A Short History of Richard Kline

by Amanda Lohrey

  Susan was still unable to discover how Martin had been able to return to his old rental, or why; he had always maintained contact with her but mostly with quirky messages that said little about his domestic arrangements. Like most men, she said, he never spoke of such things, assuming they were of no interest.

  Rick asked her how she felt about the life her brother had chosen.

  She shrugged. ‘He’s very like our father,’ she said. ‘Single-minded. They’re both warrior types, if you know what I mean.’

  He did.

  One Saturday in early spring he drove up to Susan’s house in Katoomba. It was a white weatherboard bungalow from the Federation era, set on the high side of the street with wooden steps that led up to an unruly native garden. Susan ushered him along a dark hallway to a bright, enclosed sunroom that ran along the back of the house. Here Martin was propped up in a cane chair.

  They shook hands and he seemed pleased that Rick had come but it was a strange, muted afternoon for it was an effort still for Martin to speak – either that or he was disinclined. Susan made coffee and sat watchfully beside Rick; she seemed protective, concerned that Martin not be fatigued by visitors. Rick took the hint and mostly directed his conversation to her. From time to time Martin would nod at something they said but then he would lay his head against the rim of the high-backed chair and doze. His exhaustion was palpable.

  As Rick was leaving, Susan walked him to the front door. He could see that she was weary. Martin’s appetite was poor, she said. He slept a great deal during the day but was restless at night. Once she had been woken in the night by a thump, and when she rose to check on him, found he had fallen out of bed and was sitting on the floor trying to meditate in the lotus position, his left leg twisted awkwardly. She had struggled to help him back into bed and he had grown angry and ordered her to leave the room. She had dark circles under her eyes.

  He asked Susan if she had managed to discover why Martin had returned so unexpectedly to Sydney. Yes, she said, he had sublet his house to another man who was supposed to take over his classes, but the man had been summoned home to Singapore on the death of his father. Martin had flown in for just a few days to settle the lease. She didn’t ask Rick why he had appeared at Martin’s door that Sunday morning when he believed Martin still to be in New Zealand. If he had not turned up when he did, Martin might not have survived the next twenty-four hours. Rick had been the agent of a small miracle and no-one wanted to know.

  On the second Saturday, Martin again dozed for much of Rick’s visit. But on the third Saturday he was more animated and ate a thin slice of Susan’s cake. His appetite had improved, she said, though not by much. Rick wanted to show him the pebble Sri Mata had given him, and ask Martin what he made of it, but something told him it was not the right time. They spoke of the birds in the garden, Martin in halting phrases. And this was to become a ritual, week by week, this sitting and observing the birds. A pair of gang-gang cockatoos might descend to feed noisily in the trees, or currawongs come scavenging on the lawn with their brazen strut and bright yellow eye. Occasionally they would hear a lyrebird – at least, they thought it was a lyrebird, but since it often mimicked the calls of other birds it was impossible to be sure.

  On those early visits, Susan would join them. One afternoon, when a magpie came pecking in the grass, she said, ‘Did you know that only the adult magpie is allowed to sing?’

  Rick had looked at her blankly.

  ‘I mean,’ she continued, ‘the young males are not permitted to sing in the company of the adults. They have to go away somewhere on their own and practise. If they don’t, their throats fail to develop in the way that they need to so that they can sing when they mature.’

  ‘Sounds like a lonely apprenticeship,’ he offered.

  ‘Well, if they can’t sing as adults, they can’t mate.’

  ‘At least they sing,’ he said, in one of those polite non-sequiturs she drew from him, ‘unlike the wattle-birds that squawk.’

  Martin had turned his head towards them and said, through chafed lips, ‘I like that squawk.’

  Susan had looked at Rick. ‘He would,’ she said. ‘Always the difficult cases, always the lame ducks …’

  She often spoke in this way, nervously, and he wished she would leave them alone. He felt that she didn’t trust him not to burden Martin with his own anxieties. ‘My brother has made a sacrifice of himself,’ she had said to him one afternoon in the hospital coffee-shop, and he sensed her determination that no-one would now sap Martin’s strength.

  He could not tell whether Martin was indeed recovering, or even what it was that he was recovering from. The inflammation around his heart had subsided and the pain in his chest was gone. But the fatigue remained and he seemed withdrawn. Wherever he was, thought Rick, he was where he needed to be, and he took a strange comfort in Martin’s silence. In Sydney Park they had talked so much, and at times so urgently, that it could not go on indefinitely, and in this weekly hour when they said very little to one another he was prepared to settle for a more subtle intimacy.

  At the end of the fourth week, Zoe expressed a desire to accompany him on his next visit to Martin. It took him by surprise. At first he was pleased, and then anxious that Martin might find her visit intrusive. She was a stranger to him, and though she had never expressed any hostility towards Martin, she remained sceptical – not that Rick had ever mentioned her teasing remarks.

  On the Saturday morning he was ill at ease and just a little over-anxious to please. Sure, they could have lunch at that restaurant in Leura and drop in on her friend Cassie. But really he didn’t want to do any of that, was impatient with the very idea of it. His visits to Martin were a ritual, and like any ritual should be unvaried and without interruption. On several occasions he had invited Zoe to come with him on Sunday mornings and meditate with Sri Mata and she had rolled her eyes, or said, ‘Give it away, Rick. That’s your thing, not mine,’ or words to that effect. Why now did she want to be part of this? Was she checking up on him?

  By the time they reached Katoomba he was on edge. He had endured a ridiculously expensive lunch, and Cassie’s husband had been boorish: hearty and effusive one minute, rude the next, full of an unfocused anger that men of a certain age tended to exude. When they arrived at Susan’s house they found her in the front garden, pruning the low branches of a clump of young ribbon gums, and she waved her shears at them and said she would be in soon to make tea. Rick led Zoe through the dark hallway to the sunroom, hoping Martin would be awake, and he was. He looked up as they entered and smiled.

  ‘My wife, Zoe,’ said Rick, sounding, he thought, pompous and unnecessarily formal.

  Zoe put out her hand to shake Martin’s and he studied it for a moment. Then he took it in both of his, and kissed it. It was a gesture so touching, so graceful and above all so natural that Rick felt his irritability melt away. It was not the practised kiss of male gallantry but a form of humble salute, and Zoe, he saw, had tears in her eyes. Her gaze locked onto Martin’s until he gestured for her to sit down, at which point, slightly fazed, she looked around for a chair and sat demurely opposite him.

  For the next hour Martin spoke with her as if he had never been ill, was not now convalescent, had no difficulty breathing and was receiving an old friend. They spoke of the hospital (Zoe had once worked there), of New Zealand, of the garden and of the birdlife of the mountains. Rick was reminded that his wife had been a social worker and that she knew how to speak to someone who was, or had been, unwell; she didn’t talk too much, didn’t ask too many questions, wasn’t afraid of long pauses.

  On the drive home they said almost nothing to one another. There was no need. But as they pulled up outside the house, Zoe turned to him. ‘Do you think Martin will recover?’

  ‘Well, the doctors say there is no reason why he shouldn’t.’

  ‘What will he do then?’

  ‘I haven’t asked him. Susan says he’s determined to return to Auckland. That’s what
his guru instructed him to do so that’s what he’ll do. For a monk, obedience is everything.’

  She smiled. ‘No chance of you ever becoming a monk, then.’

  ‘Never on the cards.’ He laughed, but felt a pang. It was a heroic life, of a kind, and he didn’t have the … the what? What did it take? He didn’t know, and the very fact of not knowing made it opaque to him. And the loneliness, he thought, must be acute, unless somehow you were able to live as the consort of an invisible lover, whatever that meant – though he had some apprehension of what it might mean, if only in the way of looking down the wrong end of a telescope at a speck on the far horizon.

  ‘Rick?’

  He realised that he was sitting, distracted, with his hand still on the ignition key. He removed it and leaned across to kiss his wife on the cheek. ‘I’m glad you came today,’ he said.

  On the sixth Saturday Susan met him at her front door in a state of agitation. Her pregnant daughter in Rockhampton had gone into premature labour, there were complications and she needed to fly north.

  His offer of before lay unspoken between them. ‘I can arrange for Martin to have a nurse,’ he said. ‘Live-in.’

  ‘Can you afford this?’ she asked bluntly, as if he might be some confidence man given to rash promises he couldn’t fulfil. But then, he reflected, she knew almost nothing about him.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. In the overall scheme of things it was not a significant amount of money, and she, Sri Mata, had entrusted him with Martin, so how could he not?

  ‘He’s bloody-minded. He’ll say he can look after himself.’

  But in the event he didn’t, which perhaps indicated how weak he still felt. He accepted the proposition with surprising detachment, as if it had not come from Rick but from someone else. And this pleased Rick: he was released from any position of patronage, or role of do-gooder. They were just pieces on a chessboard. Life was living them both and they were its servants.

  That night, on advice from Zoe, he rang a private nursing agency. Arrangements were made and a young man, Raoul Martinez, arrived at Susan’s house early the next morning. It was a Sunday, and on the Monday Rick took a day off and drove up to see that things were in order.

  Immediately he entered the house he felt more at ease, released from Susan’s anxious gate-keeping. Raoul was thickset, and Rick could see that he would have no trouble lifting Martin if he fell. Raoul too had shaved his head, and he and Martin looked like monks together. Rick remarked on this and Raoul laughed and said, ‘Not me, I’m married. And besides,’ he added, ‘I like my food. No fasting, señor. Every day a feast day.’ There was something fleshy and expansive about Raoul, but above all he was cheerful.

  Rick thought he ought to begin by making it clear that it was he and not Susan who was Raoul’s employer and that he would expect regular reports on Martin’s care.

  Raoul held his arms out wide and laughed. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘of course.’

  He had a Latin charm about him and was not anyone’s idea of a nurse. While Martin was sleeping he made Rick coffee and told him that his parents had emigrated from Chile when he was a child. As a young man he had trained as a paediatric nurse but the death of a ten-year-old girl had affected him badly; the parents had blamed him, had turned on him in their grief, and after that he had given it away. Now he worked on a casual basis for the agency and was taking private art classes. He had brought with him his paints and an easel, and had set them up in the sunroom, though not, he explained, with oils, since the fumes could be toxic. He said that his patient liked to watch him work; and that although Martin offered no comment, he appeared to be following every stroke of the brush with rapt attention.

  Rick was satisfied: Raoul was a gift.

  Each Saturday he drove up to the edge of the great escarpment, to the little town with its steep High Street, its grand old hotel, its famous lookout and its air of wintry desperation. Perched on a plateau a thousand metres above sea level, it looked out over the deep ravine of the Megalong Valley, and there was one day when a low mist filled the valley and the town looked as if it were floating on a cloud.

  In the past he had thought of Katoomba as gloomy but now he began to look forward to arriving at Susan’s cottage. He would drive up, wanting to talk to Martin about what was happening in his meditation but knowing he would restrain himself when he arrived. And perhaps because of this he had begun of late to talk instead to her, Sri Mata; had begun to conduct long internal dialogues with the diamond in his chest. And in some oblique way she answered him, so that he would come out of these silent raves having intuited the essence of what at that moment he needed to know.

  One day it occurred to him that Martin’s silence might have to do with forcing his acolyte into this very process of internalising, of communicating with the source. Or was this mere vanity, the idea that whatever Martin did might in any way be for his, Rick’s, benefit? The answer was irrelevant because the process was liberating. I have become like some kind of evangelical, he told himself, the kind that is forever talking to Jesus.

  This drive from the city soon became a time of recollection. Incidents would come to him that had lain buried in his unconscious for decades, and of these the most vivid was a moment of panic that had ambushed him as a boy of six. It was a school day and he had jumped off a train because it was about to take him beyond his home station. He had never been further along the line, and who knew where it led, and how would he return home? He had been daydreaming and had rushed to the door of his carriage, which in the old trains could be wrenched open, and had leaped from the moving train onto the last few metres of platform. Luckily, he had been in the last carriage and the train was not yet clear of the station. The stationmaster had seen him jump and ran to him while he sat there on the concrete surface, unhurt but for his right knee, badly grazed. And now, he reflected, he was on some other train, only this time he was staying put.

  It was during this period that something in him shifted and he began to feel as if he and Martin were leading the one life. If he had said as much, he knew it would sound facile since it was not he who was suffering, not he who spoke through strained lips, whose heart raced out of kilter, who still could not shower unaided. Often, said Raoul, Martin would stumble, as if his feet had little or no traction on the floor, no anchorage in gravity.

  As for Rick, he had never felt more grounded, and yet he could only register that this was how things were, that he was one half of Martin’s dilemma.

  Now and then in his meditation he would see that he was irrevocably bound to Martin by an invisible cable; it appeared in his mind’s eye as a long rope in the form of a double helix, and while he might go hours without thinking of Martin, that cable swayed between them, a vibration that animated both their bodies. He did not speak of this to anyone since it was too peculiar a state of being when spoken of, even as, in his everyday experience of it, it could not have been more mundane.

  On the Saturday before Susan was due to return, on impulse he took the pebble Sri Mata had given him out of the drawer in his desk and put it in his pocket. The time had come; Martin was visibly brighter and he would present it to him as a gift. Over the past ten weeks they had said very little to one another, nor felt the need. It was not a common symptom of pericarditis, even in the most dire cases, for the patient to lose speech, yet Martin had been bound into long periods of silence. But that was fine. Rick had felt not the least slight in this, indeed had intuited that silence was an essential condition of Martin’s recovery. It had suited them both just to sit and look out onto the garden, where he was able now to identify each tree, the black sassafras as well as the drooping she-oak, the cedar wattle alongside the brazen banksia.

  When he arrived he settled into his chair in the sunroom and took the pebble out of his pocket. He held it out to Martin, who looked at it, nodded silently, but didn’t reach for it.

  Rick leaned across, took hold of Martin’s right hand and very deliberately pressed the pebble into his
palm.

  Then, feeling pleased with himself, like a child who fancies he has a good story to tell, he explained how he came by it.

  ‘Why did she send this to you?’ Rick asked.

  Martin gave his crooked smile. ‘She didn’t,’ he said, with a grimace. ‘It’s for you. It’s for you, Rick. She’s your teacher, not mine. Any message from her is for you, not me.’

  ‘But she said it was for you.’

  ‘If I heard you correctly, she said it was for “your friend”. You made the assumption it was for me.’

  ‘It seemed obvious. At the time.’

  ‘Yes. But maybe there was a little more going on there.’

  ‘More?’

  Martin was silent, and looked out to the garden where a wind was whipping up the she-oaks so that they gave off their mysterious hum. Finally he said, ‘Maybe she wants you to think about who your “friend” is.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning not just me.’

  ‘Not just you?’

  ‘There are others.’

  Who were these others? Rick would have liked to ask but he didn’t. This, he knew, was for him to find out. First he would look after Martin, and then those others might present themselves. Would he recognise them when they did? Yes, he would. She would see to it.

  Martin was looking at him indulgently, like he was a favourite pupil but a slow learner. Then he held out his right hand with the pebble nestled in his palm, and it was clear that he wanted Rick to take the pebble from him.

  Just then Raoul appeared in the doorway. ‘I’ve made chilli,’ he said. ‘I make the best. Would you like to eat with us, Rick?’

  ‘Thanks, but better not.’ He would leave them to it. What an odd pair they were, the ascetic and the sensualist. And their third party, him, who was neither, just a fixer in the world, the very person that as a youth he had determined not to be.

  He rose from his chair, leaned down to Martin, took the pebble and slipped it into his pocket. They shook hands as they always did when he was about to leave. How dry Martin’s skin was, papery and taut, and often it felt hot, as if he were burning. Rick stifled an impulse to kiss the crown of his head, grey stubble that failed to conceal the livid suture that ran like a battle wound along the side of his skull.