Joyful

by Robert Hillman

  ‘Oh little Courtney!’ he commenced, throwing his arms wide. ‘Little flower of Calcutta! Return to us, little Courtney!’

  A fair-haired girl of perhaps four stopped to stare, puzzled but appreciative. The child’s mother, sensible enough to hurry past, had to double back and grab her daughter’s hand.

  ‘Little Courtney, how your papa repents! Little Courtney, how your mama laments!’

  Mrs Underwood, Pamela, proprietor of the newsagency, emerged from the shop. ‘Not here, Mr Delli, thank you very much! Take it somewhere else!’

  Emmanuel took it somewhere else: to another Courtney poster on the opposite side of High Street, and to another and another, by which time he was sick of himself. The Polish pornographer was watching him with amusement.

  ‘Mikolajczyk, you at least would appreciate my mission?’ said Emmanuel. ‘With your taste for Indian delicacies? Sikh chocolate?’

  ‘My friend, with all my heart!’

  ‘Is it true that the great cuckold is living at Joyful?’

  ‘The great cuckold is at Joyful, I promise you.’

  Emmanuel made his way home hissing like a small steam train climbing a grade.

  ‘Oh charming, charming, I survive Saddam only to imprison myself in a country of absurd leaping marsupials. Who are these people with their tedious mimicry and their timidity? These Orstrayuns. How they disgust me! What vile wind blew me here, what wind from hell? But when did I ever have a homeland? Is this where I belong after so many years, in the land of those who do not belong? And to share a town with that repulsive Pole! Where was that woman’s sanity, to become the sow for that great pig? What God would permit it, beauty matched with livestock?’

  The only remaining solace the day would afford Emmanuel was the composition of his usual letter to Averescu, but it was a diminishing pleasure. The inspiration that had braced him in the past was lapsing. It was habit now.

  Back at the house in Braidwood Street, Emmanuel ate dry bread for lunch, disdaining the kuke prepared for him by Daanya. He sat at the laptop in the study with his tie loosened and his gaze fixed on a filmy web moving faintly below the cornice. He drew his hands down his face, sighed, stared at the rug on the floor, an orange and blue monstrosity from Ikea that his daughter had favoured over the exquisite Kurdish tribal rug her aunt had sent her from Basra. Buying time, parrying failure, he called up his emails after neglecting them for weeks and was astonished to find for the first time since the death of Sofia a message from Averescu himself. He sat abruptly back in his chair as if slapped. That creature? His finger hovered over the mouse, then was withdrawn. At last, with a curse, he clicked.

  FROM: Mark Averescu [maverdr@iprimus.com]

  SENT: Sat 11/11/2009

  CC:

  SUBJECT: as follows

  emmanuel please forgive me emmanuel

  What?

  Delli read the message a second, a third, a fourth time.

  emmanuel please forgive me emmanuel

  This was a joke?

  emmanuel please forgive me emmanuel

  ‘Forgive you? Are you insane? Forgive you!’

  The inspiration that had all but abandoned him came rushing back.

  ‘Why in God’s name would I forgive you? Pig! I will forgive you when the devil has his pitchfork in your throat! Forgive you? Yes!—when your daughter is a harlot in hell!’

  But there was another message among the spam, a name that now jumped at him. What sort of day was this?

  FROM: Klara Averescu [klara2@hotmail.com]

  SENT: Sat 24/11/2009

  CC:

  SUBJECT: my father

  Uncle Manny—I am writing to tell you that my father died at home just after 7.00 AM yesterday morning. He sent you a message some days ago but I don’t know if he told you that he was so ill. Last night he was clear in the head for the first time in weeks and he asked me to take down this message for you. ‘I did your daughter a great wrong. For the trouble I brought into your life, I am more sorry than these poor words can convey. I hope you will find it in your heart to forgive me.’ Dad was ill for the last ten months of his life. Uncle Manny, a memorial service for my father will be held at Faith Chapel in Armadale on November 29th at 11.00 AM. If you could come, I would be very, very grateful. My mother and my brother will not be in attendance, so I would be so glad if you were there. In spite of everything, my father admired you more than anyone on earth.

  With love,

  Klara

  (Klara Kristine Averescu)

  Delli threw his hands to his head and screamed. That vile creature had died hoping for forgiveness! To have imagined it! To have held the thinnest shred of hope that he would ever be forgiven!

  Delli clicked REPLY and tapped in a fever at his keyboard.

  Dear, Dear Klara, I have just received news of your father’s death! How I wish I were free to exult! I pray to every god on earth and in heaven that his death was attended by agonies! You have reported that he hoped for forgiveness! Ho ho ho! Forgiveness? Do you imagine—did he imagine!—that by dying in this typically craven manner that my heart would turn towards forgiveness? His soul and spirit were made of shit. But my daughter had something to give to the world. My daughter had her beauty and her art to give to the world. Do you in your deranged state begin to believe that the death of scum like your father can ever redeem the death of a girl like Sofia?

  Delli heard his wife’s car in the driveway. Someone had phoned her. Someone had complained of his performance in High Street. Not for the first time. He would normally have logged off at the sound of Daanya returning but his fever this day was too intense:

  My forgiveness will begin when your father’s corpse is devoured by rats

  The back door opened and closed. Daanya was behind him. She was reading over his shoulder. He could smell the musk of the scent she favoured.

  ‘Finished?’ he said.

  ‘Mark is dead?’

  ‘Yes. Now go away from me.’

  ‘You will not send this,’ said Daanya.

  Delli rammed his chair back, intending to knock his wife from her feet. But she had anticipated him and stepped clear.

  ‘You will not send this, Emmanuel!’

  Daanya stood away from her husband with her clenched fists slightly raised. Prepared to fight? Prepared to box with him? He had never struck his wife with his clenched fist, only dreamed of it, but he thought now he would kill her and be done with it.

  ‘Little Angel of Wangaratta,’ he whispered. ‘Who has been complaining? What busybody has been telling tales about the professor?’

  ‘Husband, that girl has lost her father. He did not deserve her love, you will say, but who deserves to be loved, Emmanuel? Who can say that they deserve to be loved? You will not send that to her.’

  ‘I will do as I will, whore!’

  Delli’s fingers moved quickly on the keyboard.

  With undying contempt for you and the filth that was your father,

  I remain, eternally, yr dear uncle Manny

  Before he could click SEND, Daanya lunged and tore the cable from the phone socket, then wrenched it free of its connection with the laptop. She ran from the room but tripped in the hallway and pitched forward. Within seconds Delli had his hand on her throat, a fist drawn back.

  ‘Do you know what I have seen, whore? I have seen a body with a face as stiff as a mask. Cold to the touch. Cold and still. And that was my daughter.’

  He released Daanya and strode from the house to High Street. He roared with his head thrown back that he was the killer of Courtney, the killer of Courtney, that he had throttled the life from little Courtney with his two hands, and how she had writhed, how she had writhed, little Courtney!

  Onlookers paused on the sidewalk. Shopkeepers watched from doorways. For the moment, people were not prepared to give what they were watching any real status—it was the professor, it could be booze, madness, theatre, idiocy—but as the shouting continued it was conceded here and there that civic inter
vention might be called for. A young woman by the name of Jermimah from a shop on High Street that specialised in healing crystals walked towards the professor singing a prayer in Sanskrit. Daniel Mikolajczyk, studying the professor from the sidewalk, smiled in a rapture of approval.

  chapter 22

  David Plymouth

  HE SPENT hours each day adding to his letter to Tess. He had covered the floors of entire rooms. She was nearer to him when he wrote than she had been in life. Even in this state of ecstatic communion, he listened for the arrival of Daniel. But Daniel didn’t come.

  Susie, in her morning call, said: ‘Brendan is in hospital, Leon. Like last time his heart. I’ll see him tonight and tell him the flowers are from you. Doctor Perelman is coming soon.’

  ‘Who’s Doctor Perelman?’ said Leon.

  ‘Sandra!’ said Susie. ‘Read!’

  Leon walked to the front gate, as if by doing so he might encourage Daniel to appear. He took the photocopies of Jennifer Victor’s journal with him and read from them as he walked back to the house.

  November 17th, 1952

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

  A policeman came yesterday early evening and took Kenneth away. Eliza in hospital at Wangaratta, twelve stitches, the cut a quarter of an inch from her carotid. It’s unpleasant to send someone away with a policeman, but the relief, last night, of sleeping without relying on Tawny to wake me if Kenneth came free of his bonds in the laundry! My life in the hands of a cat. I’ve told Kenneth he can come back when he’s well. The policeman said I mustn’t promise him any such thing. Kenneth’s departure reduces our number to 16, more coming on Monday. I am on an unofficial list sacred to the Anglican Diocese of Wangaratta that entitles me to care for girls in the family way whose families are in the way. I’ve restricted the Bishop’s smarmy henchman to three girls per year, but he pushes and prods and now we’re at four. I don’t know what it is about me that commends Joyful so highly that the Bishop can overlook our denomination. My niece is expected on Monday also, her fourth visit to Joyful. She will find herself left largely to her own devices, I’m afraid, but she is almost a grown woman now and I hope will not feel neglected. Other than such distractions as attempted homicides, we are all tomatoes. Brendan has given over an area of the west pasture to six varieties of tomato and we now grow enough to feed the whole of Australia. The lettuces continue to flourish, I am happy to say, and we are trying beetroot in the shelter below the willows with high hopes of selling them to the man who takes our string beans. He says he’ll put our whole harvest into tins.

  My heart tires me out. I begin to admire more and more silly Catherine, whose heart was a peppercorn. Little Mandrake has quite forgotten her and thinks of Trudy and me as a mother of eight limbs. Why should I possess a womb that will not catch a seed and yet be racked by such a yearning for the weight of a man’s body? I watched from the window as David bent himself over a length of wood in the carpenter’s shed and thought I would have my fingernails drawn from me with pliers for an hour in his arms. Dear Walter in whatever heaven you have been granted find the power to intervene and give me this young man for my own. I will lose my wits. Beloved, I cannot bear it, cannot cannot bear it. David Plymouth brushes against me in the kitchen or the corridor and a fire runs all over my skin. I witness features of my character I thought steady forever turn about, and reveal an ugliness that shocks me. What hope for me when I know that I would fill his pockets with money if I thought it would make him leave Trudy and Francine and belong only to me? Dear God, he is twenty. What hope? Can you not help me, my beloved, can you not save me? I dread myself these days. I dread what I might do.

  Still holding the sheets of Jennifer’s journal, Leon watched small, fleet lizards skittering to where a bar of bright sunlight warmed the marble of the steps, roasting themselves for a few seconds before skittering back to the shade. He closed his eyes and imagined something he’d never truly welcomed when it was possible: Tess kissing his lips. He sat in the shade and suffered in as adult a way as he could manage before returning to the journal. At the sound of every car on the highway he lifted his gaze and stared down to the gate, like a dog yearning for the hand that feeds him.

  November 17th, 1953

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

  How strange, the thought that has just come to me. If Walter’s heart had kept beating and we’d come here together to Joyful, as we’d planned, I would not have given myself to David. (The last of my pride will not permit me to say ‘accosted David’.) Yet it is quite impossible to believe that my life could have passed without David. Trudy is full of conviction when she speaks of things that are meant to be, but I have no taste for the phrase. It invites a type of quietism. If one thing is meant to be, then surely all things are meant to be and there is nothing to be done about anything. Walter would never have it that anything was meant to be. He said that it was the free will of Christ that had him nailed to the cross: the choice of a man who could only have avoided Calvary and Golgotha at the cost of his soul. Certainly nothing got in the way of Walter’s free will! Did it, Beloved? A little less free will would have been welcome, my dear, if not to the maidens of England, then to me. Curious—Walter’s infidelities seemed so much of a piece, so much an expression of the manner of the dear man that I could never cry for more than a day, and he ever and always so direct in his contrition, almost as if the Susans and Sallies afforded him the opportunity to apologise in such well-chosen words. David, of course, could never apologise since fidelity was not offered or promised but oh, Jennifer, poor Jennifer, the agony. Where it comes from I don’t know, or I do, it comes out of a clear blue sky, me, Mama, standing on the verandah steps as unyielding as the marble beneath my feet with less than the least idea of what I intend to accomplish on this day—or any day!—and fix my gaze on Francine weeding and picking snails from the lettuces. I hiss inwardly, or perhaps my lips are indeed moving when I believe I am only thinking, that could be true, and these are the words I address to her, blameless as she is, fuck you fuck you fuck you, and fuck the tedious way in which you stand up from weeding and stretch and call out, ‘Lovely day for it!’ I am the Basilisk at the moment it kills with its stare; I want her dead. I have thought on it and thought on it and do you know, I believe it is David’s beauty that has wrought me to such a pitch. Was ever a man more beautiful to gaze on? He caught a splinter one day in the side of a finger and I began in the kitchen freeing it from his skin. The hold I had of his hand and wrist as I sat in the chair before him spread longing all over the surface of my body like a blush oh I could feel it then as now my heart and flesh filling themselves with desire so heedless of any such consideration as too much, or too public, although in fact Brendan had left the kitchen and we were alone. I said, ‘Come with me, there may be more,’ suggesting—what?—that David had taken a hundred splinters into his body and each needed to be treated? Something as mad as that? I led him in a rush to my bedroom, undressed him of every stitch and on my bed in the autumn sunlight caressed him in every place, lifted his limbs and held their length. He lay smiling, he let me lap at him, he let me turn him, shape him, what words I used I cannot imagine, a babble. But I do recall in the midst of this caressing and kissing and plundering I thought, ‘This is what is supposed to happen,’ (which is very like Trudy’s ‘meant to be’, I should concede) and oh, David’s lips, never lips so soft and the uncanny way he has of moving his lips and hands to the part of my body where passion has kindled to its most intense and following the shifting force of arousal with his lips and tongue so that I think and believe that he is me, I lose any clear sense of where I end and he begins. With the best will in the world (truly, Jennifer?) I believe he is wasted on Francine and wasted on Trudy, but better he remains here at Joyful and roams like a ram, for all that his roaming torments me.

  November 17th, 1955

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

  A new couple arrived yesterday, Ingrid and Peter from Latvia, barely off the boat. Trevor found them in Sydney somehow and telephoned yesterday to say that Peter is an orchardist and will make a world of difference next summer. This coming summer is too close to do anything miraculous for the apples. I must do my saintly best to impress since it will benefit the apples and everyone agrees that we are not as well known as in the past for the brilliance of our fruit. Ingrid and Peter bring us to twenty. It’s a task for me to remember everyone. If I am honest—and let me at least be honest!—I prefer the company of tiny Mandrake to any of the adults. I take him up here to the chapel once a week to pray but I hardly know what God I am beseeching any longer. The chapel is here, so it will serve, and Jesus is the great friend of Walter so He will serve. All the way up the hill the tears build behind my eyes and I hold them back until I am seated here. Tiny Mandrake says, ‘Will we cry now, Mama?’ It is three months without David. To the very day before he left with Francine he honoured our Mondays and even on that final Monday he laughed in the same way as always, lovemaking as ever for him partly a time of mirth, I have never known and have never read of a man who laughed in lovemaking as if for joy but such tenderness in his laughter, such tenderness in his dear face. I knew for so long that he would go. I tried to forestall his departure by imagining it, believing vainly that if I foresaw my grief I would avert it, that God would not send me a burden I’d so thoroughly anticipated. But God I think sends burdens in batches and cannot take time to test if this one or that is cruel beyond reason. And David, what life does he now embrace? A tradesman in Melbourne, in the house I gave him, Francine growing huge with the baby she is carrying and huge she will grow again and again and again, children filling the house with washing! Will he pause in his hammering sometimes and imagine this paradise? For it was a paradise for him. Will he? I cannot believe the city will suit him for long. And with Francine only for companionship? No. She left with her eyes glittering, Francine, possibly with joy but I think also with a steely determination to establish a new regime. But he will not be faithful. David cannot be faithful. After all this misery should I not say I tire of being a woman, of whatever happens to me in lovemaking? Except that it is not me who cries out and holds so close and wets David’s face with kisses no it is not me for I am no longer there, I am where I can only ever be in lovemaking, in a place without roads or bridges or houses or tables and chairs or pens such as this one, I am where there is no world, only a rabbit here and there and perhaps a snake, a tawny snake with dark rings such as the one I saw yesterday in the South Woods lazing his shining length on a big rock. Only that, and in that place I am free and yet not even thinking of freedom but simply free of everything that is the world and of everything that is me.