by Peter Carey
Chubb began to retreat but Noussette, of course, had been aware of him all along. She came rushing at him and drew him to her and kissed him and hugged him and introduced him to the model and the others as a great poet and simply the most intelligent man she had ever met. Not once had she made this sort of fuss over him in Melbourne. He had not been fast enough, wild enough, handsome enough, his transgressions limited to playing boogie-woogie while smoking Craven A’s. It did occur to him that the public attention of the McCorkle Hoax might have changed her mind about him, but in any case he was flattered to have her clinging to him. He could smell her slightly acrid sweat drying on her skin.
She demanded he write down his office telephone number and made him promise to call her. Two hours later it was she who called him.
Darling, Christopher, you must not tell anyone I am really a painter. Promise me, darling.
Noussette, they hired me because I was a poet. They’ll love you for being a painter.
No, they cannot know. It would not fit. I told them other things.
What things?
Oh, photographic sort of things. Christopher, I can trust you, can’t I? I know I can. After all, you are a fake yourself.
This offended him, of course. How could she say such a thing?
Darling, surely the McCorkle business—
How does that make me a fake? It was Weiss, he said, who was inauthentic. No offence, but he was a total fraud.
And what were you, darling?
The one who had made that clear.
Christopher, cher, listen to me. Promise you won’t say that to anyone else. I doubt they’d understand.
And you do?
Of course. David was a total fraud, absolutely, in every department.
People think I killed him.
Oh, he killed himself, she said, and that was his decision. It was not the first time he was wrong.
Cheh, cried Chubb, staring down at the steam as it lifted off the surface of Jalan Treacher. That was a very hard way for the mortar to talk about the pestle. It really should have put me off her, except for one thing-lah.
Let me have the teensiest guess.
Guess. Guess away, Mem. You cannot know.
You wanted to fuck her.
The old hoaxer gave me a sudden fierce stare, then his lop-sided eyebrows dipped a degree or two and he smiled not unattractively.
We had barely touched, he said wistfully, but now I knew—I might tackle her.
Tackle?
This gorgeous animal within my reach. These huge dark eyes and a figure—I told you.
And she absolved you, didn’t she?
Much lagi.
Lagi?
More, much more. He closed his eyes. Do you know, I was the most perfect man for her. I was raised for her. I was the only one. This is what I knew when she telephoned me that afternoon.
Chubb then began to talk—rather vaguely—as always when he touched on this subject—about his mother. Out of all his hesitations and qualifications, two things became very clear. First, the mother had been a strong character and this was why he was instinctively excited by a woman like Noussette. Second—and this was probably the same point—he felt himself invulnerable to her.
See, he said, I am not one of those boh-doh fools like Gordon Featherstone. Him she made climb buildings. Me she never could. And that would make it work, you see, she and I.
I don’t see, no.
She could never make me be her dog.
Now you make me think that you were frightened of her.
Frightened? No. She had appetite for life-lah. What Slater said was true. She was chili-padi. Try anything. She could be who she wished. She could get what she wanted. It was always an adventure to be with Noussette. Not only the mortar and the pestle. Every aspect. Ups and downs. Her work was the same. Huge bungles on her shoots—product out of focus. But socially always a big success.
And you became lovers….
Oh, she had others, he said. She would bring the poor goats along to makan. If I had been in love she would’ve driven me mad. But she was not trustworthy enough to love.
And were you trustworthy, Mr Chubb?
You mean sexually? Most nights I wrote. He patted his manuscript and smiled. ‘Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and bear with sweet-sounding lamentation the suffering it causes you.’
How well I knew that line of Rilke’s, and how it disturbed me to hear it from his mouth. And so, I said, how did Noussette spend her nights?
Who knows? No phone-lah. She had to take a taxi if she wished to talk to me at home. One night she broke in. Come, come, I must meet a fellow in a bar.
It was two in the morning! I was furious but she started to make a din and Blackhall probably had a glass pressed against the wall. I put on my shoes. Down the highway, over the Harbour Bridge, past Woollomooloo and into Kings Cross. Wah! Very sleazy café. One man sitting at a table. He was bald, completely. Piercing dark eyes. Chin, brow, nose, all huge.
She asked me, Don’t you recognise your playmate?
It was the madman, Mem. He had shaved his head.
This is my friend Bob McCorkle, she said. Soon she knew she had done a stupid thing, but first she was the joker.
You see, my darling, you are not a fake at all.
I should have walked away but did not wish to give offence. At another time I might not have been so timid, but Kings Cross at three in the morning? Crims and prostitutes— who knows what might happen? I stayed and drank my illegal cup of brandy. Noussette began to gabble lagi. She had used the madman in a photo shoot and the client went amok when he saw her proofs. For this I pay you? he had shouted at her. Two hundred pounds, that you should put this … this thug against my lovely frock?
She knew she was not amusing but still prattled on until the madman leaned across the smeary plastic table and circled my wrist as he had done in the cemetery.
I believe you have something of mine, he said.
I had no idea what it might be.
I applied for a passport, he said. Three months ago. They asked me for my birth certificate.
He was looking at me with such furious eyes, the stoutest heart would have been alarmed.
Tuan, I do not have your birth certificate.
At this he tightened his grip and I yelped with pain. And then he recited three lines from Paradise Lost in a voice which was very quiet, but terrifying: ‘Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay/To mould me man, Did I solicit thee/From darkness to promote me?’ Give me my bloody birth certificate, he said.
Is that all you want? Noussette said. A birth certificate?
All? he cried. Do you know what it is like to have no birth certificate?
Yes, said Noussette, I know exactly.
You’re a liar!
No, darling, I am not a liar, and it would not be your business if I was. She was very brisk now. You want a birth certificate? That is what is making you so tiresome?
Yes.
Do you know what a big baby you are?
You are very stupid to talk to me like that.
You come back here next Monday night at the same time. And don’t be late, because we are not going to wait all night.
The creature was suddenly very quiet. He was a lamb. You’ll bring the birth certificate?
You can go now, said Noussette. We will pay for the drinks.
She was amazing. I will say that for her. Who else could have brought that off? The madman rose, shook hands with us both, put on his hat, and walked—pranced really, his walk was most distinctive—right out into the rainy night.
Again Chubb looked out the window and shook his head. I thought she had the grace to apologise to me, but no. She would not be sorry.
He wants to be Bob McCorkle, she said, let him be Bob McCorkle.
I told her I thought he was dangerous.
Oh, darling, she said, all he wants is a birth certificate.
I can’t do that.
Christopher, you are
such a defeatist. People do this sort of business all the time. I’ll get him a birth certificate. It can’t be difficult.
How would you possibly do that?
I don’t know, she said. I’ll find someone. And she found John Slater, Mem, and then she worked him. I’ve never told him. This is how we know each other.
18
The very next night, Chubb had a ‘vision.’ He was not drunk; he’d taken a single glass of McWilliams Burgundy. He was not overtired; the event occurred a little after nine o’clock on a spring evening. He had washed his plate and his knife and his fork, then carried his chrome and vinyl chair from the kitchen to his desk, an army trestle table he’d positioned in the bow window at the front of the living room. In daylight he might have looked out to where the jacarandas, although they never found a way into his poetry, dropped their loaded petals in a luminous, lilac carpet on the avenue. It was dark and he could see no more than his reflection. For a long while the scratching of his post-office pen was the only sound in the room.
He heard rustling in some leaves outside but the poem was one of his beloved double sestinas, a form in which the last words of each stanza are repeated though in a new order. It is never an easy endeavour, and as he proceeded the difficulty grew exponentially, a context in which he was not interested in rustling leaves.
Then came a loud rapping on the glass, and his immediate response was anger. Cheh! I imagined it was that little bugger Blackhall, nagging me to close the gate.
He flung open the window in some exasperation. There was no Blackhall.
Boys, he decided. Scabby-kneed boys, boys with erections in their pockets and heads filled with ignorant opinions. He returned to work, back to the beginning, like one of Mal-larmé’s sacred spiders whose web has been broken by a cow. Ten minutes later he was going very well and when he looked up again, in the eighth stanza, the last piece of the puzzle was hovering on the edges of his cerebrum.
It was then Chubb saw it. You must not laugh at me, he said.
I promise.
It was a bloody horror, he said in a voice turned suddenly hollow, his hooded eyes challenging me.
I felt the hairs rise on my neck. Boys?
No, no. A ghastly snotty epidermis, sticking to the glass, like a human squid in an aquarium. I will never forget it— whiskers on the lip, the red maw stretched wide open. You are laughing at me?
McCorkle was kissing you?
It was not funny. Besides, how had he found me?
Noussette …
Of course not.
He paused. It was not like that, he said, and with his fingertips he brushed away the dry white spittle in the corners of his mouth. I finally understood, he said quietly. I had brought him forth.
Imagined him?
Brought him forth.
From where?
Choy! How do I know from where? From hell, I suppose. How would I know where I brought him forth from? I imagined someone and he came into being.
I smiled, and saw him bristle.
Mr Chubb, I said hurriedly, there are certain great writers who attract the mad.
He raised a sarcastic eyebrow, and I was immediately sorry to have said ‘great.’
For a certain period of time, I said, when I was very young, I was Auden’s assistant.
Auden? Really?
You would not believe the things people sent to him— annotated maps, detailed confessions, love letters, photographs of themselves. One young man even tried to hang himself from a tree opposite the house.
Christopher Chubb clasped his papery hands together and fixed me with his pale eyes. How interesting, he said. It took me a moment to understand that he gave not a damn. Indeed, he was angry to have been interrupted.
What happened next, I asked him.
It was a threat, he said. That was how I took it.
What sort of threat?
A threat of what would happen if the birth certificate was not produced.
Did he say that?
Of course he didn’t. The bastard was hiding in the dark.
I didn’t need Chubb to remind me that the madman had once stood at Vogelesang’s window observing him eat his supper before, finally, in his own good time, cutting the hank of hair and skin off that very strong policeman’s head.
In Chatswood, Chubb turned off the light and quietly moved his chair to the middle of the empty living room, but he was not a coward and would no longer hide in his own house. So despite that numb terror he knew from the awful minutes before military engagement, he put on his hat and slipped on his suit coat and walked outside.
It was a moonlit night with a blustering westerly wind which tumbled the fallen jacaranda petals along the empty street. He kept clear of the hedges, heading up the centre of Victoria Avenue towards that long ridge road, the Pacific Highway. The wind here was even stronger, and all sorts of rubbish, wrappers, newspapers were blowing high above the verandahs of the milk bars and newsagents into the night sky like the seagulls that swarm around the pylons of the Harbour Bridge.
He had nowhere to go but he was not about to scurry back to his house ‘like a bunny’ so hat in hand he began to walk along the Pacific Highway in the direction of the bridge.
In Kuala Lumpur there was a loud knocking on my door. Slater! I thought, and made to receive him in rather belligerent fashion, swinging open the door to discover no-one more offensive than a slim Malay maid who was delivering Chubb’s suit in her extended arms. She had a slightly swollen mouth and lovely sloe eyes, a combination which has always been conflated, in my mind anyway, with desire.
Very sorry.
Not at all, I said. After all, this hardly seemed an excessive amount of time to revive a filthy old tweed suit, not in a hotel where one could easily wait thirty minutes for one’s coffee. I held out my hand to receive the garment but she was determined to bring it inside.
As she did so, Chubb spoke to her in halting Malay. She answered—rather sharply, I thought—without looking at him. She laid the suit on the bed and lifted the skirt of plastic with her slender finger.
Too much old, she said to me. You see? I noticed only that the herringbone was green and white rather than black and grey, as previously. I could not think what to say. The lovely young woman’s eyes then became fierce and accusatory and I felt a familiar old disappointment. I had never been good with servants, not even when we had a dozen of them, and I had inherited from my mother a great passion not to upset them in case they gave their notice ‘for no good reason.’ I directed my gaze where the maid wished, at the same time searching desperately in my purse. I have always been awful with tipping. At Christmas I didn’t mind it, because those sums had long ago been decided by my father, and it was more of a tradition than that American habit which is calculated to reduce all one’s servants to the status of beggars.
You see! she said.
I held out a blue note, but could tell I had insulted her.
Chubb now came to my side, and I asked him how much should I give.
He did not answer but reached down to the suit, and I finally understood, watching him stroke the lapel, that the process of cleaning had so shocked the fabric that it was now broken on the creases, papery and crumbling in his hand like the wing of a dead butterfly.
It was very old, he said. He draped it across his arms. Excuse me. It was the catch in the voice that made me look directly into his welling eyes. He carried the suit into the bathroom—a strange, pathetic creature with his tattered shirt, his ulcerated legs, his shining female sarong. Neither the maid nor I knew exactly where to rest our eyes.
He is your father?
I shook my head.
Again I offered the blue note. She took my hand, closing it so gently around the currency. I could feel it then: this woman was not angry with me.
It is not our fault, she said. You understand, Memsahib? The suit was very old.
Yes, I understand.
When she departed, I sat down at the window, distressed not s
o much about the suit but by my sense that Chubb was coming undone. These days everyone seems very keen for men to weep, but to be quite honest I have always found it rather off-putting. I would not know what to do with him if he were crying. Then the bathroom door swung open and I saw that the sinews had been manfully stiffened. He had removed the plastic wrapping from the suit and, when he offered it for my inspection, his eyes were narrowed.
What a horrible thing to happen, I said. I am so sorry.
It was not an accident, he said grimly.
I noticed that the damage was not limited to the lapel but extended to the sleeves, one of which was frayed as dramatically as a beggar’s costume at Sadler’s Wells.
They have done this on purpose.
Oh no. I reached out my hand to touch him but he flinched from me.
They don’t want me in the hotel. Don’t you see, woman? Without my suit, I cannot enter. They tried to stop me with that stinking prawn-head Sikh, and when that didn’t work they destroyed my suit.
I did not wish to challenge him directly, but as I have been told often enough, my face is not good at keeping secrets.
You think I’m mistaken? Then say it. I could not bear to make you lie.
He was in a fury with me now, and I was becoming rather sick of his delusions. Excuse me, I am a little weary.
He bowed his head, as formal as a waiter. I hope my life has not been boring.
Not at all, I said. I did not try to dissuade him from changing back into his suit, nor, when he emerged from the bathroom, did I try to mollify his injured pride. I watched in silence as he retrieved his manuscript. Only when he tucked the parcel under his arm did I see that the suit was truly ruined, tattered at the cuffs and knees, white lining showing at the lapels.
Goodbye, Miss Wode-Douglass.
Goodbye, Mr Chubb.
You can say it would not have hurt me to have taken one of his poems, but you would be wrong. You might even say it would’ve been politic to feign admiration in order to get at the McCorkle, which is what I really wanted. Still, I could not do anything but stand there as he left. I did feel sorry for him, although of course he could not know that.