Homesickness

by Murray Bail

  It was exhilarating. They felt at home, and yet it wasn’t home. Since Ecuador, Gerald had again retreated to the background and Garry, Doug Cathcart and Hofmann entered the foreground.

  ‘Howdy!’ Doug stepped in front of a man, easy. ‘We’re looking for the Empire State Building.’

  It was something he had always wanted to see.

  ‘Can’t help yerz. I’m from Australia.’

  ‘Hey!’ Doug cried out. So were they! There’s a coincidence for you. But the man had kept walking and had already disappeared. He had sandy hair and a tanned neck.

  ‘Perhaps he works for the UN?’ Kaddok suggested.

  The next man squeezed his eyes which were small anyway and looked around, and thought the Empire State had been pulled down—‘Hadn’t it?’—adding anyway he came from Melbourne. The city was full of Australians, including a complete archery team. There were exporters with heavy cufflinks and bulging fountain pens, the newspaper execs, diplomats—yes, and artists from Sydney trying to break into Abstract Expressionism, and a black-fellow out to license the US manufacture and distribution of bullroarers and returning boomerangs. Only the other week the Prime Minister and his party had taken a suite at the Waldorf.

  ‘Two bob,’ Garry whispered to blinking Sheila, ‘he’s here.’

  ‘Who? I beg—’

  ‘Tall, dark and handsome. That drunk—you know who I mean. I’m kidding, Sheila. I’m kidding. He’s all right.’

  Her eyes had widened and she’d bitten her lip.

  While the Cathcarts kept searching for an American, and met two ladies from Largs Bay, South Australia, Kaddok spoke up. The Empire State Building was not the tallest building in the world. It was some other new building. He mentioned the exact measurements. They nodded but it didn’t matter; they still wanted to see the Empire State. As Kaddok spoke—dark glasses, dark suit—generous Americans dropped cents into his explaining outstretched hand.

  In the Statue of Liberty twelve people can stand inside the torch held high in the right hand. First, climb the steps inside the radial artery. The arm is forty-two feet high. The vital statistics were reeled off by L. K.: a man could put both head and possibly shoulders inside her nostrils. The nose (Grecian) is five feet long. The distance between the eyes is three feet thereabouts, imagine that: a yard across. Ken Hofmann could give details about her teeth. No sizes are given for the breasts underneath the academic folds, but work it out. She’d sure need a Büstenhalter. Imagine the size of her—. In all, she weighed four hundred and fifty thousand pounds. The copper was in three hundred sections. ‘That is worth a fortune today,’ said Hofmann, thinking of the London Metal Exchange. From sandals to tip of the flame a hundred and fifty-two feet. A folly, and dull.

  Only twelve could fit in the torch.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Violet. ‘I’ll stay here.’ She had her arms folded. ‘If I go another step higher I’ll be sick.’

  ‘Violet!’ Sasha laughed; because she was having a ball.

  They were standing in the hollow forehead. As they moved up into the arm Violet rested her thin elbow on the ledge, their footsteps and chatter echoed behind her, dying away. The emptiness then became larger, a state of mind. There was the dappled deep sea far below and on it a red tanker; Manhattan rising from the water and mist, more a cluster of distant tombstones.

  She heard or felt a movement behind her. As Violet turned, the hand already touched her waist; such a knowing hand.

  ‘I thought I’d study the view,’ Hofmann gazed past her. ‘I may have missed something.’

  ‘That’ll be the day.’

  ‘Well, what have you seen?’

  ‘That’s a boat. That’s New York. Those there are seagulls.’

  Looking past her Hofmann smiled. ‘I see.’

  Around her waist the grip tightened.

  ‘They look like molars, those skyscrapers. Don’t you think?’

  Violet hunted for her cigarettes, as she did in these situations.

  ‘I keep forgetting. You’re the dentist.’

  And she laughed.

  She twisted away but the hand on the arm held. It pulled her in.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be upstairs,’ said Violet flippantly, ‘with your little woman?’

  Hofmann gave no answer. Skidding past once, his mouth found hers. He pressed hard. She, against the parapet, cracked: her willowy back. His other hand felt its way along slowly, time and space were allowed, and found her loose breast; and a thick mist wreathed the city.

  ‘You’re taking liberties—’ Violet joked from the back of her throat.

  Now why does she—? Somehow flippancy can turn a man right off.

  But after glancing over his shoulder Hofmann pressed on, a kind of burrowing. He squeezed, flesh against flesh, too hard. She cried out.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s all right,’ she muttered. His knee pushed against her legs, invited; her legs parted. The Liberian oil tanker passed out of sight.

  Now what: Hofmann whispered words, directed at her, there was no one else, obscenities, curses.

  Well, Violet had tight lips, the tight surface.

  She shoved him back, and for a second he kept blinking. Several times he ran his tongue over his teeth. It didn’t suit the dentist, then.

  ‘Enough,’ she said, ‘don’t get carried away.’

  She watched him.

  ‘Run along upstairs,’ she said again, ‘to your little woman. She must be waiting.’

  Her painted nails, her mocking sunglasses matched.

  Staring at her Hofmann tugged his lapels, as if they controlled his facial muscles.

  ‘They should be down,’ he agreed, distant.

  ‘A man of very few words,’ Violet commented. ‘Well, at least that’s something.’

  She gave a short laugh; Violet could even be hard on herself.

  Hofmann’s lips returned to thin and firm, though still without colour, and his face to cardboard.

  Watching her casually now Hofmann smiled slightly.

  ‘You assume too much,’ she said, now defensive and unsteady. ‘You’re not so smart.’ She began poking around for cigarettes. It looked wretched.

  ‘In some things I’m not far out,’ smiled Hofmann.

  ‘Listen to him.’

  But he was right. Violet found a cigarette, unhappily, as if he wasn’t there. And when she looked across at Manhattan rising, and the struggles there (all those young actresses), it was made worse. For the first time Violet began smiling. She was almost crying.

  But then he was looking down, elbows on the parapet. She reached out and touched his arm.

  The others were returning: travellers descending staircase. They were about to spill into the wide observation platform.

  ‘It’s what I’ve been saying,’ Garry reverberated, ‘a woman’s head is completely empty. Nothing’s there. We’ve just seen it with our bare eyes.’

  ‘Ha! Hear that,’ said Louisa.

  ‘I’ll clock him one where it hurts,’ Sasha called out. ‘You’re no Rhodes scholar yourself.’

  ‘What are you laughing at?’ She peered at North from dark into sudden natural light; a tricky aperture problem for Kaddok.

  But she pointed to Violet and Ken Hofmann: silhouetted against the sky, his arm outstretched lighting yet another cigarette. Both were so neatly attired; they were so New York.

  ‘What was it again that made you come on this trip?’ she had asked.

  To Hofmann, lighting the cigarette was sufficient answer. It implied casualness.

  Sasha held North’s elbow. ‘Now isn’t that a lovely shot? They’re like that cigarette commercial. What is it?’

  ‘I don’t have television,’ he had to remind her; but obediently gazed at the pair.

  ‘Stuyvesants,’ Gwen offered.

  ‘Right.’

  International

  passport…

  to smoking pleash-ah!

  ‘Violet starred in one of those commercials,’ Sash
a confided. ‘Did you know that?’

  ‘Did you all have a lovely time?’ Violet turned. ‘What was the view?’

  Gerald was laughing. His face went wider with horizontal creases yet his head somehow bounced up and down; an odd laugh. ‘Someone’s written up there, GO HOME AUSSIES. That’s a turn up.’

  ‘I never thought I’d see that,’ Doug frowned.

  ‘It’s somehow all senseless this,’ Borelli murmured to Louisa. He had turned from looking down at the sea and Manhattan. ‘We’re doing something odd. Don’t you feel it? Going to places like this; simply in order to…’

  A feeling of futility: there at a great height, scrambling up and down inside a copper head. The sea was like a dirty mirror. But never one to remain despondent Borelli showed by his expression he had thought of something else.

  ‘Next thrill!’ Sasha cried out. She nudged Violet.

  And Louisa turned to Borelli.

  The float-bowl, its arm and point of pivot, the two valves, inlet-outlet, and the three or four split pins (mild steel) make up the efficient operation of the cistern. Include the length of chain and the wire lacing it to the external lever; these generally have a smooth penis-shaped wooden handle or a metal bracelet. Contemporary cisterns—now properly called water-closets—have the chrome-plated plunger which slides in a cylinder, an aesthetic breakthrough. When flushing, the floor of the cistern is opened, releasing a draught of water. The float (ball) then tilts in the void and so opens the valve, allowing fresh water to refill. Rising with the water, the float returns gradually to the horizontal where finally it turns the water off: from gush to bubble/hiss, faint high whistle, silence. The cistern is then ready to perform again. Only about the size of a grapefruit the floats were originally stamped out of discoloured copper—designed to last forever. But there have been many cases, especially lately, of hotels chiefly in Hungary, in Latin America and the Low Countries, and in the higher street numbers of Manhattan, where the copper has punctured. Summoned often in the dead of night the manager can only demonstrate a manual method of refilling, enough to get by. Stand on the seat; lift the cistern lid; raise the copper ball, reproducing the familiar gushing sound, until it is horizontal. In southern Italy and certain cities of Russia other ‘managers’ have been known to arrive with a plastic pail of water and leave it at that. In underdeveloped countries with a large tourist inflow, chains have been known to come away in the hand. Scores of wooden and plastic lavatory seats crack under the almost hourly pressure. Even in some recently built hotels the push-buttons jam. Constant use wears the cylinder. The valves too become worn. They stick. After a day of wandering the bazaars and the endless parquetry of museums it is irritating to return to a leaking or ‘whispering’ cistern. The manager is called. And how many of the slick so-called ‘low-boy’ cisterns of plastic are spotted with cigarette burns, the colour of human ordure itself? The efficiency of the lavatory may not be affected, certainly it is not sufficient reason to call the manager, but the burns are an eyesore, a sign of traffic, the odour of statistics, like hairpins left in a drawer or the piece of smooth cuttlefish soap found in the shower recess.

  Some of the picturesque countries of white stones and peasants in black have upwards of twelve million tourists per annum. Upwards—in other words—twenty-four million hands and heels of shoes scuffing the corridors; twelve million bowel movements, regular and irregular, to be catered for. The assortment of valves, copper floats and makeshift chains, the seats and the rusted but crucial internal split-pins take a hammering, night and day, no respite, not to mention the loading on the sewerage system, almost beyond the calculated diameter of the underground pipes. And where does all the muck—the weight and mass of it—go?

  Crimson flowers in the carpets of foyers and stairs are trampled; cathedral steps worn down in the middle; banisters are rubbed smooth, honed, eventually loosened from the walls: twelve million sliding hands, many with gold and sapphire rings. The next year there are always expected to be more. The subcontractors in these centres make a killing more than usual, testing the cables holding lifts. Regularly replaced are the diving boards above pools, the backs of dining-room chairs, pillows and mattresses (kneaded by many interlocking smooth bodies, holidaying), the ballpoints of desk clerks—thousands of them—and telephone cords frayed by idle fingers. The languid arms wear out tablecloths, and on the vertical facade of the reception counter a single season of North American, German and New Zealand knees can wear away the varnish in the shape of a heart. Requiring constant adjustment, regular replacement, is that pneumatic device with elbows which steadily closes the glass doors. Even mirrors used by so many tanned but anxious faces wear out.

  Quires of paper, of oblong registration cards, are imported to handle the…the invasion. Tons of, or miles of; the same for biro fluid. Not to mention petroleum products (more foreign exchange), and the extra kilowatts of juice: additional underground shifts requested of distant coalminers. And the tourist like anyone else has to eat. This can drive the price of food up. Twenty-three point four per cent of the perishables trucked and railed into Manhattan is consumed by them; said to be more like 80 per cent in that other island, Venice.

  ‘God knows—I mean, really—why we chose this hole,’ was Gerald’s comment; but he was distinctly unsympathetic to the jackhammers of the New World. Granite, Carrara marble, bronze and oak were his substances: permanence, like the residue left by religion and history—and in the Old World it’s so much part of the whole, so visible. As he spoke the tapered shadow of a yellow jib came in from across the street, and across the carpet like a draughtsman’s compass, swinging an iron ball. The desk clerks wore yellow hard hats. The chairs and carpet had a fine coating of demolition dust. A confident travel agent several oceans away wasn’t to know. In the last decade the hotel had enjoyed tremendous traffic, an old favourite for the package tour, the seminar and sales convention. The carpets and even the floorboards underneath were now badly worn, and the janitor and several of the white-collar staff were over there all shoving, trying to open one of the sliding windows. A black woman vacuumed a corner and as Mrs Cathcart watched the old heavy-duty Hoover gave up the ghost: a declining whine, almost-human sigh. In its heyday the lift used to be the fastest in the western world. It still had the brass plaque. Festooned now with fingerprinted mirrors and advertisements for bistros, Rotary International and a dozen nearby museums and hair salons it seemed to be held by ropes of rubber, took its time, tired, with coloured lights flashing when they shouldn’t have. After walking or waiting all day naturally they were impatient. Doug for one got irritable if he went too long without his shower. They all wanted showers and to put their feet up. Already Hofmann flipped the pages of the latest Time as he entered his room, looking forward.

  Each had an end wall of tinted glass and they could step over and look down and across at the landscape of verticals and thrust, capital’s example, the sections here and there being replaced, as in a child’s building game. A pearly light refracted through petrochemicals softened the edges and imbued the pastel canyons with high mercantile drama and a sensation of even greater—if that were possible—opportunities. Such a sense of complications and graduations. The various ELECTRIC WORDS could be gazed at for hours. In Rooms 104 and 109—Sheila’s and the Hofmanns’—soap worn smooth into cuttlefish had been found in the basins…disconcerting…and Gerald Whitehead found strands of hair on his pillow.

  In Borelli’s room the tan tip of a Florsheim shoe protruded from under his bed. He stepped back: anything can happen in New York. Poking it with his stick he found it empty. He sat on the edge of the bed. Such a piece of flotsam could make him rueful. He turned it over. The shoe, that of an American male, fitted a tall heavy man leaning to his left. It was his right foot. Nationalism and shoe styles: the American male prefers the soles protruding around the perimeter giving the appearance or the illusion of flat-footed, well-meaning eagerness. Across the ocean the Englishman’s brogue with its serrated tongue and extra
vagantly punched bindings is a subtle yet loud counter to the quiet English architecture, the greens, and subdued speech patterns. Shoe styles and nationalism: they fit. Americans who readily buy classic Burberry raincoats are reluctant to step into alien brogues.

  ‘My lavatory’s kaput,’ he said aloud. In the corridor he asked, ‘Do you have water?’

  ‘We’re next to you,’ Louisa leaned out. ‘He can use ours—can’t he, Ken?’

  Squatting near the window Ken appeared to nod but didn’t turn.

  And here was the redeeming feature of their hotel—worth writing home about. Instead of Gideon Bibles each room had been given a powerful telescope. These were the 16-inch Japanese refracting type and not cheap. They were chained to the windowsills. Guests could study at close quarters the habits and appearance of the local inhabitants without embarrassment. Proposed amendments had been constantly rejected by Congress: the use of high-powered telescopes was a constitutional right of the individual.

  Quickly getting the hang of it, members of the group focused on their preoccupations. Each one became chained to the window, some with their doors wide open. Both Hofmann and Garry Atlas had focused from slightly different angles on the cleavage of the platinum blonde wobbling below; but it was Hofmann who switched to the brown tenement building in the adjoining precinct, an unsavoury district, and slowly panning floor by floor found there, between fire escape and busted downpipe, fourth window along…telegram boy in kitchen seated on housewife’s knee. A large woman, she was stroking the boy’s head. And look now she began—. ‘What have you found?’ Louisa typically asked. ‘Let me see.’ ‘Nothing.’ But the window grew so large and so clear, revealing the women’s teeth and heaving bosom as she whispered in the poor boy’s ear, leaning forward now to see his glazed open-mouthed expression, that Hofmann moved to another window, as if she could see him, before quickly returning. She wore only a slip. She stood up and sat down with the boy again…