With the children asleep, at least for now, his mind was free to wander and he wasn’t sure it should. Rightly or wrongly, he thought of taming it with an update from Betga, who was apparently camped out in the reception anteroom of the Intensive Care Unit housing Malcolm Torrent.
‘Hey Betga, any news?’
‘Not yet,’ said Betga quietly. ‘I’m earning my bona fides with the nurse in charge. It takes time. She’s on a call now anyway. What are you up to?’
‘Eleanor’s had to go to parent–teacher night and I’m at our house minding our sleeping kids, wondering what’s going to happen to Mr Torrent, to my job, to my life. Eleanor’s said she wants me back. I’m looking at our furniture, remembering when we bought it, missing Jessica, missing Eleanor, the one I married, wondering if I move back in will she be the Eleanor who used to greet me with a kiss and an almighty hug or will it be the one who prefers to watch The Bachelor. And I’m missing Jessica. Did I mention that? Betga I’m tearing my hair out. I don’t know what to do.’
‘About what?’
‘About Jessica and Eleanor. Have you been listening?’
‘Yes, I have. Here’s my advice: enjoy the moment. Do nothing!’
‘Do nothing?’
‘Look, Maserov, whichever option you choose, there will be times in your life, and knowing you, many, when you will regret the choice and feel guilty you made it. Yes, of course you will. We’re all of us only human, especially you. You’re nothing but human.’
‘What a talent you have for making an innocuous comment with the remote possibility of a slightly positive interpretation sound unbelievably negative and belittling.’
‘Yes, I really should be in management. Do nothing for as long as you can. Enjoy the sweet nectar of possibility before you make a choice and fuck everything up.’
‘That’s really your advice?’
‘Yes, why does that surprise you? It’s because you keep looking for safety, by whatever name, in every corner of your brief and compromised existence. How many times do I have to remind you, dear Maserov, the very best you can do these days is to try to buy a little time before your worst fear becomes your neighbour, after which it becomes your overcoat, then your shirt, then your skin. If you really want to buy some time, learn how to write the algorithms that are taking every other bastard’s livelihood. But even that will be short-lived. There will eventually be an algorithm to write the algorithms sure as bribery follows day. You can occupy yourself, distract yourself trying to wake people up, prodding them into recognition of their own learned helplessness. But there’s no money in this and a person like you will be crushed to see just how fast your audience swipes left.’
‘Thanks, Betga. I feel much of my anxiety transforming into a kind of numb resignation with still just enough in reserve to resemble a living creature, albeit an immunosuppressed one, an ideal host for a homeless virus or two, a renovator’s dream for a couple of nucleic acid molecules in protein coats hoping to settle down and start a family.’
‘Will you stop worrying? At least you’re not bored. Look, whatever you do, you’ll always have me.’
‘Betga, you never told me what Hamilton did to you.’ There was an uncharacteristic silence.
‘Well, that’s another story . . . which I’m happy to tell you . . . Oh, got to go now! She’s off the phone. Wish me luck. I’m going to buy us all a big chunk of time. This could be the start of a brand new chapter in your life . . . and mine. Got to go.’
‘Betga? Betga?’
Betga had returned the phone to his pocket but whether deliberately or not, he hadn’t ended the call. So Maserov did.
He went for a walk around his old house. It was quiet. When he reached the kitchen he decided to pour himself a drink, Scotch on ice. Did he want to be a partner at Freely Savage? He was a guy who tried to hang on. Partnership wasn’t compatible with his self-image. Could he change his self-image? He tried calling Jessica to tell her what had happened to Malcolm Torrent. Or was it more important to tell her where he was? The call went through to voicemail, which was perhaps just as well since he couldn’t talk loudly for fear of waking the children. What did Eleanor drink now? Was there still the Scotch he liked or had she given it to the drama teacher? No, there was some. But it was a brand new, unopened bottle. Was that an enticement to come home or just a reflection of guilt? He was getting himself some ice when he was startled by his elder son.
‘Beanie! What are you doing in the kitchen?’
‘What are you doing in the kitchen?’ his son asked. His father hadn’t lived there in a while. It was a legitimate question for a five-year-old.
XI
Betga had been in the Intensive Care Unit anteroom for almost an hour, alternately pacing and drinking cups of water from the water cooler adjacent to the hand sanitiser. And when he wasn’t doing this he was reading the bible. There was a large, mute television suspended from the ceiling, showing what was either a news magazine show devoted to the entertainment industry or else the network’s late news program. Betga couldn’t tell and hadn’t really paid the television much attention. Instead, he’d been hoping to impress the nurse with his apparent religiosity, studying the bible he’d brought along. But this was hard given she had barely looked at him for the previous forty-six minutes.
‘Are you a religious person?’ Betga suddenly asked Nurse Penberthy outside Malcolm Torrent’s room. She looked up as though startled anyone was there.
‘What?’
‘Are you a religious person?’
‘No, used to be . . . when I first started, but it’s not really possible to remain religious after you’ve worked here for years.’
‘Is it confronting mortality day after day, does it test your faith to breaking point?’
‘Sure, it’s that and all the rest of it.’
‘“All the rest of it”? The physical toll of the work?’
‘Yes, the daily reminder of suffering and mortality, the physical toll, the fact that you can come into this career so full of enthusiasm, so well educated and trained and be so poorly treated as a matter of course.’
‘By management?’
‘By management, they who periodically line us up against the wall for rounds of jobs cuts, wave after wave of job cuts, then make those who survive do the work of all the people they’ve just fired. Then there’s being treated like dirt by the doctors and by the family and friends of the patients who don’t make it and allow their grief to morph into anger. There’s not a nurse here who hasn’t been abused in some way, verbally and physically assaulted, some of them even sexually.’
‘Jesus! I’m so sorry to hear that,’ said Betga. ‘I really . . . am.’ He glanced up at the television screen, momentarily distracted.
‘Oh, look, it’s that actress, Helena Bagshaw,’ said Nurse Penberthy, ‘the one who was sexually assaulted. She’s got herself lawyered up. Good for you, honey!’ On the screen, standing beside the mute young actress, was her new lawyer, taking questions from the press, Mike Hamilton of Freely Savage Carter Blanche.
‘You know,’ began Betga, looking away from the screen, ‘all the nurses I’ve met tell me they love what they do. They speak of the tremendous job satisfaction they get from nursing. I can’t help but admire them. And,’ he added cheekily, ‘I’ve met a lot of nurses in my time.’
‘Why, are you chronically ill?’
The woman was not easily charmed. She was too exhausted, not just by the day, but by the sum of all the suffering it had been her task to try to mitigate and by the inappreciation with which that endeavour had so often been met.
‘No, I was just trying to be funny.’
‘Yeah, you’re funny, mister,’ she said, unimpressed.
‘Betga, A.A. Betga.’
‘Look, Mr Betga, I can’t let you in to see your friend till tomorrow, no matter how much you sympathise with the plight of working nurses.’
‘I empathise, it’s better than sympathy,’ said Betga.
‘
And I’m not giving you my phone number so you can put your bible away.’
‘Nurse, that was the furthest thing from my mind.’
‘Mister, I’m too busy and too tired for your bullshit. You want to know how things really are for people around here? This will probably sound crazy to you but . . . more than half the nurses here, pretty much everyone employed in the hospital, certainly everyone below doctor, most of them are absolutely terrified of losing a job they absolutely hate. Does that sound crazy to you?’
‘No, that doesn’t sound crazy to me at all.’ He looked up at the television screen. Hamilton was still there, talking.
‘If I might speak frankly, with your experience and your postgraduate training as an ICU nurse, you could really earn a packet working directly, I mean privately, for the patient, one patient, a grateful patient, say, a high net worth patient. I’m talking really high net worth, high enough to build his own hospital. You could recruit colleagues to share the shifts, take a cut as a finder’s fee and, well, you could have a much improved life, should the circumstances arise. You just need to be on the lookout for the right opportunity. Granted, the kind of opportunity I’m talking about doesn’t come every day, but if ever one does come, you wouldn’t want to miss it, Nurse Penberthy. Would you?’
She looked at him and, for the first time, paused to consider what he’d said. Then, abruptly, she turned her attention back to what she was doing. ‘I need to check on my patient,’ she told him.
Betga wondered if he’d just played his last card. He’d gone all-in and was looking to fold.
It was late and he was tired. It was not a good time to be tired.
Just then Nurse Penberthy came out of Malcolm Torrent’s room newly animated. She closed the sliding door and started walking away from both the room and Betga at speed.
‘What’s wrong?’ Betga called to her.
‘You can’t go in. I need to get the ICU registrar.’
‘Why?’
‘He’s woken up.’
XII
Eleanor still hadn’t returned home. Beanie couldn’t sleep and negotiations had led him back to bed in return for some patting and a ‘pretend’ story, by which Beanie meant an impromptu story created live by the storyteller as opposed to one read from a book. It could be told in total darkness which promoted sleep but it also required greater effort than mere narration from his father. That was the deal. Beanie was lying on his side in the dark while his father patted him though his blanket.
‘What about the story?’
‘Okay, once there was a little boy who had a bear and —’
‘No, not that one, the one about the jester, the king’s court jester.’
Maserov’s phone lit up. It was a text from Jessica that read, ‘That’s awful about Mr Torrent! Can you talk now?’
‘Not really,’ Maserov texted back. He didn’t want his son to see the text but he wasn’t quite sure why.
‘I don’t know one about a king and a jester.’
‘Yes, you do. The king was going to get rid of the jester but the jester said if he was given a year he would be able to make the king’s horse talk. Remember?’
‘Able to make the king’s horse talk?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Talk later?’ came another text from Jessica.
‘Yes. Will talk later,’ Maserov texted back as fast as he could. He tried to imagine how she would feel on reading his reply and winced at the apparent lack of priority he was according her but he really wasn’t sure he was going to be able to call her later. Nothing at all was within his control as far as he could see. He couldn’t remember the last time anything was. He wasn’t sure where he would be sleeping that night. He wasn’t sure where he wanted to be sleeping that night.
‘Oh yeah, that one. Once upon a time,’ Maserov began in a quiet soothing voice, ‘in the thirteenth century in a far-off land now called Turkey there lived a jester whose job it was to entertain the king. He’d gone to court jester school years earlier to learn how to be the best court jester he could be. He never wanted to be a partner and certainly not the partner responsible for all the Torrent Industries files. All he ever wanted was to be safe, a safe jester.’
Beanie was breathing heavily now in a rhythmic pattern that suggested he was close to sleep. He crept out of his son’s room as quietly as he could. Soon Eleanor would be home. Soon he would have to call Jessica or be ready to explain why he hadn’t. Which was it going to be? He didn’t know. Was that Eleanor’s car?
Now Maserov’s phone was ringing. It was Betga. But when Maserov answered there was no reply, as though Betga couldn’t hear him or simply wasn’t listening, and Maserov quickly surmised that Betga must have called him by mistake, a pocket-dial, the world’s fastest growing form of interpersonal non-communication. Maserov was about to hang up when he realised he could hear Betga talking to what must have been Malcolm Torrent’s nurse.
‘Can I tempt you, perhaps . . .?’
‘What do you have in mind?’ she asked. Maserov heard a loud but muffled whooshing sound as though rapid excited movement was taking place through material of some kind.
‘Oh, Jila mints! Thank you!’ came the woman’s voice, genuinely delighted.
It sounded as though Betga had poured at least two mints into the palm of the woman’s hand. Then nothing but breathing, Betga’s breathing, footsteps on a linoleum floor and the sound of a door squeaking, just slightly. The breathing got louder. Then Maserov heard Betga’s voice, a muffled whisper, but the words were clear and unambiguous.
‘Maserov? We’re going in!’
acknowledgements
For their help in various ways (sometimes unknown to them) during the gestation of this book the author wishes to express his gratitude to: Simone Abel, Jin Auh, Jane Banting, Peter Bartholomew, Tracy Bohan, Sarah Chalfant, Nikki Christer, Françoise Delivet, Danny Dexter, Maggie Doyle, Tamara Eichel, Emma Felman, Rick Goldberg, Liv Perlman Handfield, Toby Handfield, Johannes Jakob, Dorothy Kovacs, Bob Lamb, Sharon Lewin, Evi Meisa, Danny Mahendra, Niki Maartens, Brendan Miller, Robert Milstein, Gil Orski, Dan Pearce, Donna Pelka, Alexander Perlman, Janine Perlman, Nicholas Perlman, Rodrigo Pintos-Lopez, Adam Pozniak, Gabriel Pozniak, Gideon Pozniak, Micah Pozniak, Samara Prosser, Anne Sarzin, Lisa Sarzin, Zara Sarzin, Alan Schauder, Rachael Schauder, Suzie Sharp, Gabrielle Williams and Andrew Wylie.
Harry Perlman deserves to be singled out for the critical attention he lavished on the many incarnations of this book over the many years of its creation. For not the first time, his close reading and thoughtful advice proved invaluable and cannot be repaid in words alone.
BY ELLIOT PERLMAN
Three Dollars
The Reasons I Won’t Be Coming
Seven Types of Ambiguity
The Street Sweeper
Maybe the Horse Will Talk
(For Children)
The Adventures of Catvinkle
Praise for Elliot Perlman
THE STREET SWEEPER
‘Excellent . . . harrowing, humane and brilliant.’
The Times
‘A wonderfully rich, engaging and multilayered story . . . [from] an author of rare erudition and compassion.’
Washington Post
‘This epic about racial persecution employs similar techniques [to Seven Types of Ambiguity] but scales up the ambition . . . The interleaved sequences set in Nazi Germany and Fifties America are so searingly potent . . . As he depicts both the kindnesses and the unspeakable cruelties of the concentration camps, Perlman fleshes out his research with a moral and imaginative force that feels revelatory . . . It demonstrates how history and fiction can converge to tell stories that cry out to be remembered.’
The Telegraph
‘An expertly told novel of life in immigrant America – and of the terrible events left behind in the old country . . . Perlman’s long tale, spanning decades, is suspenseful and perfectly told in many voices, without a false note. It deals with big issues of memory, r
ace, human fallibilities and the will to survive against the odds.’
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
‘Perlman deftly navigates . . . complicated waters, moving back and forth in time . . . In so doing, he brilliantly makes personal both the Holocaust and the civil rights movement, and crafts a moving and literate page-turner.’
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
‘The Street Sweeper, Elliot Perlman’s monumental and, at times, mesmerizing novel, is a meditation of memory – and its relationship to history . . . Perlman burnishes his reputation as a masterful storyteller who captures the cadences of consciousness and conversation and the varieties and vagaries of cruelty, courage and compassion . . . You will, in all likelihood, find it unforgettable.’
Jerusalem Post
‘A big, bold international work with a piercing moral sense . . . striking and enlightening . . . The novel illuminates the small acts of individual kindness, memory and compassion which must stand against the human capacity for cruelty and inhumanity.’
Prospect
‘Acclaimed Australian writer Perlman is a master at meshing characters’ streams of consciousness with social tsunamis of hate and violence. In his intensely detailed world-within-worlds third novel, this discerning and unflinching investigator of moral dilemmas great and small takes on the monstrous horrors of racism in America and the Holocaust . . . Perlman’s compulsively readable wrestle-with-evil saga is intimate and monumental, wrenching and cathartic.’
Booklist
‘In the best kind of books, there is always that moment when the words on the page swallow the world outside – subway stations fly by, errands go un-run, rational bedtimes are abandoned – and the only goal is to gobble up the next paragraph, and the next, and the next . . . [The Street Sweeper is] a towering achievement: a strikingly modern literary novel that brings the ugliest moments of 20th-century history to life, and finds real beauty there.’
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