Disreputable People

by Penelope Rowe

  The Fortunes’ sad fate had been to produce a terribly flawed child. Their son was blind and almost totally deaf, his limbs twisted and contorted, he uttered growls and grimaced frightfully. He could do nothing for himself and was thought to have no intelligence. ‘It’s just one of those unfortunate things,’ the Fortunes had been told. They had been advised to put him into Morisset, a home for vegetative children, and forget about him, then set about having another child as quickly as possible, there being nothing to indicate they might produce another like him. Charles and Mary were good people. They did not think the suggestion honourable. This was their son, their responsibility. Neither of them could consider ‘putting him away,’ as the wording was, as if he were an ugly gift given them by a vindictive but significant relative, an ornament too frightful to display, so shut out of sight in a dark cupboard, disowned really, not looked upon or referred to again, but stored, nevertheless, in the unlikely event that they might be asked to account for it.

  ‘Come along, son,’ Charles said stiffly to the tiny twisted baby after a final, emotional interview with the hospital staff. ‘Your mother and I are taking you home.’ He lifted the baby from its crib, the first time he had touched him, and handed him to Mary. Handed him over really. He rarely touched him again. Instead he put away his childish dream of bridges and arches, spars and spans, and set about earning a reliable income.

  Mary became a full-time attendant to the boy. In the early days Charles had tried to insist that they hire an assistant, but it had proved more trouble than it was worth. No-one stayed long with Paul, probably because there was never the slightest response from the child that would compensate for the hours of hard work and effort. Only Mary could like, could love, the child unconditionally.

  From the start Mary was quicker than Charles in accepting their son’s limitations. Charles had never completely overcome his lack of ease when he was in a public place with him. Mary had quickly become used to taking him, firmly strapped, in his pram then stroller then wheelchair to the shops and railway station and lending library and park. She seemed remarkably untroubled by the strange noises that issued from her son’s mouth or the vacant blind eyes, the endless stream of mucus from his nose, or the dribble that saturated his little bibs and shirts until she took to tying a large plastic apron around him. She did not seem to notice the looks of alarm or pity or shock or, from small children, outright curiosity. Paul was her son. That was that. ‘It’s easier for women,’ Charles Fortune told himself. ‘It’s an instinct thing.’

  His contribution to his son’s welfare was hard work and many hours of conscience-salving overtime. Mary did all the washing and feeding, caring and cleaning. Soon after Paul’s birth Charles had developed a dicky back, so heavy lifting was out. Mary compensated by growing in physical strength. Charles felt guilty. Therefore he tried never to resent spending his salary on making the house easier and more labour-saving for his wife. He paid a cleaner to come twice a week, bought a hoist for the wheelchair so that Mary did not have to shove it in and out of the car (which was for her sole use, he took the train and walked to and from the station morning and evening). He never forced his attentions upon her in the bedroom if she was unwilling and he truly appreciated her devotion. He repaid this devotion with fidelity, probity, security and a charming manner. He was a nice man, Mary thought.

  They always stayed at home during his annual holidays. Home had the conveniences and Charles could quite understand that, for Mary, going away was an organisational nightmare. For the three weeks of his annual leave he devised small projects for himself. One was a quite ingenious irrigation system for his beloved vegetable garden, one was a Japanese-style pond with a charming arched bridge and each year, for her birthday, which fell during the holidays, he created a new fountain for Mary, the water spraying from intricate, perfectly scaled bridge sculptures. The Fortune garden grew to be quite a conversation piece in the neighbourhood, and once someone at the golf club urged him to have an open day so they could raise money for a new pro-shop but Charles modestly demurred and they never pushed him. He had enough to contend with.

  Mary had none of her husband’s natural style. She had lived in dark brown or navy tracksuits for over twenty years. Anything more stylish or attractive was hopelessly inappropriate in dealing with her son. She had taken up smoking when he was born and never given it up. It was the one thing she defied her husband on. ‘They’re my one luxury’, she said. ‘I couldn’t cope without them.’ Her deepest worry was that she might die before her son. Who would look after him then? She knew that Charles could not. She prayed that she might outlive them both. Mary was grey-haired and sinewy and her face was heavily lined by determination, exhaustion, worry and a constant nagging puzzlement about her husband that she was totally unable to articulate.

  Charles Fortune was a tall and dignified man with a good head of greying hair, an upright stance, a clear gaze and had a certain vanity about his suits. Retirement was only a few years off. Only he knew that he had been living a lie and the burden of the pretence was threatening to become insupportable. He carried inside himself the thirty-year seepage from a fierce poisonous thorn of guilt that pooled and spread in a mess of foul decay.

  Now it was holiday time again. Every morning while he worked in his garden Mary wheeled their son out and parked him under the shade of the maple near Charles. He resented this intrusion terribly. The eerie silence, broken only by ugly sounds, disturbed his peaceful contemplation of the garden. He had never been able to adopt Mary’s practice of mindless chatter with Paul. It was, he thought, a total waste of energy. The nearest he came to any sort of communication was the odd, affectionate pat on the lolling head. This year, having Paul parked out here in the garden with him reminded him obsessionally, of that life-altering day thirty years ago.

  Paul had been six years old. It was mid-summer and hot. Those were the days when Charles was setting up the irrigation system, in the back of his mind a delicious fantasy of the Water Gardens of Bali. Mary had put Paul in the shade and gone, at Charles’s urging, to have a little lie-down. So involved had Charles become in the excavation work that he forgot his son was close by. He dug and shovelled and packed until the sweat ran down his face and his bad back ached but his mind was far away, dreaming of completing this new project. He forgot the sun had moved and that Paul, strapped in his chair, was exposed to its remorseless midday strength. The first he knew of it was when he heard a frightful roar and, toppling in fright, he lurched towards the sound. Paul’s restraints had burst and he seemed to be exploding out of his chair. He fell to the ground, writhing and howling and grinding his teeth, his trousers fouled. Charles stared at him transfixed, shocked by the obscenity of the scene and the thing that was creating it. Then, dispassionately, he registered that Paul’s breathing had stopped.

  Still he was unable to move, respond. He felt himself to be somewhere far away, detached and cold. Terrible temptations insinuated themselves into the coils of his brain. If I do nothing, my son will die. I will be released. Good fortune will be mine. No-one will ever know. He saw that the child’s lips had turned blue. Now, decide now. Quickly! Decide! At that instant he heard the back door burst open around the other side of the house and footsteps came running. Like a projectile he launched himself across the lawn, rolled his son onto his back and pressed his mouth to Paul’s blue slimy lips, blowing life-giving air into the starved, screaming lungs, pausing only to pump the chest until he saw it start to heave of its own accord. Only then did he stop to look up at Mary who stood, fist to mouth, ashen, beside him.

  ‘Get the ambulance,’ he gasped at her, turning back to his son. He heard her race away and ten minutes later when the ambulance arrived Paul was breathing of his own accord.

  ‘My God,’ said Mary at the hospital later. ‘What if neither of us had been there? He would have died.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said a doctor. ‘It was an epileptic fit. He would have started to breathe again of his own accord.
’

  ‘Thank God,’ said Mary, leaning against Charles with relief. ‘It wasn’t so serious after all.’ She encircled her husband’s back with her arms, holding him tight, drawing strength from his poise and dignity.

  The doctor’s words were no comfort to Charles. He felt his emotions harden to stone with horror at Mary’s touch, as if he had looked the Medusa in the eye and tried to defy it. Had he started to move before he heard Mary or just at the instant he heard her? Had he intended to save his son’s life or not? It had been so quick. He honestly did not know the answer. He had been cheated forever of the most profound and terrible knowledge about himself. His wife had stolen it from him.

  Now at age sixty-one he did not know for how much longer he could contain his raging despair towards Mary who had thwarted him on that summer day, denied him the surety of his own true nature. He knew that inevitably, unless something miraculous relieved him of his terrible burden, he would, one day, destroy her.

  god’s little tadpole

  Anneliese and Roger Penrose spent Saturday in The Valley, a rural retreat well known to pressured professionals from the city. It had been Roger’s idea. His wife just went along because she couldn’t think of anything better to do. The thought of staying at home, her own uninspired self for company, could not be countenanced. She had well and truly wandered off the path. Roger, more optimistic by nature, tried to tell himself that their tired, twelve-year marriage could be kick-started, though he was blowed if he knew how. He still had a punch of energy left in him and he was determined, this weekend, to ignore Anneliese’s lack of enthusiasm. He wanted his marriage back on track. He wanted his wife back on track.

  They both agreed they had ceased to be available to each other. They agreed on most things actually—Anneliese was too lethargic these days to care much one way or another about anything. To agree was simplest. They had set out the ground rules for their autonomy from the start. They were professionals. Far be it from him to stand in her way. God forbid that she would stand in his. They had been very adult. They had given each other ‘permission’. (What words they had used!) He had forged ahead. So had she. They were successful. Their names appeared in newspapers. Their opinions were canvassed. They were asked to lend their names to causes. They had money. A terrace house. They had considered a child but no child had come. They had travelled and supped at the delightful banquet of the good life. Now they were tired. The thrill of the acquisition had been replaced by what? A great empty black hole. Anneliese had given in to the bleakness. Roger still resisted.

  Help, called Roger Penrose, still hopeful that someone would hear. Help, cried Anneliese, without hope, to herself.

  On Sunday morning, after a listless attempt at lovemaking had been abandoned by unspoken mutual consent, they drifted to The Valley’s local store in search of distraction. The dreadful Sunday papers would have to do. The store was a weatherboard, ramshackle building with a sagging bullnosed tin awning. Inside it smelled of sprouting potatoes in hessian sacks, the rubber of a pile of tyres warmed by the sun that slanted through a side window, frying food and the dust of ages. Anneliese bought the papers and a chelsea bun, two apple drinks and block of chocolate. Roger picked up a pamphlet. This pamphlet, at once, became an out-in-the-open cause of disagreement between them. That was, perhaps, a relief.

  ‘You can’t be serious,’ said Anneliese. ‘I’m not having anything to do with it.’

  ‘Well, I’d like to see what it’s all about,’ said Roger. ‘It’s all very well for you Catholics, but it’s all a mystery to me.’ Anneliese tightened her jaw in annoyance. She hated it when he said ‘you Catholics’ as if they were some great amorphous species.

  ‘I can tell you what it’s all about. It’s about poor gullible fools being hoodwinked by some sleazy snake-oil merchant with a few lousy tricks, a smooth patter and a lust for money. It preys on people’s insecurity. It …’

  ‘It’s only an hour from here. It’ll be fun. God knows we can do with some of that.’

  Fun? God help us, Anneliese never laughed anymore, except in a bitter, sardonic way, which was really a sneer. Nor cried. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever cry again,’ she had said to Roger one day. ‘There’s nothing worth crying over.’

  ‘Let’s go see. Come on, love,’ said Roger. Anneliese felt her jaw tighten further. (Her dentist had warned her she was grinding down her teeth with this habit.) Recently she hated it when Roger called her ‘love’. Her long-dead mother had once told her that people who called you ‘love’ were common and, although Anneliese had almost without exception never agreed with anything her mother had said, somehow this ridiculous thing had come back to prickle at her and to increase her dismay with her husband. And her dislike of herself.

  Then, because she knew it was unfair to hold Roger totally responsible for her own neurotic hangup, and because she was basically a decent person, she kissed him and said, ‘Oh, all right, let’s go. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.’

  As they drove Anneliese read the pamphlet aloud:

  ‘Like Lourdes, Fatima, Majagore and Guadaloupe, Carrabubbulla Bottoms (Anneliese snorted) has become a place of pilgrimage for the faithful. Deep in this mountain ravine God had chosen to reveal Himself, through His Holy Mother, to His Little Tadpole, and to those who come in devotion and love to pray for His Divine Mercy.

  ‘God’s Little Tadpole had his first vision as he walked up the ravine from school one afternoon when he was but ten years old. He had been soundly thrashed that day by a disenchanted young teacher who had wrongly accused him of wetting his pants. The young lad had offered up his suffering to the Virgin Mary for the alleviation of the poor souls in Purgatory and for his poor mother that the Virgin might make her well.

  ‘As he walked up Carrabubbulla Bottoms the Virgin appeared hovering in a blaze of light above a gum tree. So glaring was the light that God’s Little Tadpole would later say, “I was blinded.” He would also say later, with a laugh, “I got such a fright I really did wet my pants.”

  ‘Hmm. I’m not surprised,’ muttered Anneliese.

  ‘Go on,’ said Roger, flinching from the sourness in his wife’s voice. She was brimful of it.

  ‘However, the Virgin spoke gently and allayed the little lad’s fears. She said (as the Little Tadpole later recorded), “Do not be afraid, little one. You have been chosen as an instrument of God’s work. As proof of this I will make your sick mother well and this miracle will set you on your mission in life. You will be known as the Little Tadpole.”

  ‘When the little lad arrived home he could not contain his excitement and burst into his mother’s modest bedroom where she lay with puerperal fever. So astonished was she by his story that she immediately rose from her sickbed, no sign of illness, and thrashed him soundly for disrespect and lying and for wetting his good school trousers.

  ‘However, despite a round of thrashings over the course of the next three weeks, both from his mother and his father, who ran cattle on the mountain, the lad never wavered from his story.

  ‘Finally, in desperation, the parents took the child to visit the bishop of the Carrabubbulla diocese. This holy man immediately recognised the truth in the Little Tadpole’s story and assured the parents that they must support and encourage their son in his Divinely Ordained Mission.

  ‘Thus came about the Carrabubbulla Bottoms shrine, where, every third Sunday of the month, thousands of the faithful gather to beg the intercession of the Virgin from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. (6 p.m. daylight saving).

  ‘It’s things like this that give the Church a bad name,’ said Anneliese, tossing the pamphlet onto the dash board and biting into the chelsea bun. ‘Thousands! Bullshit!’

  ‘Well, we’ll see,’ said Roger.

  ‘Carrabubbulla Bottoms doesn’t have a very spiritual ring, does it?’ said Anneliese. Roger ignored her.

  ‘Tell me more about these apparitions you Catholics have,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t,’ snapped Anneliese. ‘Oh, well …’ She sh
rugged. ‘They don’t show a great deal of imagination.’

  ‘I think they’re chock full of it,’ interrupted her husband.

  ‘Do you want me to tell you or not?’ Roger nodded. ‘She, the Virgin, invariably appears to simple rural children. “Peasants” is the expression normally used. To my knowledge there are no reports of her appearing to urban, middle-class private-school boys and girls in Sydney or Paris or London or wherever, though I did read the other day about a sighting above a huge mesa in the Bad Lands of South Dakota, but that’s pretty peasanty. Anyway, she hovers above a tree or some such and asks for prayers for the conversion of Russia. At least, she used to. I don’t know if she still does now that things are different there.’

  ‘Maybe prayers for a cure for AIDS?’

  ‘Don’t be mad, Roger. Of course not. Most of the people who believe this stuff also believe that AIDS is Divine retribution upon the wicked and depraved. They’d be all for it. AIDS. Grateful to God for cleansing the world. They’re always the most frightful bigots.’

  The afternoon grew hotter as they climbed into the mountains and drove across the top of the dry scrubby plateau towards Carrabubbulla Bottoms. The traffic had increased to such an extent that Roger was riding the clutch, inching forward, gears grating. Anneliese felt the sweat dripping from under her breasts and the itch of wetness in her armpits. She fanned herself with the pamphlet and made irritated tutting noises. The flow had turned into a long crawl of cars by the time they turned off the bitumen into a vast, dusty car park, surrounded by leached-out gum trees. Young men in ankle-length brown tunics were acting as parking marshals.