The Death of Noah Glass

by Gail Jones

  Evie looked at his gleaming face and felt her tears swell.

  She remembered the votive ears. Martin had gone to Santa Rosalia to deposit the silver ears, and by happenstance, by ludicrous coincidence, his friend Veeramani had come upon the scene of his attack. Veeramani could not say who had set upon Martin or why.

  ‘It is one of the mysteries, Miss Evie, why one man assaults another.’

  The formality of his speech was almost heartbreaking. Evie thanked him for the news, and for his kind assistance. She was decisive. She would come to Palermo, she told him, she would come to her brother’s side.

  ‘It will be a comfort,’ said Veeramani, and then his flat-screen face said goodbye, and he was gone.

  ~

  Evie sat before her computer, composing herself, staring at the wall. There was some recurring tragedy that pursued their family, a condition of error or a central unhappiness. It was more than the tragedy of their mother, more than their stammered history of uncompleted relationships. It was akin to the fear she had as a child, when a wave, unexpected, pulls too strongly underneath, and there is breath-struggle and sinking-feeling and an aching reach for the light.

  Veeramani had been crucially imprecise. Evie realised she did not know the extent of Martin’s injuries, or if his life was in danger. She had the name of the hospital, so she located its number and rang. Someone confirmed that a man with her brother’s name had been admitted. They would not give details over the phone. She was his sister, she said, ringing all the way from Australia. There was a relenting sigh and a brief blank response. ‘Stable,’ the voice said curtly. ‘His condition is listed as stable.’

  She needed to make bookings. She needed to organise herself. Clothes, passport, frame of mind. Veeramani had appeared like the angel Gabriel, the bearer of stunning information, then he’d puffed into darkness and disappeared. No glad tidings, only a fearful interception. But there was insanity in this thinking. She was almost breathless with worry. She felt unprepared for a second tragedy after the still-present death of her father.

  Evie booked a flight, returned to bed and lay awake thinking of Martin. The rainstorm had passed. What time was it now? The air had become tranquil, gauzy and quiet. All over Sydney, people were sleeping. In the western suburbs, on the North Shore, over the plains and towards the mountains. East, where the ocean smashed onto high sandstone cliffs. It was some hours before dawn and there were dreamers and sleepwalkers and the slow turn of heavy bodies. There were children twitching with energy and couples with their legs entwined. A lover’s arm might rest on the breastbone of another. Evie imagined the entire city at rest, as if under a spell. Outside, for all the torn bushes and floating leaves, for all that had been detonating and disturbing the water, the swimming pool was now still and a copy of the sky.

  Then it was ten a.m.; she would leave at noon. It was only when she arrived at the airport that Evie rang Benjamin. He said all the correct things: that she must take her time, her brother needed her. That he hoped all would be well, and that Martin would soon recover. The telephone was a black tunnel stretching between them. She wanted him to lower his voice and say something more personal, to recall what each had known, only yesterday, keenly undressing. But she heard in his tone a practised self-protection. Benjamin said, ‘Take care,’ and she hated the triviality of it, the dismissal of their complicated day-before. Scrupulous, neutral, he was trying to sound like a patient man, but she knew he was already impatient for her return.

  The discontinuity of her experience was almost unbearable. Evie heard a sound that might have come from within clanging overhead in the spacious airport, where feelings went wheeling upwards, hitting the metal ceilings, refracting over signage and escalators and lines of people trailing luggage. The acoustics of airports always seemed to snatch things aloft. Evie thought again alphabetically; it soothed her, thinking thus. The alphabet was her ideal order. Categories of things could be apprehended. The chaos of unlucky accidents, threatened environments and global inequity, of lost mothers and dead fathers and injured brothers. All might succumb to methodical lists.

  Airborne, Evie’s mind was agile with anxiety. In the sleep-deprived afternoon, she had submitted to be strapped in, lifted up and projected above the earth at 885 kilometres an hour. She flicked through Scientific American. She made more lists. She accepted a miniature meal of glutinous substances and a miniature plastic bottle of red wine. After that, she closed her eyes, and must have dozed, because she woke with a start as the man next to her shook her shoulder and asked if he could step out into the aisle. The plane had become dark, she saw, full of sleeping passengers, all resting in vulnerable attitudes of wearied abandon. Some looked like children, curled up, or open-mouthed, or clutching at a blanket as though it were a precious thing. A screen showed their flight path, now over northern India. The calculated alignment, the inexorable route to a destination.

  There was a news story, once, of a plane that left Perth—at 6.09 p.m. on the fourth of September in the year 2000 (how pedantic her mind was)—to fly to the mining town of Leonora, in the Western Desert. But it continued flying in a long arc, right across the continent. All the passengers, including the pilot, had suffered hypoxia, loss of oxygen, and had been borne automatically in the plane, unconsciously missing their own deaths, floating at a consistent speed and height until the plane ran out of fuel. Eight people fell from the sky and were killed. Nothing could be done. None could be saved. The hopeless flight was tracked till it crashed near the Gulf of Carpentaria.

  Evie remembered the story unfolding on the radio news; how it had haunted her, this canister of drifting souls, this machine-age allegory of insistent engines and the negation of human function. Next day the newspapers showed a map of Australia with the ‘ghost flight’ arc transecting it. She hated remembering this story now, after years of forgetting. She rose from her seat and walked up and down the dark aisle of the plane. She needed to move. She needed to stop assuming the triumph of tragedy, or the mean omnipresence of fateful symbols. Martin would recover; they would return to Australia together. They would resume their lives. She would stay in Sydney. With Benjamin, perhaps. With Nina. But when she sat down again and strapped herself into her seat, she was still thinking of the ghost plane, silver as tinfoil, arcing out of schedule into the flight path of eight unpredestined deaths. The arc took the form of a perforated trail, such as a child, imagining footsteps, might meticulously draw.

  36

  FROM THE TALL windows of the hospital she could see the lay of the city, the main avenues, the ruined areas, the harbour and ocean to the right. And in the far distance stood Monte Pellegrino, a block of massive stone rising in dark profile to the north. Evie noted these landmarks with little interest; she had no wish to explore the city or to roam its streets. Her concerns were contracted to this room, and to the horizontal body of her brother, lying disfigured and discoloured before her. He had a fractured skull and four broken ribs, and his spleen had been removed, they said. His shattered hand had required microsurgery.

  Martin’s face was swollen and split. He was unrecognisable. The pulp of him, all the stuff inside hitherto miraculously in place, had shifted and distorted. Evie did not weep or make a scene. She was brisk and practical, and signed forms and spoke to doctors. Her Italian was rusty, but she learned medical terms, and used them, and impressed the staff with her knowledge. They began in good humour to call her dottoressa, and soon, without her assenting or encouraging it, staff were speaking to her as if she were a medical doctor. But she was simply the sister from Australia, visiting her brother.

  At first she imagined she was a figment to him, a long shape moving in front of the light. She knew he was trying to make sure she was there. Sometimes his eyes opened and he squinted, then closed them again. When he did see her, surfacing from an immense dark stillness, he worked his rubbery lips and said softly, ‘Ciao, bella.’

  Evie put her face on the pillow near his and whispered that she was here, tha
t he would be alright, that she would stay as long as needed, and then she would take him back to Australia. His eyes closed again. Staff in crisp uniforms came and went; Frank Malone visited, bringing a bag of mandarins, and was visibly shaken by what he saw. The local cops, he told her, said an Australian had been attacked, and when Martin didn’t turn up he put two and two together. Now this assault was part of his investigation. Veeramani came, sat quietly, and left a small icon of Santa Rosalia hanging on the end of the bed. Both men shook hands with Evie, abashed, it seemed, to be upright in the company of so wounded a man.

  Evie read, and waited. She watched the light in the hospital room shift and fade and understood that time was dilated here, and ruthlessly slow. Hospital time. She saw blueness open, spread across the sky like a shawl, then fall away, and darken. In one of the paradoxes of grief, she found herself telling strangers about their father’s death, and of Martin’s wish to follow his tracks in Italy. No mention of a possible crime, simply of filial piety, and a journey devoutly undertaken. This too endeared the brother and sister. There was a reservoir of kindness in hospitals, Evie thought, a great and good surplus, which went largely unacknowledged. It must be the handling of bodies that created such decency: the wiping of human muck, the cleaning of wounds, the bending over a drained face, transitioning to night-time, as the thready pulse slackened and breath subsided in a rasp or a sigh.

  At her hotel near the Quattro Canti, Evie slept like a nun, on her back, hoping not to dream. In the early mornings she wrote emails to Benjamin and Angela, only to them. She knew that Benjamin’s computer would translate her emails into an American-accented female voice, so that her news and affection would seem robotically strange. She washed her hair, standing under the shower for too long, and dried it with the roaring machine attached to the wall near the bathroom mirror, so that she could not avoid seeing how a death and a half-death had affected her. There was silver in her hair and twin crescents of purple beneath her eyes; she looked older, she thought, than thirty-nine.

  Evie ate each evening at a nearby trattoria, cosily dreary, arousing interest because she was a foreigner, and a woman conspicuously alone. Asked if she was a tourist, she casually mentioned her situation to the waiter—the brother in hospital, she mostly at his side—and found this too meant that she was surrounded by expressions of goodwill. Staff offered up their names; she began to learn small details of their lives, and knew they were whispering about her, giving her a story. She knew they pitied her, an unmarried woman who had recently lost a father and with no child to comfort her. This must have happened to Martin, the foreigner slotted into gossipy knowledge that would make him explicable.

  One night the cook, Vittorio, came in from the kitchen and showed Evie a photograph of his dead sister. It was black-and-white and rather worn from constant handling, and showed a woman of about seventeen wearing a cloche, her broad face mottled with shadow. Vittorio placed a bottle of homemade digestif on the table, sat down with Evie and began to talk. They drank from tiny glasses, and this man, who might have been seventy-five, fat as a wine barrel and covered in mess from cooking, spoke in a soft voice about his sister and the past they had shared. They were from the land, a village near Corleone. His sister had a lovely singing voice, and had taught him the old songs of the region. She made the best olive oil. All the boys were in love with her. Guarda! Che bella!

  Evie reached out and touched the back of his hand, and he ignored what might have indicated a weakness. It was a tender moment. She had entered the world of sorrowful revelations that exist between stranded people, of night-time confessions and the low-tone disclosures that happen in a stripe of hospital light or the fuzzy hours after too much drink. Martin had mentioned several times the melancholy of the city, but perhaps this was no different from anywhere else, or perhaps hospital waiting gave access to the world of ignored feeling. When at last Vittorio bade Evie goodnight, she was almost falling over from her own weary sadness. She stumbled back to the hotel, changed by listening to the story of a man she didn’t know, by his assumption that his conversation would somehow support her.

  In the morning the nurse who attended Martin was scandalised to learn that Evie had sat up drinking with a cook, and that she went out at night on her own. The nurse warned of gangs in the inner city, bad men with knives. No sensible woman would go out alone in Palermo at night. There were Indians and Nigerians, she said. There were evil Turks. All men want only one thing, she added, her sallow face growing cloudy, her tone baleful and foreboding. Evie politely thanked her for the advice.

  When Martin woke fully for the first time, he began to cry. He’d thought he would die. Then he found he was lying in Veeramani’s arms, in terrible pain and barely alive, but rescued. He felt himself lifted up, carried at an angle, and delivered into the pouch of a waiting ambulance. Then there was nothing—the induced coma while they relieved pressure on his brain—until her face, leaning close and incredibly present.

  Evie watched her brother weep without ceasing. She knew this was a kind of aggregated weeping: the desolation of all that was spoiled or vanishing, the sense of his own corruptible flesh, the memory of plunging towards death, and the prospect of an arduous recovery. The darkness gone, there was now this elongated twilight, and this dazed, bored waiting, while his body repaired.

  He said he hated the tubes around him and the hospital tastes and smells. He despaired to see that his drawing hand was a bulky clump of bandages that rested on the bedcover like a foreign object, pallid and ugly, crude as a boxing glove. The metal bed was a kind of cage. All was din, interruption and unrestful inspections. When a nurse appeared, Evie waved her away, so that only she would see her brother weeping.

  Walking that evening back to the hotel, Evie took a new route. She found herself confronted by the high-lit spectacle of the city’s famous cathedral. Polished stone and shiny foliage glinted through the darkness. She stopped for a moment, knowing that her father would have visited here, that he would have brought a notebook and a camera and recorded the artworks inside, pernickety about all the dates and details. How often she’d seen him at his task, crested in churchy light, bent over a notebook. This was the first occasion on which Evie had really envisioned Noah in Palermo, and she was disturbed to think how recently he may have stood on exactly this spot.

  In the yard of the cathedral rested a wooden boat, and on the bow stood a statue of Santa Rosalia. He may have photographed her too, and filed her away in his catalogue of Italian saints’ lives. If she’d seen her father’s ghost, it was now, under a narrow rim of curved light, crowned in a halo of scholarly concentration. A nimbus of white seemed to envelop the scene: dust in the air, she reasoned, or moisture becoming visible.

  Slightly spooked, Evie hurriedly crossed the street. She did not wish to enter the cathedral, ablaze and apparently open, even at this hour. The shops opposite sold ecclesiastical paraphernalia: embroidered capes, cassocks, monstrances and crucifixes. A little further along, a shop window featured life-sized figures, arranged in a tableau of deposition. The plaster Christ was mauve-coloured and bloody. His cerements were grey. He lay temporarily dead in the arms of his mother, a sweet-faced Mary who appeared, as convention allowed, more or less the same age as her son, more sister than mother.

  Evie was flushed and unsteady. She hastened from this scene, appalled by her own disgust. But she couldn’t bear it; there it was, in a store window, the tortured body of a man. This was a graphic faith and a rough rendition. And even here, in reverential show, the body was dreadful in its wounding.

  For some unaccountable reason she thought of the boy in Sydney, the boy on his bicycle. He visited her as she fled, speeding alongside in a whorl of mist. It was an actual boy perhaps, a Sicilian boy on a bicycle. She peered at a hazy receding form and had a conviction of his reality, as if he was a vision, a gift to a believer patiently waiting in prostration or penance. But then the form was covered over by the black of the night. The cycling boy, unverified, was swept a
way.

  37

  WHEN NOAH DISEMBARKED at six a.m. at Sydney airport, he carried his case and hand luggage through customs with barely a glance. He’d not told Martin or Evie the date of his return, so moved through the clattering arrivals hall unnoticed and unremarkable. Other passengers dispersed into the waiting arms of relatives; he lingered in the anaemic light like a man abandoned. A compulsion made him wish to confess his secret load, but when this feeling passed, there was only fatigue in its wake. He needed a shower and a shave. He felt despicable. Ahead was the sunburst signage of a hire-car company and Noah recalled he’d booked a car to drive himself home. He had always loved driving. He would be in control again, and self-directing. Speed would revive his slackened senses.

  A tall woman, unadorned but for her Thatcherite perm, wore an orange button that read Ask me about hire cars.

  ‘I booked online,’ Noah said meekly.

  Already, he was unravelling with jetlag. The hall around him seemed to pivot and spin.

  ‘Name, credit card, licence.’

  The woman gave him a deadpan, no-nonsense assessment. Noah could see she was unfazed by his dishevelment; people must stumble from flights all the time looking unfit to drive. He hoped she hadn’t noticed the rash at his throat.

  He fumbled for his wallet and produced his cards. On the licence his stamp-sized face shone up at him, a mugshot, a picture that might appear with a red caption on the evening news. Viewers would look up from their TV dinners and think: jeez, what a phoney.