The Trojan Dog

by Dorothy Johnston

  ‘G’day there.’ I heard Guy Harmer’s voice as I was putting down the phone. ‘Ladies got you working, have they?’

  I turned to see Peter hesitate for a second, then give Guy a specu­lative grin. ‘Nah,’ he said. ‘I’ve got tonsil—tonsil—’

  ‘Tonsillitis?’

  Peter nodded, taking Guy in from the top of his smooth head to his buffed Italian shoes.

  I introduced them. Guy made a sympathetic face and said, ‘Tonsillitis hurts, doesn’t it?’

  ‘A bit,’ Peter admitted.

  ‘Would you like a butter menthol?’ Guy reached into a pocket of his coat and brought out an orange-and-blue packet. He handed the packet to Peter, saying, ‘Vanessa loves them.’

  ‘Who’s Vanessa?’ Peter asked, taking one of the sweets and beginning to suck on it experimentally.

  ‘My daughter.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Peter. ‘Has she got a sore throat?’

  ‘She did have,’ Guy said, taking back the packet. He glanced at me. ‘Well, I best be making tracks.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Peter with his mouth full.

  I felt grateful to Guy for taking the trouble to notice Peter and say a few friendly words to him. Neither Di nor Bambi had bothered. And certainly no other passer-by had stopped to say hello.

  A public-service office was no place for an 8-year-old. But I couldn’t believe that it had never happened before, that I was the first mother ever to bring a sick child to work with her. Because of Guy’s friend­liness, the department was suddenly a nicer place to be. I’d never asked myself what was behind Guy’s glossy centrefold surface, or even if he was capable of kindness.

  I had a meeting at three-thirty and I asked Ivan if he’d keep an eye on Peter for an hour or so.

  When I came back, Peter was engrossed in a computer game and Ivan was on the phone. I mimed thank you, then asked Peter how he was feeling.

  Peter grunted without taking his eyes off the screen.

  Ivan finished his conversation, hung up and walked across to stand behind us. ‘A bit like Macdraw,’ he said. ‘But a tad more Oz content.’

  ‘Did you write it?’ I picked up the box. A logo in the corner looked familiar. ‘It says here Compic.’ I pointed to the bright pink and green lettering across the top left-hand corner of the box. Peter had dragged down a paintbrush, and was jumping up and down and crowing, ‘Man! This is excellent!’

  Ivan said, ‘Compic gave me the chance to do something creative for a change.’

  A credible outline of a dog appeared on the screen, a black dog with a big head. Peter laboured over the teeth and ears, but the smaller the features the harder he found it. The creature ended up with great long fangs, and ears that might have suited a giant rabbit. But Peter was so pleased with himself he could hardly stay still long enough to finish it. He leapt about in front of the printer, calling excitedly as he watched the thick lines taking shape on the paper.

  ‘Have you done any recent work for Compic?’ I asked Ivan.

  ‘Here he is! Here he is!’ cried Peter. ‘I’ll call him Deefa! Like Paul Jennings’ story!’

  Ivan put an arm round Peter’s shoulders while he shut the program down. I watched the way the fingers of his other hand curled around his keyboard, fronds of an underwater plant as the tide came in.

  ‘Relax,’ he told me. ‘You’re a prickly little woman, Sand. You know that? An echidna woman.’

  ‘I wish people would stop saying that.’

  I wondered if Ivan’s beanies, the winkle-pickers, the kingfisher jumper and the rest, had been a hangover from some past gesture or mood of defiance. Now that Ivan was discarding them, neither of us was quite sure what would take their place. Defiance can form the core of a person’s character, so that you don’t know when, if ever, they’re going to get beyond it. And then they can confound you by changing from one minute to the next.

  Me, I have to take in new experiences a little at a time. I get confused when a lot is happening at once. Confused and frightened. I have to absorb information slowly, resisting, not always successfully, the impulse to run away and hide behind what I already know.

  That evening, when Peter was getting ready for cubs, I became aware of an odd resemblance between him and Ivan. When Peter pulled his cap down hard on his head, his hair stuck out under it and to the sides, the way Ivan’s used to under his striped beanie.

  ‘I wonder what Dad’s doing right now,’ Peter said, avoiding looking at me by fidgeting with his blue-and-yellow cub scarf.

  ‘I guess he’s getting up. He might be having breakfast.’

  I expected Peter to laugh, as he had before, tickled by the time ­difference. I wanted him to laugh.

  Instead, he looked straight at me and asked, ‘When’s Dad coming home?’

  I told him, though I’d told him a dozen times already, and he started chattering, telling me a story about a trip he and Derek had made to the Shoalhaven last summer, pretending to forget how often he’d already told me; or perhaps he did forget. But I had the feeling, listening, watching my son, that he was buying time, occupying my attention while he worked out just what questions he could ask and expect a truthful answer.

  Ivan didn’t present himself as a figure of success to Peter, someone to be admired. Sure, he knew a lot of things, and some he was passionate about; but there was no demand to follow in his footsteps. I don’t think anything I’d ever said to Peter impressed him as much as Ivan’s story of travel and confusion, and failing to learn to read. It wasn’t told as a cautionary tale—simply, that was the boy I was.

  Ivan’s face reminded me of a landscape with mountains and vol­canoes. But it’s his mixture of awkwardness and defiance that has stayed with me, as though those two qualities formed one necessary edge. As though Ivan couldn’t, and wouldn’t, decide which personality suited him best. He had to dare people to pigeon-hole him. And then he had to dare himself to live up, or down, to their expectations.

  I think life for Ivan wasn’t what it is for most of us—the tension of relationships, the pull and counter-pull and drift of love and responsibility—but it was his own personality that held him in thrall. His persona, his character, was a piece of elastic, to be pulled and then let snap.

  He had his own special greeting for me in the mornings.

  :-)

  When I went into Peter’s room that night to clear away roll-up wrappers and empty fruit boxes, our new computer screen was a huge kaleidoscopic eye, noting my every move.

  Ivan had brought Peter a christening present, a spelling program he’d designed himself, with funny cartoon characters sprouting the words from the tops of their heads. The common words Peter had trouble with grew legs and arms and made farting noises. Peter had pronounced it awesome.

  Gail Trembath phoned while I was brushing my teeth.

  ‘I rang around some outworkers,’ she said. ‘Like you asked me to, you know?’

  I apologised for having a mouthful of toothpaste, then began to thank her. She cut me off.

  ‘Was quizzing one about her jobs, her kids, sticking to that brief you gave me. She told me her name and address had found its way on to a mailing list for a software company. Scads of junk mail, brochures for stuff she couldn’t possibly afford. Phone calls at night. She told them to stop, but apparently the message was rather slow in getting through.’

  ‘What was the name of the company?’

  ‘Compic.’

  ‘Compic,’ I repeated. ‘Had you heard of them before?’

  ‘Looked them up in the book. Local outfit.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And?’ Gail’s voice was mocking. ‘I checked to see if we’ve got any of their stuff at work.’

  ‘Have you?’

  ‘A CD-ROM. Some crap about meat pies.’

  I laughed and said, ‘Of course.’

  The Gift Horse

  Lying naked in front of a combustion stove is not at all the same as lying naked in front of an open fire. An open fire can warm th
e whole length of you and your partner. And if you’ve turned the lights off, and the flames are large enough, and flicker.

  My combustion stove was a relatively small one, black, on four squat legs. On Friday night, I opened the doors and tried to fluff up the coals while Ivan fussed in the kitchen. You had to sit up to see the fire. You couldn’t lie down or lean on one elbow and watch it at the same time. I pulled grubby floor cushions closer to the hearth tiles. The living-room light was off and the one from the kitchen, shining through the open door, was enough to see our hot drinks by. We sipped them and then, because there was nothing left to do, we got undressed.

  Ivan stood in front of the stove, blocking the square of light it gave, and the fine black hair covering his chest seemed to take the shape of a kite, decorated with letters in an unknown alphabet. At the same time, the light he blocked seemed, through some strange displacement, to be shining out of him, from inside his skin and his bright black thatch of hair.

  ‘Why me?’ I asked softly, half not wanting him to hear me.

  ‘Your look of desperation, Sand,’ Ivan whispered back. ‘That first day. The way you hid behind that dinky plant of yours.’

  ‘Dinky? I’ll admit to nervous.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Ivan, ‘I get nervous too.’

  Our love-making was so quiet and unassuming that I was fooled into believing I’d stepped over no fiery line, no burning branch of mine or anybody else’s planting.

  That night, I dreamed of Rae Evans standing alone in a courtroom. The magistrate and everybody else, including me, wore gowns of rusty black, while Rae’s white face was huge, expressionless, a mask without an actor. White was for brides, shining, also for surrenders.

  I woke Ivan in the middle of the night to ask, ‘What did your mother die of?’ He said, ‘A broken heart, I think.’

  I made Ivan get out of bed and leave before dawn, well before I heard the first stirrings of the new day from Peter’s room.

  I pottered about the house all morning, while Peter played computer games. In the afternoon we went over to Ivan’s place.

  Ivan’s garden was a mess. It didn’t surprise me. He’d had never struck me as a man who’d spend hours mowing lawns. Of course, you didn’t need to mow your lawn in winter, but last summer’s long, dead, whispering grass brushed against the fences and veranda posts, making a faint woosha in the wind, overlaid and accompanied by an irregular tlunking sound. I looked around to see what it was: a loose bit of tin on the carport roof.

  Peter said it was like the enchanted wood. He still had sore ears and I’d made him wear a woollen hat and scarf against the wind. At Ivan’s front door he ripped them off, calling, ‘Ivan! Hiya! We’re here! Ivan!’ There was no bell or door knocker, but a sleeping giant would have heard him.

  Grass and weeds grew thickly around the carport and through the cracks in the concrete. I knocked on the door. Peter was dancing from one foot to the other. ‘Mum! I’ll try round the back!’

  Ivan opened his front door. ‘Welcome to my devil’s kitchen.’ He winked and made a face, arms held out for Peter to run into them.

  Peter ran straight past Ivan while I looked around, keeping an eye out for a photograph, the residue of a woman’s touch, blushing because I couldn’t imagine Ivan’s wife, ex-wife, in any but a Penthouse kind of way.

  I sniffed. There was no smell of sex, remembered or otherwise. I watched Ivan, whose eyes were tracking Peter. For a moment I was back there, in the ease and quietness of the night before, the feeling that what had happened was some small and scarcely counted further step, undemanding, that both of us might ignore if we chose.

  ‘Biggest computer museum in the southern hemisphere,’ Ivan boasted, leading us to the door of his workroom, standing aside for us to admire.

  This time Peter didn’t let him down. ‘Wow!’ he cried, running from one piece of equipment to another, trying out whatever he could get his hands on.

  I didn’t want to touch anything. I didn’t even want to step inside.

  Ivan’s black computer table sparkled. Thick nests of cables looked to have been dusted too. The light in the room was silver, filtered through grevillea juniperina, the same spiky dark-green aggressive bush that Derek had planted in front of our house because it grew so fast, and that I cut back each year to stop it strangling the daphne.

  The walls of Ivan’s workroom were black and white—white, black, white, black—like an enormous old-fashioned checkerboard side-on. On one wall hung a row of framed certificates, yellowish and long, with red seals at the bottom. Bachelor of Computer Science—I read the nearest one—University of Queensland.

  Peter skittered from screen to screen. He skimmed and landed, giving each machine a pollen-dusting of attention.

  A large map covered the wall closest to the door. Moving closer, I saw that it was a map of the Moscow underground. It was patched in several places with clear sticky tape.

  There was a row of hats along the top of a bookshelf filled with CD-ROMs, cassettes, boxes of floppy disks and computer manuals. On the bottom shelf a large furry orange Garfield was arranged in the act of pouncing on a mouse.

  ‘Who’s that?’ I pointed to a black-and-white photograph of a man with a long silver beard cut square above a flowered cravat. White hair standing up at the top and to the sides matched lowering white eyebrows and a thick moustache. The man wasn’t smiling. From what I could see of his mouth, it looked as though he might be in the middle of an argument with the photographer. He wore a black suit, and the entire background to the photograph was black, so that his face, hair and beard stood out remarkably. He looked like Ivan might in thirty, thirty-five years time.

  ‘You don’t know?’ Ivan said reprovingly. ‘That’s Alexander Graham Bell.’

  I dragged my eyes away from the photograph. On the wall opposite it was what looked like an entire telephone exchange suitable for a small town. Red and green lights flashed along the bottom.

  There was a drawing of Wilhelm Leibnitz showing his Stepped Reckoner to the Royal Society in 1794, and a much larger drawing of Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine. And beneath them what Ivan later explained to me was a scale model of the Harvard Mark 1, completed in 1944. The original was fifteen metres long and two-and-a-half metres high.

  Ivan turned away from my bewilderment to answer Peter’s questions. Listening to them, I had another of those disconcerting, kaleidoscopic memories. Peter was six months old. I was lifting him out of the bath when, without warning, he twisted out of my hands, wriggling furiously, all four limbs going at once, a long low hoot of delight. I tightened my grip, and he howled with rage as he felt my hands close round him. Perhaps I’d hurt him. The freedom. The cage of hands.

  Another time—a temper tantrum. Peter was three. I watched him fling himself across the floor, hitting his head on a cupboard. I picked him up and sat on the floor, holding him tightly, afraid he would hurt himself, afraid that I would hurt him. The whiplash of adult arms. And he’d turned, twisted, bitten my hand as hard as he could. I cried with surprise and pain, and loosened my grip. I don’t know what he saw in those few seconds. My hand in close-up. Blood under the skin, soon to be let fly.

  I’d seen virtual reality on television, not what Ivan promised us that afternoon, not inside, but programs about it, how it could be used to train pilots, and as a tool for architects and surgeons. I expected Ivan to have some glorified computer game to show us, something with lots of shooting, only instead of aiming a mouse at a moving coloured target, you aimed a joystick.

  Ivan told Peter with a grin, ‘We’ll let your mum go first, to show her that it’s harmless.’

  I stepped on to a round platform of shiny silver metal. Around me was a padded leather cage, a kind of corral. Was this to catch me if I fell? I felt a familiar prickle of nervousness inside my clothes.

  The helmet too was made of metal, and soft padded leather. The eyepieces were round, bright blue incandescent eyes, spaced as they would be on a human head.

>   ‘Man! This is excellent!’ cried Peter, when Ivan lifted up the helmet.

  It felt like having to carry a load of bricks on my head, and I hadn’t got the balance right.

  ‘How much did this thing cost?’ I was relieved to hear my voice sounding almost normal.

  Ivan said proudly, ‘You don’t want to know.’

  I swayed a little sideways, and he steadied me with one arm around my waist.

  There was a picture of a flower-pot upside down. ‘Is this right? I feel as though I’m standing on my head.’

  ‘It’s for the focus,’ Ivan said. ‘Just tell me if the outline’s clear.’

  He pressed the eyepieces right up against my eyes, like swimming goggles, and tightened the helmet a notch or two so that it fitted snugly on my head.

  ‘Now see the stick in front of you? It should be right underneath the flowerpot. Take it with both hands.’

  I saw a hand come up in front of my eyes, a simulated hand, not mine, but moving exactly as my hand did. I took hold of the joystick and the fake hand mimicked mine exactly. Of course I couldn’t see my real hand—all I could see was the black space in front of my eyes, the flower­pot, the stick and the fake hand.

  ‘Now feel the button on the top. That’s it. Press it and you should begin to move.’

  ‘It’s still all black,’ I said after a moment. ‘It’s like I’m in a dark room and I can’t find the light switch.’

  ‘Relax. You’ll soon see where you are.’

  At first I thought it was meant to be the inside of an early settler’s bark hut, with the door shut, the light dim through regular gaps or cracks in wood, not the grey or silver-grey of night, or the pure black background to the flowerpot.

  I noticed that the walls didn’t join at right angles. Now I thought I might be inside a boat, or, since whatever it was had a roof that curved in the same way—long, curved, overlapping planks of wood—an oval-shaped coffin? The unlikely wooden belly of a submarine? There were voices whispering in a foreign language.

  Suddenly I understood. It was the horse. The ancient sting. Ivan had built it, not out there, to touch and climb on and drag innocently through the gates of Troy. He had built the experience of being inside the Trojan Horse.