Joyful

by Robert Hillman

  ‘Now,’ said Constable Cuff, ‘you were saying that you hadn’t seen anything of Courtney?’

  ‘Constable, may I ask you to remove your hat? In my native land, it is considered a grave insult for a man to ask another man questions about the possible murder of a third man’s saucy daughter while still wearing his hat. I am sorry to have to raise the matter.’

  Constable Cuff placed his cap on the table beside his green clipboard.

  ‘You mentioned murder,’ he said.

  Emmanuel lowered his voice and leaned forward on his elbow. ‘“But now the professor made his first mistake, for canny Constable Cuff had mentioned nothing about homicide. The colour left the professor’s dusky countenance. Oi means, if ’n it is murder, he said, attempting to extricate himself from the consequences of his bungle. It was too late. Constable Cuff pounced!” Your turn.’

  Constable Cuff offered a tiny smile and scratched at the hair on his right temple with the end of his ballpoint pen.

  ‘Mr Delli,’ he said, ‘this is a friendly visit.’

  ‘Good. Good. I have few policemen amongst my circle of friends. But now I have you. Good.’

  ‘You’ll appreciate what a difficult time this is for Courtney’s mum and dad. They’re worried sick. Any information, they’ll be glad about that.’

  ‘Of course they will be. Of course. But can I ask you a question, Constable? Now that we’re such close friends, I feel I can ask you anything. How many other households have you visited in the shire? Because I imagine I’m not the only chap you’ve visited. Or am I?’

  ‘It’s a request from higher up.’

  ‘Ah, a request from higher up!’

  ‘Mister Delli, you’ve made yourself a bit of a target for rumours and that sort of thing. It’s a request from higher up, in case you might have seen something. I’m being as open with you as I can.’

  ‘As befits the intimacy of our friendship.’

  ‘Look, Mr Delli. I don’t think there’s anything in the rumours. But as I say, I’ve been asked to call in. If you’ve seen anything, it’d be a help.’

  Emmanuel traced with a fingertip the outline of Kuddly the Koala.

  ‘Do you know, Constable, the last place I sat at a table answering questions about rumours was in Iraq. In Baghdad. I was seated at a desk, not a table like this one. Do you know who was asking the questions on that occasion? Of course you don’t. How could you possibly know? But I will tell you. It was Saddam Hussein. The late Saddam Hussein. He asked me what I did in my spare time. Did I, for example, spend my spare time promoting Kurdish political causes? Oh no, I said. I spend my spare time reading the poetry of William Wordsworth. It was very difficult for me to remain calm, because Saddam had murdered my brother a week earlier. Well, not he personally, not Saddam himself, but my brother had been murdered on his orders. I will tell you why. It was rumoured that my brother, an artist, had designed a poster for a Kurdish political party. It showed two hands cradling a map of the Kurdish north. My brother was found with a bullet hole in his head. His two hands had been severed and stuffed into his pockets. There were other rumours, too. Saddam was under the impression that my father had been talking to the Americans. Business matters. Just rumours, but my father was considered an extremely wealthy man. Saddam intended to take all of my father’s money and keep it for himself. In the event, he settled for about half of my father’s wealth. As for me, I was required to dedicate to Saddam a translation into Arabic of William Wordsworth’s poems. Which I did. A caprice of Saddam’s. Listen.’

  As Professor Delli began to recite, his expression altered. The wolfish, predatory look disappeared; everything softened.

  At the conclusion of his recital the professor applauded himself gently. ‘That’s what Saddam did,’ he said. ‘A little round of applause, like that. What did you think of the translation?’

  ‘I don’t speak—what was it?’

  ‘Arabic.’

  ‘No, I don’t speak Arabic. That won’t surprise you.’

  ‘Do you not? Do you not? Of all the languages on earth, the most perfectly adapted for Wordsworth. It’s better in Arabic than in English. But all of this, Constable, was brought about by rumours. The humiliation of dedicating a book of poems to the man who had murdered my brother, the ransom paid by my father, who was by no means as wealthy as Saddam imagined, my imprisonment, all caused by rumours.’

  Constable Cuff had been listening as intently as any undergraduate in Emmanuel’s famous lectures, considered models of engagement. ‘You were probably glad to see him hung,’ said Cuff. ‘Saddam Hussein.’

  ‘No. I disapprove of capital punishment. Saddam sucked mints. An incidental piece of information. Vain about his breath. Another incidental point: the rumours were true. My father was talking to the Americans. And my brother did design that poster.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘The rumours about me are also true. I murdered little Courtney and ate her in a pie.’

  Cuff raised his fair eyebrows, looked away from Emmanuel then looked back. ‘This is getting away from me a bit,’ he said. He took up his cap and his green clipboard from the table. ‘If you recall anything, you will let us know, won’t you, Mister Delli? For the sake of the parents?’

  Alone in the house once more, the professor wandered back to the kitchen, drank a centimetre of scotch from a glass that had once been a container for Vegemite, rinsed the glass and the two tea mugs. Gazing out the window at yellow azaleas in late bloom, he sang softly, ‘Little Courtney is gone, Little Courtney is gone, Oh where, oh where can poor Courtney be?’ He thought he might make a pest of himself at the clinic in Wangaratta where his wife was curing piccaninnies. Was it too soon? Three days earlier he’d driven his little yellow Getz to Wangaratta to complain loudly at the reception desk of a pain in his penis. Or tour the town? Tour Yack? It delighted him to study the variety of ways in which the townsfolk expressed their disdain: the attempt at the cutting glance; the thin smile; the muttered remark; and his favourite, old fashioned racial abuse, sometimes uttered from as far away as the other side of the street: ‘Wog cunt!’ How he would have relished the chance to chat for a minute with the wog cunt man! ‘Sir, you call me wog; you believe, sir, that I have done some harm to Little Courtney, herself a wog and a darker wog than I! Curious, sir!’

  chapter 20

  Jesus My Love in Your

  Heaven My Love

  HE WANTED to spend all of the hours of his days writing his letter to Tess on the floorboard but penance got in the way. He should not have burned the books. Also, Susie was ringing each morning to say: ‘Read!’ He didn’t want to read Jennifer’s journal. He didn’t want to discover that his great-aunt was mad in the same way that he was, not at all. What, his customs and tastes merely the expression of his DNA? He didn’t want a great-aunt in any case, nor a mother nor a father.

  He shuffled the photocopied pages of Jennifer’s journal. Each page was stamped top right with the logo of the Philpot Archive.

  November 17th, 1947

  Jesus My Love in Your Heaven My Love the Blood of Your Wounds My Love runs in my body.

  He thought: Oh please! Nevertheless, he read on. Penitently. And discovered that his great-aunt Jennifer Victor had written what he was reading where he was now sitting:

  My usual perch on the top step. Raining, of course! The roof of the verandah barely protects me. The spring foliage of the elms has hardly known a dry day since it appeared.

  Leon glanced up at the elms, then back to the page.

  Surplus remains a problem. We produce ample for a third shop but who will look after a third shop? Tim has returned to the town. His faith was a fluctuating thing, there one day and not the next and back again on the third. I paid his dentist bill, perhaps that was all he wanted. Better he went. Catherine’s child continues hearty. His dribble makes his chin shine. How the child was conceived remains a mystery to everyone but Catherine. Her theory—I must consider it a ‘theory’—is that the wind carried a see
d to her cunny. That is her word for the pudendum muliebre, her father and mother are from Yorkshire. I have not thus far asked her for a less whimsical explanation and I shan’t. She displays no evidence of distress, unless striking affected poses is a form of distress. She cares for the child well—oh for pity’s sake, let me write his name!—Mandrake—there, it’s done, she took it from a cartoon in the newspaper and I counsel myself to be placid since the same newspaper might have yielded Ginger Meggs. Perhaps the father was a travelling magician. Even a perfectly congenial town like Yackandandah is no place for a girl of seventeen turned out of home. Trudy and her baby are cut from cloth of quite a different weave. While Catherine is limitlessly lazy, Trudy hoes and weeds as if she were a plantation slave, urged on by a man with a whip. It is never necessary to ask her to do anything. She is the first up from table, the first at the sink, the first to fetch wood from the shed when the stove is cooling. One marvels at her energy, and at the source of combustion that provides it. She is as thin as a finger, even her breasts are tiny, her baby rarely cries although what it extracts from those thimbles must surely leave it famished. It is as if Trudy has somehow educated the poor little thing with its strange moustache in her own habits of uncomplainingness. In all honesty, I can’t remember a whimper coming from the child at night. What is it called? Is it Joe? She is Catholic, Trudy, but has taken to our faith in exactly the manner she takes to the garden—that is, she rolls up her sleeves and gets down on her knees. I’ve read her both of my books twice until I am properly tired of the sound of my own voice and my own grand claims. For claims they are, it is important…

  Leon’s mobile rang, ten seconds of baritone hip-hop installed by Tess’s son Justin some time past: a jest. Since it was Susie, and since he could please her, he answered.

  ‘Brendan is here, Leon. He wants to talk to you.’

  Leon stifled a groan. Brendan was a magistrate, fairly aged now, a great lover of literature and renowned for letting almost everyone who appeared before him go free. You might sometimes wish to spare yourself his goodwill.

  ‘Brendan here, old fellow. Susie tells me you’re a little under the weather?’

  That would be Susie’s story. Rather than, ‘Leon has gone mad.’

  ‘Alas,’ said Leon.

  ‘No Tommy H this month?’ said Brendan. Tommy H was Thomas Hardy.

  ‘Not quite up to it, Brendan.’

  ‘Dear fellow, of course not. Do get well.’

  ‘So I shall,’ said Leon.

  Susie came back on the line. ‘Read!’ she said, and rang off.

  …my books twice until I am properly tired of the sound of my own voice and my own grand claims. For claims they are, it is important for me to concede this. I respond to what the Bible tells me of the life of Our Saviour but I am elsewhere the magpie that Papa was, fetching bright ornaments back to my nest. Reading to Trudy only four days past, I believe I heard myself saying that the disciples courted martyrdom as if competing for medals. Christian Socialism does offer a lovely banquet of contradictions, if anyone were watching. But they are not, especially. The people of Yackandandah, whatever they wonder, remain comforted by my grey hair. Oh, Jennifer, you fearless matron, there, you have written it! Grey hair. But cascading, let me hasten to add in my vanity. Oh dear, I can be lonely. What do I miss? Kisses. And who would provide them? Hunter? His parents should be put in stocks for christening him Hunter; he is pure prey, and appears to have been raised from the cradle as prey. Melanie moved his boots drying by the fire so that left and right were no longer aligned and my aunt, what a to-do! He squawked for I think an hour and could not leave it alone. ‘I ask very little of the comrade-brethren but I am dashed if I gave permission for my footwear to be interfered with!’

  Leon said aloud: ‘Kisses?’

  It’s in the beginning that we shine. We say, ‘How far to go!’ We know the effort. But we shine. Now, it’s only mouths to feed. This was Walter’s plan, not mine. His heart was greater, his mind more capacious. He called Christ comrade, on earth a fellow like other fellows yet with a steadier control of his visions. How he hated Paul! And called him a ‘Plagiarist of the spirit’. He could not abide a hereafter of reward. Walter’s hereafter was for all men, those who’d behaved and those who hadn’t and it would be their task in the hurly-burly of heaven to share or die a second time. Walter’s heaven was the earth all over again, but with the great example of Christ striding about and shouting and kicking bottoms. I miss my Walter, dear Christ, I miss him! Too cruel to emerge from my over-education into the relief of his plainness, only to lose it! That mind of his, more widely read than me but sorting it all so deftly, the nonsense, the cant, the unimportant, all kept apart from the lovely. What am I at Joyful? A nurse. It tires me. The rain lasts and lasts. I will buy a radio. It will mean contradicting my own rule. I will buy a radio and a gramophone. Can we not at least have music? Oh, I have just looked up to see musk ducks settle on the water! They will depart soon. They like swamps but Joyful only seems a swamp from the air and then they see that they are swimming on pasture. Oh dear, it is all Walter’s dream. I honour him by sitting here on a day of rain after a week of rain and ask the community to love Christ if they can and each other if they will. But for how much longer I do not know. A radio and a gramophone may make a difference. I will dance. Oh Jennifer, what a shock to those you’ve gathered here! Have I not said over and over that Joyful is no holiday camp and carried on about not wasting time on fol-de-rol? Oh, I say and say and say and am almost sick with saying! We will have a radio and a gramophone. We will have music.

  Leon thought: ‘We are mad in different ways.’ He sat without reading further, waiting for Daniel. He would have no rest until he destroyed Daniel’s memories in the way that he’d demolished Emily’s. But he thought of Jennifer Victor in a more generous way. At least that.

  chapter 21

  Averescu

  EMMANUEL DRESSED himself for today’s outing in a fresh blue shirt, black slacks, tweed jacket and Black Watch tartan tie. The opportunity to excite loathing on the streets of Yackandandah lifted his spirits, he wished he had a cane to twirl. He could deliver a little rap on the muzzle to any dogs who approached, use it as a pointer, conjure disgust in passers-by.

  He came to the memorial gardens where by good fortune a couple of tourists, no doubt husband and wife, were staring up at the incongruous palms that towered above the bandstand and rolls of honour. Wife wore cerise and lime and had charge of the little digital camera. Husband in ironed jeans and Hush Puppies looked perhaps five years into genial retirement.

  Emmanuel made a show of studying in bafflement the Honour Roll of the Great War.

  ‘Hmm. Gosh. How strange. Excuse me sir and madam, do you understand this business?’

  Mister was prepared to help out. ‘Understand which?’

  ‘Many many names! Bickell F., Bickell J., Carter L.! Jolly strange!’

  ‘The names? Men who fought in World War One. Some got killed. Most, probably.’

  ‘World War One? It was far, far away from here!’

  ‘Yes it was. Gallipoli. And France. Thereabouts.’

  ‘Gallipoli? Gallipoli is where?’

  ‘That’s in Turkey. Gallipoli. The Dardanelles.’

  ‘I see! These chaps are shooting Turkish fellows! A good thing to shoot the Turkish fellows! Rascally fellows! But some of those Turkish rascals are shooting the Yackandandah chaps?’

  ‘Some, yeah.’

  ‘A bad thing to shoot the Yackandandah chaps!’

  Wife, appraising Emmanuel, was urging departure.

  ‘Well, it was war. People were killing each other. It wasn’t personal.’

  ‘Frank?’

  ‘No, I’m just explaining for the gentleman. It was war. Germany, Turkey, I think Austria.’

  ‘Ah, shooting the German chaps too! Very very good! Bad fellows the German chaps! I am shooting many German chaps myself!’

  ‘Frank!’

  ‘Have to go.’r />
  ‘In the arse I shoot them!’ Emmanuel called after the retreating tourists. ‘Turkish rascals! German rascals! In the arse!’

  He stopped for a scotch at the Star, where he was especially unwelcome. It was his habit to sit at the bar and complain of his wife’s lewd behaviour at the Wangaratta clinic, and of her attempts to convert the children of the shire to Islam. On this day, for the sake of variety, he stood beneath a framed poster depicting legendary Australian Rules footballers of the past, clapped his hands three times and sang out in the warbling manner of a muezzin, ‘Oh, ho, Muslim emergency, oh!’ The bar was busy enough, near to the midday counter lunch. Patrons turned to him sceptically, or else with a mild relish for the nonsense that would follow.

  ‘These chaps, these footballers, each is a secret Muslim. I give you my word. Each was recruited by agents from my unhappy land across the seas. My unhappy land of Iraq. This fellow here, Jack Dyer, I have personally witnessed making the Tashahhud. Sam’i Allahu liman hamidah Rabbana wa lakal hamd. I have seen him making wudu. A fanatic. Thank you for your attention.’

  Along High Street beneath the oaks, snapdragons of pink, purple and white grew from wooden planters. Emmanuel nipped off a white flower for his buttonhole. Across the street at Enchanted, the libidinous Pole Mikolajczyk and his peculiar half-wife were loading their station wagon. Emmanuel sauntered down the sidewalk, gathering frowns and even occasional smiles from the more forgiving, and those who considered him touched. Courtney Singh smiled from posters on shop windows and various upright fixtures. Emmanuel settled for one at head height just outside the newsagency.