by Thea Astley
He blinked away guilt brought back by dubious wall stains and puddles along the alleyways and focused on his partner in elopement. His conscience wouldn’t let him alone.
Something nagged.
Guilt.
Impulsively he rang Kathleen from a pay phone at an ufficio postale, ignoring the thought that it was now nearly midnight in Brisbane.
‘Mother,’ he said without preamble, ‘I’ve left Bosie.’
‘Where, dear?’ his mother asked. Her voice came through as strongly as if she were in the next phone booth.
‘In Venice.’
‘Darling,’ Kathleen said, ‘what a lovely place to leave her.’
Handing down the delicious Waterman into the gondola, that half version of a Melanesian war canoe, Brain was stabbed with déjà vu. Dad, he remembered. Mum. Two eccentrics he had regretted but delighted in as he matured. After his father’s death mother had flung herself head first into evening courses and floundered through a bachelor degree in economics. Mother in her middle years on a borrowed bicycle, cycling all the way down the old Sandgate Road to attend a Corpus Christi procession at his college, cycling in her moth-eaten undergraduate gown, even though no one bothered wearing them those days, a trencher cockahoop on her skull, bat wings flapping. It was his final year and he had tried pretending—oh shame! shame!—that he hadn’t seen her as she propped her bicycle against the football oval fence and came seeking him out, grinning her excuse me’s through the crowd and the roaringly sung Pange Lingua.
Mother! Oh Mother!
In guide-book Italian he asked the straw-boatered gondolier to take them up the canals to the railway station. There appeared to be some difficulty. The boatman kept shaking his head as Brain shouted ‘Il stazione’ over the noise of police launches and ferries. Not even waved money bills of impossibly large denomination were lubricant. The gondolier poled away, taking huge and elegant sweeps with his oar, glancing occasionally at Mrs Waterman, who was too amused by the whole business to do more than catch that admiring Italian eye. After twenty minutes of graceful movement up and down the major canals they found themselves back where they had started.
‘This is too much!’ Brain cried, angered, and producing thousands of lire. The gondolier daringly kissed Mrs Waterman’s fingertips, giving her ring finger the smallest of nips with his teeth, and refused to look at either of them again as he waited for the next mad tourist. In the end they were forced to take a water taxi.
Despite the spiritual dousing of the boatman who had tampered with spontaneity, there they are, entrained, racing towards Milan and points north of there. North to Zürich where the Zürichsee would mirror its indifference to their unadventurous adultery. Brain had been expecting a sexual renaissance. Perhaps he was in awe of his partner’s almost phlegmatic urbanity, despite the pneumatic attractions of her pastel flesh. A sense of trespass which might have sustained them failed to stimulate. Having left all their possessions to be lugged about or sent home by their abandoned partners, they were forced to spend too much of their time replenishing essentials. Exhausted and now irritably guiltless, they tucked into Sauerbraten and told each other how bored they had been in their former lives. Bored, bored, bored, Nina said, almost wolfing her tucker. Brain was appalled by her healthy appetite.
They made no inquiries as to the reaction of the tour party. They dismissed the anxiety—if there were—of their spouses and pressed on into Germany where they stayed for three days in a hotel near the cathedral in Augsburg. On the second morning as they left their hotel, Nina expressed a most urgent need for chocolate and they found themselves in an upstairs Kaffeehaus chockablock with huge German Hausfrauen, shelf-breasted like escritoires, demolishing mini chocolate mice and Dachshunds to muted Strauss. The air was trembling and breathing fur, perfume and the more subtle scent of overfeeding.
The waiter patronised their broken German and in perfect English pointed out errors of adjectival agreement and tense. At the next table an elderly sourpuss paused to absorb this half way through chomping, leaving a small nugget of mouse suspended by its candy tail from her gaping lips.
‘Joyboy’s mother,’ Nina whispered, stricken unexpectedly by the antithesis between postwar gluttony and postwar horror. She smiled up at the waiter. ‘Do you want me to explain? Do you remember “The Loved One”? The dolce vita is too ghastly.’ She began shaking with silver ripples of laughter and then a noisy choking. ‘Oh the death camps,’ she said tactlessly to Brain. ‘The ovens.’
Brain admonished through his own laughter.
Their hot chocolate was brought. Nina lowered her perfect profile to the cup and began sipping. Brain lit a cigarette and there were immediate cries of outrage from the table behind. The waiter returned from his on-guard position by the cash register and reprimanded him in excited German and then in English. Brain took one more drag on his cigarette before stubbing it out on his saucer, then he looked up and held the waiter’s eye. Kathleen could have handled this, he thought, and said conversationally, ‘Lots of smoke in Auschwitz. Why does one cigarette upset you?’
The waiter vanished and returned with the manager.
Residues of fifty-year-old resentments were all about them.
‘I must ask you to leave immediately,’ the manager said. He was a heavy man with fat-protected eyes of light blue.
Brain rose, holding out a hand to Nina. ‘Nazi,’ he suggested amiably. Somehow he didn’t seem to care about anything any more.
They went down the stairs clutching laughter, anger and rails—the feeblest props.
Mrs Waterman told him he had been brave but foolish.
That’s me, he thought, with the emphasis on foolish, and his fingers ran playful scales on the tender skin of her arm. He began humming as they walked to the Bahnhof, humming then singing softly under his breath, increasing the volume, a mobile busker, until at the station entrance, plena voce, he achieved a climax of farewell.
And the slow rain. The slow rain in Copenhagen, pitting sidewalks and window-sills, drowning hair and eyes in the slowest of tides, pocking the last snow in the parks.
Brain felt no urge to sing Tosti to parka-muffled Danes. He treacherously wondered if this haphazard union were part of the real thing. He wondered if she wondered as well, sitting on the edge of a lumpy bed in a second-rate hotel misnamed The Grand. They had sauntered through arcades, examined monuments and explored parks where the statues still wore neat singlets of snow. Where was the bloody rapture? Could he be, he wanted to know, self-embroiled in emotional swindle? He was startled to hear himself tell this near stranger-carnal partner that he ached to get back to the discomfort, the essential crudity of the homeland. The heat. The laissez-faire. Even, he added, allowing his lips to curl deprecatingly, the cockroaches. He especially missed them.
She took the wind out of his sails! What a dame! ‘I miss them too.’ Sentimentally rolling her lovely eyes. ‘And I especially miss our own slack, mendacious brand of government. Easy come, easy take.’
The train run north had been more of a via crucis than a sentimental journey. They were pestered by another tourist who, recognising their accents, claimed kinship. The skinny lad announced that more than anything at all he wanted a lamb bloody chop. It seemed to sum up everything. Although Brain informed him that there were plenty where he was at present, the horrible traveller kept saying, ‘Not like ours, mate. Not like ours.’ Nina had whispered disloyally, ‘Me too. I understand. I’m on his side. The short-loin side.’ The youth, suspecting mockery, looked hard at them for the first time in an hour and translated their smiles. ‘And sod you, too,’ he said, moving away.
‘Does that,’ Brain asked, nodding after the denim back, ‘still make you eager to return? Does it?’
‘Of course,’ she said.
The ferry crossing was delayed because of fog so thick nothing of the outer world was visible, a world choked with the cries of ships’ bells and the mournful breves of sirens. During that rolling trip Nina suddenly clasped his han
d saying, ‘I have no wish to be difficult, my dear, but I feel I have reached the end. Terminus. I must get away, get back, as quickly as possible.’ Then she closed her eyes and slept.
It was late when they had reached Copenhagen. Icy winds blew them momentarily apart as they came out of the station and headed across the square to the hotel. Mrs Waterman chose it because it was rumoured James Joyce had once stayed there. In the foyer a bellhop, determined on a tip, pressed so closely behind her as they waited to register she could hardly move. Baby fingers tangled with hers on the bag handle. She looked down and was surprised by the cold, pert determination of the fuzzless face. Carefully, meticulously, she raised each of the clutching fingers one after another, pressing them away, but as one finger was removed another would return with the persistence of an anemone. ‘Go away, little boy!’ she hissed. ‘Away.’
The desk clerk raised his eyebrows.
Once in their room Brain offered the mildest of rebukes. ‘That wasn’t wise, dear.’
It was a ghastly room stinking of decay—old bodies, old clothing, damp towels. He began listing the mouldering objects.
‘Humid prose.’ Nina added.
‘Whose what? What humid prose?’
‘Joyce’s for God’s sake! Perhaps this was the very room.’
‘What very room?’
‘The room where Joyce … oh God, Brain, you’re determined to madden. Nora Barnacle. Perhaps even … Oh never mind. I get the feeling they haven’t touched a thing in here for years. National treasure at second-hand.’
He could not honestly tell her that she was his. He pulled off his shoes and socks and inspected his bare toes. The central heating was excessive. The window latches were stuck on decades of paint. There was a detumescent protestant stuffiness about the entire Scandinavian peninsula, despite affirmations of liberal sexual manners. Those too were overlaid with Lutheran censure.
Was he failing with her already?
There had been no discussion of future strategy. Former partners had been obliterated in unemotional whiteout, the word ‘never’ typed in. He had to force the next question, the salient word.
‘Together? Us? You want to go back together?’
She wasn’t stupid. She could assess. She crossed to the window and looked down at the sleet-filled landscape and the misty buildings. Below on the sidewalk a group of walkers illuminated by the hotel entrance were skidding as they hurried against increasing snowfall. One of them fell flat on his back. She could interpret the ‘O’ of pain through the double glazing.
‘For the moment, I suppose.’ She turned and looked at him dubiously. ‘There are other ways of partnering besides the bed.’
‘What?’
‘A business, perhaps. There must be something. Gallery? Craft shop? Cafe? A small but exquisite restaurant?’
The inner howling at memory of past failed business ventures surged up, escaped in a lewd moan in that dank room. He would have to do something, he supposed, but had not thought beyond the moment of freedom. If it were that.
She had moved away from the window and was busy brushing her hair, dragging the bristles through shining lengths as slowly as summer. Stroke after stroke.
Was she serious?
Sleepless on that lumpy bed in Copenhagen, Brain remembering through the sleet-filled night.
Two years ago another of his more exotic failures, for which he had, without a doubt, a kind of genius. Over the years there had been sharp exchanges with his brother-in-law, the minister for transports. Own up! He couldn’t stand Len, couldn’t bear his lamp-tanned ego-ridden confidence, the spanking way he hefted his cheapskate schemes through the barriers of local councils to make another financial killing.
Jealousy? Sure. Ferocious unabating envy.
Brain nosed around.
No wonder Sham and her husband were rolling in the stuff. The Mercedes and the Porsche were hardly products of a backbencher’s salary.
He nosed around.
He kept alert at parties.
He kept his ears open. Their antennae sensitively recorded the slightest frisson of shonky dealing. The wealth, he noted, had followed swiftly on electoral success. He was engaged by rumours of land deals up and down the coast and vast profits made from Japanese investors. Between his own misdirected concerns Brain conceived an ironic revenge whose jokiness might yet be turned to profit.
On a shaggy block of land on the highway north of Reeftown, a block he had purchased fifteen years before, he had begun erecting a three-storey … what? Humanoid? Pioneer figure? Tourist goggle-butt? The land was a poor few unserviced acres on the hillside above the sea, picked up cheap before the boom. Except when the bill for rates arrived each year, he had almost forgotten he owned it.
Come down in the world, Brain was working as evening bar manager at one of the glitzier resorts, a grocery-money job that gave him the days free. Bosie spent her mornings at the local golf club trying to achieve a hole in one. Connections who owed him a favour at a plastic and fibreglass mouldings factory became involved in his project, making mysterious sections without ever being aware of the total concept.
No one twigged.
Over three months of near-furtive activity, he trucked up huge anonymous pieces of bildakit and by the time legs, belly and chest were assembled, the monstrous torso was visible above the uncleared scrub on the fence line. Another week and he would be ready to lug the questing head up on ropes to drop onto its swivel axle so that Len’s slack, tanned features could inspect the Coral Sea. North, south, north, south, to the whim of the trades, in the harbour, in the islands, he hummed, remembering his father and the singing in the Ascot evenings. His first political coup! Already busloads of tourists heading for the Port had noticed with excitement this mammoth artifact skulking behind acacia, and visitors in rented cars had been stopping to take photographs.
Wisely he slung a six-foot chain-wire fence across the frontage of his block and extended it partly up each side. He put a padlock on the swing gates. At the end of that week Len’s conniving features were lowered into place by ropes and pulleys in early tropic darkness. Brain was so enraptured with the result he sat below his towering god savouring the proxy ecstasies of a pagan worshipper.
Within two days the council intervened.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ the shire engineer asked. ‘Did you apply for a permit? Anyway, what in God’s name is it?’
Brain smiled modestly. He was choked with laughter. ‘It’s the Big Developer,’ he said slyly. ‘Related to the Big Cow, Prawn, Pineapple, Banana. It’s a work of art. I don’t have to apply for a development permit for a sculpture.’
The two of them stood in the shadow of thirty feet of moulded fibreglass and poured concrete, dodging the slab-like heat and humidity of mid-day. There was Len—hi, Len!—sporting natty tropical safari suit painted in semigloss acrylic, gold chain and white developer shoes. His legs, Brain pointed out to the unliterary shire engineer, bestrode the world like a Colossus. The tanned rubbery features and neurotic eyes moved on their swivel skull to the smallest breeze, gazing appetently up and down the coastline, seeking new empires.
‘Smashing, isn’t it!’ Brain said. ‘Unfortunately I’ve run out of money. I had intended a restaurant.’
‘Restaurant?’
‘Sure. Stairs up each leg, lavatories at the flies—suitable, hey?—dining room at the paunch and a revolving lookout in the skull. Say cocktail bar, huh, where all the brain damage occurs. Nothing like a metaphor. It’s a nice idea, isn’t it?’
‘I think you’re bloody mad,’ the shire engineer said. ‘Get it down.’
‘Hey, wait a minute,’ Brain protested. ‘It’s a statue. It’s not a dwelling. It’s not a restaurant. Not yet. There’s nothing in the by-laws about erecting a statue. It’s beautification of my land, mate.’
Rage transmuted the shire engineer’s face into a clone of the one swivelling above them. Congested fury made him goggle. For a minute Brain thought he w
as speaking faster than sound.
‘You’ll hear more about this. There’ll be a council ’dozer up as soon as I can organise one. That’s if you don’t get busy yourself. The thing’s caused traffic snarls, near accidents. Just look down there now. Can’t you see what it’s doing?’ There were indeed five cars parked below on the highway with excited families clambering up the road margin. ‘It’s a bloody public hazard.’
He stumped off down the slope to his car, now wedged between a bus and a truck. Japanese cameras clicked crazily as he approached.
Brain smiled. Already reporters had been up to take shots and run stories in the local press. He liked to think of Shamrock’s and Len’s outrage when the Brisbane papers took it up. May they choke on their croissants! he hoped. He could hear the cough-splutter of tortured windpipes. It was a good likeness. Len could hardly fail to recognise his horrible self.
Brain grew high on wild sensations of pride. Flair, that’s what it was. Flair.
His tragedy was a multiplicity of small talents.
‘Hey!’ Chaps said that week, on one of his brief visits home for money. ‘Some kook has built a bloody great statue thing on the Cook Highway.’
‘What of?’ Bosie was waggling her finger-nails to dry them. She appeared to be clawing air.
‘Well, it’s a guy in a snappy safari suit. Looks like Uncle Len, actually.’
‘Len?’
‘Yeah. Got those bloodshot eyes. Shifty. You know how the Unk looks when you ask him anything. Guess it’s a kind of libel. Doesn’t look like a tribute.’
Attempting indifference his father asked carelessly, ‘Did you go right up?’