Something Special, Something Rare

by Black Inc.

  THAT VAIN WORD NO

  BRENDA WALKER

  He said, repeating the opinion of Socrates in the Phaedrus, that a tree, so beautiful to look at, never spoke a word and that conversation was possible only in the city, between men.

  -SAUL BELLOW, Ravelstein

  William is an old man, a surgeon, standing barefoot on a paved driveway at dawn. He holds a hot-water bottle in his arms. He’s looking at his trees. Conifers trucked in from some place of immediate forests. They’re lined up along the driveway now, deep in the earth, evenly spaced, shocked. These trees don’t show their misery yet, the foliage is firm and grey, but William notices an unhealthy pliancy that wasn’t there when they were unloaded from the delivery truck. They will recover; they will grow. In the meantime he breathes in the scent of Christmas trees that reminds him of the smell of disinfectant in a dirty urban train.

  He was six years old, sitting by his mother, watching her take a square of chocolate from a man across the aisle, watching as she slid into a light diabetic coma that the other passengers mistook for sleep. The man folded the silver foil back over the remaining chocolate; his hands were white and small. William said no, please no, quietly, she heard him and she refused to listen and he lost her. As he sat alone beside her body he relaxed. If she could slip away then so would he. He noticed the disinfectant: pine-scented chemicals rising from something, vomit, blood, half wiped up by a railway cleaner days before, and closed his eyes. His mother began to stir at Central Station. So long ago, almost sixty years ago, and the smell of pine is waiting in his memory.

  Birds sing, the sky turns white, then rose, then blue, the hot-water bottle cools against his chest. He hears the tearing sound of a blind spinning upward in Dan’s kitchen, the empty voice of a politician from the radio inside the house where his coffee waits.

  Dan helped him to plant the trees. They’ve been neighbours for a long time. William knows the details of Dan’s illness, the name of the woman in Geneva who sometimes phones him in the night. Dan is vegan, thinner than William, lining up ten vegetables and five fruits on his kitchen bench each morning. It’s kept him alive, kept the markers down in his blood. Dan says that if he doesn’t die of cancer he’ll die of starvation. He’s a good cook, in spite of the restrictions. He often cooks for William. The trees were his idea; it’s William’s driveway but Dan organised the sudden view of the pine trees through his kitchen window.

  The old men hacked at the roots with axes, freeing the young trees from their clenched and pot-bound state. Dan dug pits slowly and filled them with water and William steadied each tree in the earth. Then they ate together: black ragged mushrooms with chopped garlic for Dan, steak for William.

  Late at night, back in his own house, William climbed the spiral staircase to his bedroom. At every step he had a new view of the room below: the cane rocking chair, the sisal mat. Photographs of his daughter, Nina. Alone, long after a long-exhausted marriage, he circled the few things he owned like a great bird moving upwards in the air, thanks to this staircase. And it carried him like a mother to his sleep.

  *

  William is driving by the river, later in the morning. Boats with firm white sails slip beside his car and veer away into greener ruffled water. The traffic has to slow so that cars can file past a cyclist on a fold-out bike. A tourist. A man who doesn’t know his cycle paths, who has checked his folding bicycle through with the rest of his luggage in some truly distant city. Osaka. Dusseldorf. The cars slow, slice into the edge of the adjoining lane, ease past. The cyclist could slip and be destroyed in spite of all this irritated care. It’s William’s turn to pass. He guesses at the space the man will need, then looks in the rearview mirror and sees that the rider has a joyful hands-free smile. Each driver puts aside the light callousness of the morning rush, slows, then speeds away.

  William gives the day’s first patient his opinion of her illness. She sits with her husband beside her and William watches as the man’s hands began to tremble. He smells fire, an electrical fire, just a faint smell, then he realises that the smell comes from the husband, from his skin and breath. It’s fear. She listens calmly; almost everybody lapses into shock. That’s why William draws diagrams; he writes instructions down. The patient tells him, quickly, that she has children. As if this will reverse his diagnosis. As if he’ll change his mind. She’s in jeans and running shoes. Some of his patients dress formally in black, they make a funerary occasion of their appointments. I have a rendezvous with Death. William tries to think of the cyclist, smiling on the lethal metal highway. After she speaks she gathers her things. In the waiting room William sees a child scramble to his feet, a boy about the same age as he was when he rode in the train to Central Station beside his own unconscious mother. This boy must belong to his patient. Her secret shield. Surely a mother cannot be taken from her child. Surely even Death plays by this rule: that a mother cannot be parted from her child. The husband leaves first, then the woman with her son’s hand in her own. Quite often at the door he feels misgivings; he senses the vast appeal of simple denial; the refusal of his surgery.

  *

  Once William’s mother took him to a strange house in the city. He remembers the narrow street, the shush of trains. His mother left him alone with instructions not to follow her upstairs. He was afraid to leave the room in case she disappeared. He pissed in thimblefuls, thirsty but too frightened to look for a kitchen, soaking the brocade and wadding of a chair, soaking his own dark shorts. He was damp when she appeared at the foot of the stairs. By nightfall the cloth barely rasped his skin. There was no smell. His mother was at her sweetest, her most warm and sad. He knew that she hadn’t pulled it off, the new lipstick and the astrakhan coat had been good for an afternoon upstairs but nothing more. They were going to be alone, William and his mother, or William would be alone in a wet chair guarding a strange door.

  He sees patient after patient with good news and bad, the day slides into shadow, he takes a message on his mobile from Dan. Dinner again, yes.

  *

  Dan’s house smells of butter and polenta, of cornfields in summer. Or is it paper? Something good. William leaves his drink untouched; his hands are occupied with a metal lobster from Japan. Dan owns this kind of thing. Probably old. Yes, it’s old, Dan tells him that it was made by a family in Kyoto who died, one after the other, leaving no descendants. Brown flanges clack into place as William curls the tail. It’s a miracle. The legs are loose and jointed like early attempts at prosthetic hands.

  Dan’s phone rings. He takes the call in another room but William can still hear his voice, he’s speaking a name over and over again, a single syllable, half-sung into the receiver to soothe or amuse the woman in Geneva on the other end of the line. Like a parent calling softly in the darkness. Dan at sixty-seven, dying, and in love. William suddenly realises that it’s the voice Dan uses when he says his own name, which he does at times, dramatising a conversation, putting himself in the sentence. Dan loves this distant woman as he loves himself.

  William remembers crowding into a lift in the city with his mother. He was too short to see her face. He reached for her hand and held it until the doors opened and she stepped out ahead of him and he found that he had been holding onto a pale man, who smiled but did not speak. Tonight there is nothing but his mother in his memory. Even his daughter Nina fades. Perhaps he should speak to Dan about all this.

  Through the window, beneath the blind that he had heard Dan raise that morning, William sees his row of conifers and feels the relief of darkness for the foliage newly positioned in unsheltered sun, the relief of the slow restorative lift of dampness from the unfamiliar earth. He closes his eyes and listens to Dan’s love, failing as his life will slowly fail but still musical with the confident failing music of all human love.

  LA MOUSTIQUAIRE

  GILLIAN MEARS

  The girl crouches in front of a fire about the size and circular width of the leaf she intends to wrap around some of the beans that she ha
s stolen from the man. She has his little silver flask too. The veins of the leaf seem to glow with a green fire that’s nothing to do with the burning twigs. If I could become very thin, she thinks, thinner even than the man, then I’d slip through this leaf to become its sap. The beans are on a metal spoon, smoothed by the innumerable tongues and fingers of girls who’ve accompanied the stockman.

  This girl has been with the stockman for nearly five years but sometimes they are still such strangers the girl thinks it’s as if they’ve been sealed off from each other in candlewax. On other occasions, there’s no separation between them. Being with the man then is like cantering on the smoothest horse imaginable. The man puts his nose against the girl’s and holding only one nostril shut breathes out and in so that their breath becomes the breath of one creature – neither girl nor man but the animal whose shape she has seen only in dreams, or in the moving leaves of a tree against the stars. It has a horse’s head but its ears are soft and round in a way that reminds the girl of the love poem the stockman once wrote. ‘La moustiquaire’, the man said it was called. ‘For you,’ he said, reciting, but the girl could understand nothing of it, as it was in the language he’d learned when he went away to the long ago war. Mosquito net girl, he says it means. Mozzie, he calls her or Ginny, the name he called the other girls.

  Yet not even the night with the rodeo boy on the last full moon in town can equal what the girl feels for the old stockman. The man can’t live much longer and although she hates the man more than she has ever hated anything, she also loves the man more than she has ever loved. With the boy she’d pretended to laugh at his jokes about old men but even as his hands were finding her again, she’d felt the pang of her betrayal. Wondering if the stockman was over his sudden sickness, she’d suddenly lost all interest in doing anything more with that rodeo boy. Even as he was throwing his leg over like she was another of his rides for the day, she was wishing she was inside a mosquito net with the stockman, listening to him reading.

  *

  The girl sighs. Already it’s light enough to see a line of trees about fifty horse lengths to the right. Hovering in this way between day and night, the land looks downy, as if old stockmen have multiplied out there and lain down with their finely haired shoulders turned towards the sky. The three horses are tethered near another tree and look over. She takes a biscuit of hay over to them and, deftly, between her own knees, she picks up the hoof of the one who seemed yesterday to have a stone bruise.

  At least there are no mosquitoes here. The girl puts the horse’s hoof back on the ground. It isn’t often when they travel away from the town that she doesn’t have to stay up all night with the switch made of wild grass, waving mosquitoes off the man.

  The old travelling net rotted about a year ago and although it could’ve easily been replaced, now the man prefers to call the girl, La Moustiquaire. Or ‘Ginny,’ he calls, stretching her out over him as if her skinny limbs are cotton net. He jokes that girls like her are more beautiful when tired, with the purple skin under the eyes deepening in the way of the coast at dusk. ‘Your father must’ve been one of those really black black-fellas,’ he speculates, but she won’t ever say who that father might have been or where he got to or if she even remembers him.

  *

  She mashes the beans into a paste and pinches some salt out. Her hands come together. ‘Thankyou beans. Thankyou leaf who is a little like me. Thankyou God.’ She wraps the leaf into a parcel and eats.

  For a moment the girl’s jaw stops chewing and with alarm she listens. The air has filled with the moaning noise of insects. Then she looks up and grins. For it isn’t mosquitoes after all. She’s sitting under a tree full of flowers and it’s just bees, floating around the yellow blossoms.

  Everything seems to be playing with me! she laughs. In a spiderweb there seems to be a heart shape on a string. And look at the sun! The more she stares, the more the sun pokes out its tongue. Even the sun wants a go at me, she thinks. Then, worried by this thought, she picks up the hip flask.

  The rum almost instantly dries out all extraneous thoughts. So that’s why the man has never allowed her any. She tips it into her mouth again and rocks back on her heels. Selfish, selfish, she thinks. Crazy old slutfish. She utters a few more obscene words and suddenly hopes that when she returns to the tent, the man will not want to get up immediately but will order her to take off her clothes and lie down on the square of blue cloth. I will pretend I’m with the boy. I will suck his old so-and-so until it goes foamy like the sea. Although she hasn’t seen the boy for a while, she feels he isn’t far away and that his face, smiling this way, contains all the haziness of a summer.

  As the vision of the boy fades, she drinks all the rum and lies down. Suddenly she feels the mixed animal whose name she doesn’t know is very close. It half hops, half runs but no, it is clearly a young bridal veil wallaby, she sees that now. White people are killing wallabies with knives and clubs. It’s the time of blood and in the distance she can hear human babies crying. She knows they are babies with skin as black as her own and that like the wallabies, they’re going to be harmed.

  Oh, but it’s too much. White women laugh and show their teeth. Even though they are only watching their men, the girl sees the power that the killing bestows. Under their dresses, she senses their breasts becoming even whiter, like huge dampers rising, threatening to smother the land altogether.

  She sees that the killing makes them powerful in the same way she feels power over all the mosquitoes she’s destined to kill, or the mice in the horse’s oats whose tails she sometimes seizes, swinging their heads against a stone with a sharp crack.

  When she kills mice the stockman smiles and loves her and says she’s like a bloody good dog. Good at anything. His best Ginny ever. And he tousles her hair like it is indeed the ruff of a dog.

  The girl sits up and spits. The twig fire’s gone out. It’s time to creep back to the old man’s tent. First she goes across to the horses who prick their ears hopeful of an early feed. She scratches their tails instead and the favourite spot behind the wither and tells them that probably by this time tomorrow, they’ll be back in town. ‘There,’ she says, pulling off two bottle ticks, ‘that must feel better.’ She licks her horse’s neck where the salt from yesterday’s sweat has gathered, in the hope that it’ll hide the taste of her mouth.

  When the girl ducks down into the tent, she sees with horror that the stockman is as if carpeted in mosquitoes. He has come out from his cover, the better it seems to feed the numerous mosquitoes that have been feasting in the tent. Panic-struck, she picks up her switch but it’s of utterly no use. It’s simply a miracle that the man sleeps on through such moaning. Surely there can only be one explanation. The man has fallen into that which he has always most dreaded. He’s in the mosquito fever from which there is no return.

  The mosquitoes, at the presence of the girl, rise for a moment like little blood suns, like a multitude of demon spirits with fiery gold wings and red bellies. ‘But I am to die first,’ she says. The stockman has always said this. That it’s the fate of her race. That if she leaves him she’ll end up buried young in a shallow reserve grave the dogs’ll dig up. She utters the man’s name which even though it is ridiculous and ill-suited is the only one she has to use.

  The girl puts her mouth onto the man’s but there is no response. The girl slaps the man and shouts that at the very least he could’ve fallen into a normal fever first. ‘They’ll think I killed you and stole your booze and bible.’ The girl lets forth a volley of violent words. The man seems deep in his own breath and has tucked his hands into his armpits in the way of a sick bird.

  Now she holds the man in her arms, the way the man has never allowed. He is just a tiny little fella really. Without his boots on, not much more than her size. She cradles the face. She forces open the stockman’s mouth, trying to induce him to take a nipple. At the touch of the old man’s lips, one nipple forms a drop of whitish dew. She looks deeply and sees the fa
ce his mother must once have seen, when he was just a baby. For a moment it seems that the man’s going to suck but his lips loosen and, skinny though he is, he’s too heavy to hold up anymore. Then she wipes the brylcreem from his hair off her breasts with sudden disdain. ‘Funny, seeing you without your hat on,’ she comments but he doesn’t reply.

  The day inches along. Now the girl grows impatient, wishing that the man would hurry up in the taking of his last breath. And what a rotten breath it has become. If God is breath as the man has said, then God is surely rotten. The girl feels the familiar revulsion. A wasp flies down towards them and then out of the flap to the outside. Then another.

  ‘The bible’s hatching!’ The girl in one leap is at the book, sealed up last visit to town by a pottery wasp building her nest along the pages. The man had taken it as a sign. That not until the wasplings had hatched and flown safely away would it be time to resume his readings.

  Two perfect holes now pierce the mud and from within comes the humming noise. The girl goes back and leans down to the man’s ear to convey her excitement. The hair of the man’s ear shimmers as if traced in late evening water seen from a track, but he doesn’t appear able to hear. The girl feels bitter. Her shoulders slump down in the most downcast of ways. After all their waiting, for the book to be released but for the reader to be dying.