down the lights. She went to the windows and opened one wide. A cool breeze came up from the street and played around my bare feet. I joined Asquith at the window.

  ::Hundreds of feet below, the city was a scattered hoard of jewels. So ugly close to hand, the river cast cold light up between the dark geometry of office blocks and the more organic outlines of old Victorian buildings. I placed my arm gently around Asquith’s shoulders and we gazed on the world that was ours. We went softly to the couch in the darkness and Asquith slid downward, her lips soft but waking with hunger that—

  :: “God Almighty Christ shit!” I had not heard her shrew voice before. “This bloody reptile!” She swung her delicately molded leg with public-school trained accuracy and agility at the Kwee-poo dozing curled on the couch.

  ::The beast hurtled into the air with an angry squawk. With a thunderous noise it wheeled, clawing at Asquith’s face. In two weeks it had grown substantially. Undaunted in her fury, Asquith raised a cushion and beat blindly at the Kwee-poo’s head. I tried to intervene, but she was propelled by pent-up hatred.

  :: “Filthy—” she cried, “misshapen—,” swinging the cushion, “monstrous—,” collecting the Kwee-poo’s snout, “beastly b-b-beast.” She burst into self-pitying tears as the cushion came apart in her
hands, spraying the room with kapok.

  ::I snapped the lights up and tried to pacify the Kwee-poo. It gave me a look combining misery and contempt and fled through the open window.

  :: “Oh my God,” I cried. I leaned out the window. I couldn’t see a thing. Leaping back into the room, I flipped off the lights to the accompaniment of fresh gales of angry grief, and went to the window again. It took some seconds for my sight to adjust. I was horrified to find the Kwee-poo pointed head downward, departing vertically along the face of the building. Even as I watched it gave a thin derisory squawk and vanished into an open window.

  ::I turned back into the room, frantic. Asquith blundered toward me, make-up smeared over her face, seeking comfort and support. I was not in the mood. “Why did you have to do that?” I shouted. “Now the poor thing’s gone. It’s probably lost for good.”

  ::Tears forgotten, eyes wide and jaw slack, Asquith stood for a moment staring at me, her arms akimbo.

  :: “Poor thing?” Her voice rose. “What about me? Don’t I have any feeling at all? Is that it? And you actually expect me to marry you?”

  ::She had a very good point. I went once more to the window and looked into the darkness. Far below, the Kwee-poo’s head protruded from a window. It was gazing upward with a reproachful, hopeful look. I gave a cry. Asquith ceased her denunciations for the moment.

  :: “Thank God,” I said. “Asquith, I think it’s coming back.”

  ::She crossed the room with tremendous speed for someone burdened with a fire extinguisher. Before I understood what she was doing, she leaned out the window and held the device upside down, freeing its noxious foaming chemical retardants. Froth boiled into the blackness, falling like acid to blind the hapless Kwee-poo. I realized in that ghastly, fateful instant, an instant that lingered it seemed for an hour, an instant that clutched my heart with a frozen hand, that a choice lay before me, a decision of the most profound import: that I must choose between the most beautiful woman I had ever met, all my worldly possessions (for a Kwee-poo is a hungry, remorseless beast), my very peace of mind…and a single scaly horrible orphan monster.

  ::And you know what I did, Ray, for we all have made this choice one way or another.

  ::What I did, Ray, in my boring, E. Nesbitt fashion, what I did was lean back, take a firm balancing grip on the back of the couch, and with all my karate-trained strength boot Asquith Lancaster through the window.

  ::I watched for a moment as she plunged toward the ground. My Kwee-poo turned its head to follow her passage, then raised its eyes and climbed straight back up to the penthouse. I got down the Ming vase and opened the decanter and we settled in to our companionable drinking.

  ::And that’s how it was, Ray. Consider yourself warned.::b. wagner::

  1975: tying the knot

  Unsatisfied and tense, Marjory presses her hands to her breasts for comfort. His back to her, Brian lies on the alien sheets, curved into himself, naked in the air-conditioned warmth of the Raymond B. Cattell Hall of Residence. At this moment, across the courtyard and through the trees, her husband is moderating a panel before one or two hundred people in the A. D. Hope building’s Reading Room, principal venue for this astonishing event, this historic anomaly, the first international Point Two Six Convocation held in Australia: one of the few, in all truth, to leave its imperial American and British homelands. None of this gives her an abiding sense of security. Ray’s careful logical being is as subject to random interruption as anyone’s. If he trudges over here now, seeking a handkerchief or a celebrated quipu to cite, they will be in major explicit crisis with no notice.

  Her body aches with the deception done upon it. You bastard, Brian, she thinks. You selfish pig.

  It is not even as if she likes him particularly.

  He rolls over and his wry pale eyes catch her gaze, and he grins apologetically and puts his arms around her, and she recalls with a visceral shock the words, the truthful unguarded words that he’d once quoted to her from the dean of Australian quipu writers. Will he remember them now? Will they express her own ambiguity to him, penetrate his barriers of buffoonery and bigotry and egotism?

  “Why Do You Publish Quipus?” she quotes, straining her neck away from his nuzzling face.

  He looks up at her, really looks at her for a single moment.

  “Yes, I know Marj.”

  Because I’m lonely.

  Marjory shivers, darts her hands down and tweaks his balls, sits up quickly as he jumps in surprise and releases his own hold. She crosses to the tiny apartment’s shower (good thing Ray had first grab at a tutor’s unit, rather than one of the shared-facility student one-roomers), turns the jet on full, stands in hot steamy clouds under the sluicing spray. A highly effective ventilator removes the steam with dispatch, clearing moisture from the mirror.

  Through the hum of the fan, she distantly hears Wagner say, “That’s “kwee-poo,” singular and plural.”

  She dries herself swiftly with a towel brought from home, leaving the hotel linen untouched. “Crap, Brian. “Kee-poo” singular, “kee-poos” plural. Check your dictionary.”

  Unwashed Brian has his clothes on when she steps from the bathroom.

  “Hike usage hasn’t made it into the dictionary yet, Marjory. “Kee” or “kwee,” it’s “poo” whatever the number. I’m making some tea. Want some?”

  “You’ll find the teabags are rather repulsive.”

  “Less so than the coffee sachets. Speak up, woman.”

  Dressing, she nods. Her nerves are relaxing. She doesn’t even know very much about him, after all these years. He’s Ray’s friend really, they all are. Marjory pulls up the sheets, straightens the blankets, bashes the pillows into shape. It is Ray’s honorary position as assistant to the Chairman of the Convocation which is paying for this room. Brian Wagner, like many of the Melbourne brights, commutes each day and sleeps at home, or crashes on someone’s floor. In Brian’s case, she reflects, it could well be someone’s bed he crashes in. If he can find a willing partner. Until now, there’s been little enough spare to go around. At least the size and magnitude of this event has attracted interested and curious non-hikes, by the score. Healthy young librarians, teachers, Public Service clerks. Opportunities for them all, for hapless Mike Murphy with his self-destructive bouts of inappropriate fixation, for Joseph, for all of them. Maimed and half-formed, for all their authentically prodigious gifts. Calibans.

  Because I’m lonely.

  The tea is wonderfully hot. Marjory sits in a Fler chair and looks at her partner in infidelity.

  “Brian, why don’t you find some woman and get married?”

  “Shame on you, Marj. There are strict penalties for bigamy.”

  She regards him in astonishment. They fill the pages of their quipu with endless nonsense and leave out all the important stuff.

  “I didn’t know you were married.”

  “Well.” He slurps at his tea, an attempt at comic distraction.

  “Give. What’s her name? Anyone we know?”

  “Hardly likely. Alice.”

  “Where is she now, Brian?”

  “I think they deported her.”

  Marjory spills her own tea into the saucer. Should have brought some mugs. “They can’t do that, Brian. What, you don’t mean she—”

  “Alice was Chinese, from Taiwan or Hong Kong or somewhere. She wasn’t very fluent.”

  Despite herself, Marjory is laughing out loud. “Brian, you imbecile. What rubbish is this?”

  “Happens all the time. Her parents wanted to marry her off for a tidy sum to a Taiwanese gent back home but Alice wanted to stay here. She had some cousins in Brisbane who ran a restaurant. It was all part of some half-crazed family Triad feud. I’ve never been good with these tonal languages. I was talking to some guys in a pub. I’m not even sure they really were her cousins.”

  “Are you telling me you married a girl from a Chinese take-away and you couldn’t even pass the time of day with her?”

&nb
sp; “She was a student, actually. The Department of Immigration planned to ship her back home when she finished.”

  “But surely if she married you—”

  “Yeah, that’s what we thought. What her cousins thought.”

  “You did this out of the goodness of your heart?” That is harder to believe than the story itself.

  “Are you nuts? They paid me a thousand dollars.”

  “Good God, and you took it?”

  “They were stinking rich—racehorses as well as restaurants. I was broke. This was well before Joe Williams got me his old job and I became a paid-up member of the Australian Journalists Association.” Wagner sits himself on the edge of the neat bed and sprawls back on it, pulling up both pillows behind his head.

  “How bizarre. What happened?”

  “We all fronted along to the local registry office and got married, at least Alice and I got married. Then, just for the form of the thing, we went off for the honeymoon to this bloody great luxury hotel on the Gold Coast. It pissed on this joint.” He waves expansively at Marjory’s borrowed accommodation. “Her cousins came with us, of course.”

  “What? They disturbed the sanctity of the wedding chamber?”

  “They did indeed. Most insistent. After all, they had to make sure we didn’t have it off with each other. That way it could all be legally annulled after a suitable delay, and she’d be available for re-marriage as unmarked goods.”

  “You’re a sexist pig, Brian.”

  He widens his eyes and tilts his head. “I merely describe the world, my dear. I didn’t invent it. The slant-eyes have lived this way for five thousand years, don’t take it out on me.”

  “And a racist pig.” She does not smile. Brian sighs, lies back on the bed. After a time, Marjory rises and switches on the jug again. “You can’t stop now.”

  Instantly bouncing back, Brian says, “All four of us sat around the bridal suite for three days. We played cards non-stop and drank. At least the cousins and I played cards, along with various friends of theirs who dropped in at all hours. Alice just rang up room service and asked for tea every half hour. The cousins were pretty sharp cardplayers, better than fans.”