“Just one Abo.”
“They’ll have been grub-hunting likely, the others I mean. He’s never been the same since they made that film about him. Tries it on all the tourists. Now let’s have a gander at your doolies mate. You’re in luck. I’m the vet, see? What about your chum?”
“Alone.”
“Oh my word. You been in there by yourself? You could go round and round in there you know, just round and round. Now careful, easy does it, can you lift up? Let me get my arm under and then pull your pants down. Oh my word as we say in Aussieland. If you was a bullcalf I’d say someone hadn’t done a neat job. Oh dear. We’ll put ’em in a sling. Of course in my line of business I’m generally moving in the other direction if you follow me.”
“Car. Hat.”
“All in good time. Let’s hope Harry Bummer doesn’t find it first, the ungrateful sod. After all the education he’s had. Keep ’em wide apart. I expect after all they’ll find he hasn’t spoilt your chances, ruined the family jewels, clumsy it was. I’ve often looked at a bullock and wondered what he’d say to me if he could. What’s this in your pocket? Oh, a preacher are you? No wonder old Harry—Now you lie still. Try to brace yourself with your hands. It’ll jolt a bit but we can’t help that and the hospital isn’t far, not really. Didn’t you know? You were nearly in the suburbs. You didn’t think you were really in the outback did you?”
He started the engine and moved the Land Rover. Very soon Matty lost consciousness again. The vet, looking back at him and seeing that he had passed out, put his foot down and bumped and slewed through the sandy soil and on to the side road. As he went he talked to himself.
“Got to tell the police I suppose. More bleeding trouble. Not that they’ll catch old Harry. He’ll have an alibi with a dozen of them. This poor Pom could never tell them apart.”
Chapter Five
Matty came to in hospital. His legs were strung up and he had no pain. There was pain later on but nothing his stubborn soul could not cope with. Harry Bummer—if it had been he—never found the car, which was brought in for Matty with his spare shirt, pants and third sock. His wooden Bible lay on the night table by the bed and he went on learning his portions from it. He had a period of fever when he mouthed inarticulately, but when his temperature was normal he fell silent again. He was calm, too. The nurses who attended to him so intimately found his calmness unnatural. He lay, they said, like a log and no matter how sordid the necessity he submitted to it with a still face and said nothing. The ward sister at one point gave him an aerosol to keep his privates cool, explaining delicately why it was touch and go with some vessels, but he never used it. At last his legs were cut down and he was allowed to sit out, be wheeled out, to limp out with sticks and finally to walk. His face had acquired an immobility in hospital on which the disfigurements seemed painted. From long stillness his movements had become more deliberate. He no longer had a limp, but he did walk with his legs kept slightly apart as if he were a freed prisoner whose body had not yet rid itself of the memory of chains. He was shown photographs of various Abos, but after a dozen, he spoke the great Caucasian sentence.
“They all look the same to me.”
It was the longest sentence he had spoken for years.
His adventure was publicized and a collection taken up so that he had some money. People thought he was a preacher. Yet those who got in touch with him were baffled by a man of so few words, so awful and grave a face yet who did not seem to have opinions or a purpose. Yet still inside him the question pressed, altering now and becoming more urgent. It had been who am I, then become what am I; and now through the force of his crucifarce or crucifiction by the black man leaping on him out of the sky it changed again and was a burning question.
What am I for?
So he moved round the curious tropical city. Where he walked now, clad in black and with a face that might have been cut out of particoloured wood, the old men sitting on the iron seats under the orange trees fell silent until he had passed towards the other end of the park.
Convalescing, Matty wandered round and round. He sampled the few chapels and those who moved towards him to ask him to take off his hat, came close, saw what they saw and went away again. When he could walk as far as he liked he would go and watch the Abos in their lean-tos and shacks round the edge of the city. Most of the time their actions were only too easily to be understood; but now and then they would do something, no more than a gesture, it may be, that seemed to interest Matty profoundly, though he could not tell why. Once or twice it was a whole mime that absorbed him—a game perhaps with a few sticks, or the throwing of pebbles with marks on them, then the absorbed contemplation of the result—the breathing, the blowing, the constant blowing—
The second time he saw an Abo throw the pebbles, Matty hurried back to the room he had been found in the Temperance Hotel. He went straight through into the yard and picked up three pebbles and held them—
Then stopped.
Matty stood for half-an-hour, without moving.
Then he laid the pebbles down again. He went to his room, took out his Bible and consulted it. Then he went to the State House but could not get in. Next morning he tried again. He got no further than the polished wooden information desk where he was received courteously but got no understanding. So he went away, bought matchboxes and then was to be seen, day after day, arranging them before the door of the State House, higher and higher. Sometimes he would get them more than a foot high, but they always fell down again. He gathered groups for the first time in his life, children and layabouts and sometimes officials who stopped on their way in or out. Then the police moved him away from the door out on to the lawns and flowerbeds; and there, perhaps because he had moved away from officialdom, people and children laughed at him louder. He would kneel and build his tower out of matchboxes; and sometimes, now, he would blow at them like an Abo blowing on the pebbles and they would all fall down. This made people laugh and that made children laugh; and now and then a child would dart forward while the tower was abuilding and blow it down and everyone would laugh and sometimes a naughty boy would dart forward and kick it over and people would laugh but also cry out and object in a friendly manner since they were on Matty’s side and hoped one day he would manage to get all the matchboxes balanced one on the other since that seemed to be what he wanted. So if a naughty, energetic boy—but they were all naughty, energetic boys and quite capable of saying “Go up Baldhead!” except that they did not know what was under the hat and there are no bears in the Northern Territory—kicked, struck, spat, jumped and knocked the matchboxes over, all the grown-ups would cry out, laughing, shocked, nice women out to do the shopping, and pensioners, cry out—“Oh no! The little bastard!”
Then the man in black would move back on his knees and sit on his upturned heels and he would look round slowly, round under the brim of his black hat sweeping round at the laughing people; and because his face like particoloured wood was inscrutable and solemn, they would fall silent, one by one on the, by now, watered grass.
After seven days Matty added to his game. He bought a clay pot and gathered twigs; and this time when everyone started laughing at his matchboxes, Matty put the twigs together with the pot on top and tried to light them with the matches but could not. Crouched down in black by his twigs and pot and matchboxes he looked silly and a naughty boy kicked his pot over and all the grown-ups cried out “Oh no! You little sod! That’s reely naughty! You might have broke it!”
Then, as Matty gathered his matchboxes and twigs and pot together, everyone drifted away. Matty went away too, watched absently by a park-keeper.
The next day, Matty had moved out to where the twigs would not be damp from the water that the automatic jets sprinkled on the grass lawns by the State House. He found a kerb near the central parking lots, a kind of nonplace with rank grass and seeding flowers, rank under the vertical sun. Here it took him a little longer to gather a group. In fact he was an hour at his building and mi
ght have got his matchboxes all vertically arranged the way any game of patience will come out at last given enough time but there was a little wind and he could never get more than eight or nine on top of the other before they fell over. However, at last the children came and stopped and then the adults and he got his attention and his laughter and a naughty boy and “Oh no, the wicked little sod!” So then he was able to lay his twigs and put the pot on top and strike a match and light the twigs and he got more laughter and then applause as if he was a clown who had suddenly done something clever; and through the laughter and the applause you could hear the crackling of the twigs under the pot and the twigs blazed and grass blazed and the flower seeds went bang, bang, bang and a great flame licked across the wasteland and there were shrieks and screams and people beating each other out and the children and people scattering and the screech of brakes as they ran into the road and the crash as cars shunted each other and cries and curses.
“You know,” said the secretary, “you mustn’t do it.”
The secretary had a thatch of silver hair that was as carefully arranged, as carefully wrought as a silver vessel. He had the same accent, Matty could hear, as old Mr Pedigree had had all those years ago. He spoke mildly.
“Will you promise me not to do it again?”
Matty said nothing. The secretary leafed through some papers.
“Mrs Robora, Mrs Bowery, Mrs Cruden, Miss Borrowdale, Mr Levinsky, Mr Wyman, Mr Mendoza, Mr Buonarotti—an artist do you think?—You see when you singe as many people as that—and they are very, very angry—oh no! You really must not do it again!”
He put the paper down, laid a silver pencil on it and looked across at Matty.
“You’re wrong, you know. I believe your sort of person always has been. No, I don’t mean in the, the content of the message. We know the state of things, the dangers, the folly of taking a meteorological gamble; but we are elected you see. No. You are wrong in supposing that people can’t read your message, translate your language. Of course we can. The irony is—the irony always was—that predictions of calamity have always been understood by the informed, the educated. They have not been understood by the very people who suffer most from them—the humble and meek—in fact, the ignorant who are helpless. Do you see? All Pharaoh’s army—and earlier than that the firstborn of all those ignorant fellahin—”
He got up and went to the window. He stood looking out of it, his hands clasped behind his back.
“The whirlwind won’t fall on government. Trust me. Neither will the bomb.”
Still Matty said nothing.
“What part of England do you come from? The south, surely. London? I think you would be wise to return to your own country. I can understand that you won’t stop what you are doing. They never do. Yes. You had better go back. After all—” and he swung round suddenly—“that place needs your language more than this one.”
“I want to go back.”
The secretary sank easily into his chair.
“I’m so pleased! You are not really—You know, we felt what with that most unfortunate episode with the native, the Aborigine—did you know they insist on being called Aboriginals as if they were adjectives?—but we did feel that perhaps we owed you something—”
He leaned forward over his clasped hands.
“—And before we part—tell me. Do you have some kind of, of perception, some extra-sensory perception, some second sight—in a word, do you—see?”
Matty looked at him, mouth shut like a trap. The secretary blinked.
“I only mean, my dear fellow, this information you feel called on to press on an unheeding world—”
For a moment or two Matty said nothing. Then slowly at first but at the last with a kind of jerk, he got himself upright on the other side of the desk and stared not at the secretary but over him out of the window. He convulsed but made no sound. He clenched his fists up by his chest and the words burst out of his twisted lips, two golfballs.
“I feel!”
Then he turned away, went out through one office after another and into the marbled hall then down the steps and away. He made some strange purchases and one, a map, that was not so strange and he put everything he had into his ancient car, and the city knew him no more. Indeed Australia knew him no more as far as eccentricity is concerned. For the short remainder of his stay he was noticed for nothing but his black clothes, and forbidding face. Yet if human beings had little more to do with him in Australia there were other creatures that had. He drove for many miles with his curious purchases and he seemed to be looking for something big rather than small. He wanted, it seems, to be low down and he wanted to find some water to be low down with and he wanted a hot and fetid place to go with it all. These things are specific and to be found together in known places but it is very difficult most of the time to get close to them by car. For this reason Matty took a winding course in strange places and often enough had to sleep in his car. He found hamlets of three decaying houses with the corrugated iron of their roofs grinding and clanking in a hot wind, and not a tree for miles. He passed by other places of Palladian architecture set among monstrous trees where the red galahs squawked and lilies loaded the tended pools. He passed men riding round and round in little traps drawn by horses with a delicate high step. At last he found what no one else would want, looked at it in the bright sunlight—though even at noon the sun could scarcely pierce through to the water—and he watched, perhaps with a tremor that never reached the outside of his face, the loglike creatures that slipped one after another out of sight. Then he went away again to find high ground and wait. He read in his Bible with the wooden covers and now, for the rest of the day he trembled slightly and looked closely at familiar things as if there was something in them that would bring comfort. Mostly of course he looked at his Bible, seeing it as if he had not looked at it before and noticing for what that was worth how the wood of the cover was boxwood and he wondered why and thought aimlessly it might be for protection which was strange because surely the Word did not need it. He sat there for many hours while the sun took its wonted way over the sky and then sank and the stars came.
The place he had looked at now became additionally strange in the darkness which was thick as the darkness an old-time photographer thrust his head into under the velvet. Yet every other sense would have been well enough supplied with evidence. Human feet would have felt the soft and glutinous texture, half water half mud, that would rise swiftly to the ankles and farther, pressed out on every side with never a stone or splinter. The nose would have taken all the evidence of vegetable and animal decay, while the mouth and skin—for in these circumstances it is as if the skin can taste—would have tasted an air so warm and heavy with water it would have seemed as if there was doubt as to whether the whole body stood or swam or floated. The ears would be filled with the thunder of the frogs and the anguish of nightbirds; and they would feel too, the brushing of wings, antennae, limbs, to go with the whining and buzzing that showed the air too was full of life.
Then, accustomed to the darkness by a long enough stay and willing—it would have to be by sacrifice of life and limb—to trade everything for the sight, the eyes would find what evidence there was for them too. It might be a faint phosphorescence round the fungi on the trunks of trees that had fallen and were not so much rotting as melting away, or the occasional more lambent blueness where the flames of marsh gas wandered among reeds and floating islands of plants that lived as much on insects as on soupy water. Sometimes and suddenly as if they were switched on, the lights would be more spectacular still—a swift flight of sparks flashing between tree trunks, dancing, turning into a cloud of fire that twisted in on itself, broke, became a streamer leading away which incomprehensibly switched itself off to leave the place even darker than before. Then perhaps with a sigh like a sleeper turning over, a big thing would move washily in the unseen water and loiter a little further away. By then, feet that had stayed that long would have sunk deep, the mud
moving to this side and that, the warm mud; and the leeches would have attached themselves down there in an even darker darkness, a more secret secrecy and with unconscious ingenuity, without allowing their presence to be felt would have begun to feed through the vulnerable skin.
But there was no man in that place; and it seemed impossible to one who had inspected it from far off and in daylight that there ever had been a man in the place since men began. The sparks of flying life came back as if they were being chased. They fled in a long streamer.
A little while later the reason for this flight in one direction was evident. A light, and then two lights, were moving steadily behind the nearer forest. It showed tree trunks, hanging leaves, moss, broken branches in silhouette, lighting them and bringing them into a brief local visibility so that sometimes they seemed like coals or wood in a fire, black at first, then burning, then consumed as the twin sidelights wound onward through the forest to the marsh, each light bringing with it a dancing cloud of flying things, papery and whiteish. The old car—and now its engine had warned away everything but the flying creatures so that even the frogs had fallen silent and dived—stopped two trees away from the mysterious darkness of the water. The car stopped, the engine died, the two sidelights faded just a little but were still bright enough to light up the flying things and a yard or two of mould on this side of what must have been a track.
The driver sat for a while without moving; but just when the car had been silent and motionless long enough for the noises of the place to begin again, he jerked open the right-hand door and got out. He went to the boot, opened that and brought out a number of objects that clanked. He left the boot open, came back to the driver’s seat and stood for a while, staring towards the invisible water. After he had done that, he became suddenly busy and incomprehensible. For he was pulling off his clothes so that his body appeared in reflected light from the sidelights, thin and pale, and to be investigated at once by some of the papery flying things and a great many of those that hummed or whined. Now he brought a curious object from the boot, knelt down in the mould and began, it would seem, to take the object apart. Glass clinked. The man struck a match, brighter than sidelights, and what he was doing—but there was no one to see—became comprehensible. He had on the ground before him a lamp, an antique practically, he had the globe and the chimney off and he was lighting the wick and the papery things whirled and danced and flared and were consumed or crawled away half burnt. The man turned the wick right down, then put on the tall funnel and the glass globe. After that, when he was sure the lamp stood straight and safe in the mould, he turned to the first set of objects. He worked at them and they clanked and everything was inscrutable except inside of the man’s head where his purpose was. He stood up, no longer quite naked. There was a chain round his waist and on this chain, heavy steel wheels were slung; one, and that the one of greatest weight, lay over his loins so that he was absurd but decent even when nothing could see him but the natural creatures that did not matter. Now he bent down again but for a moment had to steady himself by clutching at the door of the car because the heavy wheels made kneeling straight down a very difficult business. But at last he was there, kneeling, and slowly he turned up the wick; and now the white globe of the lamp took over from the sidelights and the trees and the undersides of the leaves. The mould and moss and mud came solid like things that would still be there in daylight and the white, papery things went crazy round the white globe and across the gleaming water, so flat, so still, a frog stared at the light through two diamonds. The man’s face was close to the white globe and it was not the light that made a difference on this left side where the eye was half closed and the corner of the mouth twisted.
Darkness Visible: With an Introduction by Philip Hensher Page 8