No, look, she said, and pointed to a sigla inscribed above what looked like a tall, disused, copper-plated and panelled door set too high in the wall, it seemed, for anyone to have ever walked through it.
I looked. The sigla was made up of letters and other signs but I couldn’t tell what language they were in, let alone decipher them. They looked Gothic, like the characters of medieval German scripts or the words that were written by hand in illuminated manuscripts.
Don’t you see? she prompted. That’s a double U, that’s a C …
I did but I also knew that she was ahead of me already and that it would be both easier and more politic if I just let her tell me what they meant.
What is it? I asked, speaking louder than I normally would have, because of the hearing aid.
Well, I could be wrong, but I think it’s William Caxton’s printer’s mark. This is a library, isn’t it? Beautiful place … I went around the front for a squiz while I was waiting for you.
She looked at me again or perhaps it is better to say we looked at each other. Those wide aquamarine eyes magnified, as always, by the glasses she wore, guileless until you also saw the nest of ironic crinkles of skin they lived within.
It’s nice to see you, she said, and hugged me lightly. You haven’t changed, you’re just the same. Now, where are we going to sit. Here?
The café, an annex to the bookshop appended to the new library, was behind us, facing the back wall of the Mitchell with its arcane inscriptions. It was modern, glass and steel and tile; you could sit outside or in and ordered first at the counter. Not without a certain residual awkwardness, we ordered coffee and sandwiches and then sat outside in the half-sunny, half-shadowed, narrowly trapezoid concrete antespace.
C touched her ear, acknowledging the deficit. Too much ambient noise in there, she said. It’s better out here.
What happened … ? I asked, still speaking too loudly but unable not to, watching C watching my lips rather than my eyes.
Well, I’m going deaf, aren’t I, she said in that way she had. Never one to suffer fools gladly. Or indeed, at all. The explanation was unusual. Her father, an agricultural scientist, was also somewhat deaf, although the precise extent of his deafness was never entirely apparent to me since, a shy man and devoted to his work, he used the affliction as a shield against the social annoyances of the world. As I recalled from staying at their house in my youth, anything really important seemed perfectly clear to him, as for instance when I ventured some erotic proposal, sotto voce, to my beloved and he fixed his eye upon me with that peculiar glare, part knowing amusement, part obscure outrage, that fathers reserve for the lovers of their daughters.
C had inherited from him a predisposition towards whatever kind of deafness he had, and this tendency became exacerbated during her last pregnancy. The unforeseen consequence was this: in the general softening of female bones during pregnancy, which allows the hips and pelvis to articulate so that the baby’s head may pass more easily down the birth canal, those three tiny ossicles we have in our ears also softened; and in that softening she had begun to lose her hearing.
The hammer, I said, the anvil and …
The stirrup, she said, completing the trilogy and moving us, swiftly, from the smithy to the stables. Or, to give them their Latin names, the malleus, the incus and the stapes. The eardrum vibrates the hammer that moves the anvil that excites the stirrup that strikes the cochlea—like a pin hitting a bell. Except not for me, or not any longer. Now they just mutter vaguely together like old women shuffling their feet among leaves.
There was no self-pity, just an ironic shrug in the face of an implacable fate. I asked if anything could be done and she said yes, there was an operation, but it was complex and new and if it didn’t work the result could be profound deafness; whereas, as things stood, she still could hear a little and that little she didn’t want to lose.
But aren’t you, I said. Didn’t you become … I meant to say a specialist working with the deaf and the mute but couldn’t complete the speculation.
Yes, I did, she said. And do you mean, did I go deaf before and that’s why, or did I go out afterwards, in sympathy, as it were? She laughed. And then, quietly: It was afterwards.
I looked again into those guileless blue eyes, searching I suppose for the grief that must lie behind her plain acceptance—what of the music she listened to, the Dvořák, the Bartók and the Messiaen, his Quatuor pour la fin du temps which she loved so much? What of the cello, the viola she used to play?—but there was nothing, or nothing that I could see. Instead, inadvertently, an image came unbidden to mind: curled red–gold pubic hair glistening wetly in the sepia light of a forgotten afternoon as we lay together on the Moroccan blanket in the house on Constitution Hill.
I dropped my eyes. Our coffees came. Then our sandwiches. We made small talk while we ate and drank. Catching up. Her five children (there were twins). My two boys. Marriage and divorce (twice) for me; a lifelong liaison for her. He was a mathematician and together they’d pioneered software which made a lot of money so there were no financial constraints now. They had an ocean-going yacht and spent a lot of time sailing; when she was ashore, she painted and sculpted and that helped make up for the lack of music. She did have a herd of white goats! And so on.
It wasn’t until later, after we’d decided to go for a walk in the Botanic Garden, that she told me the real reason for her visit. It was a pleasant day, cloudy and sunny by turns, with that evocative early autumn chill in the air which makes you think of other years, both those that have gone and those to come. Walking lent a new dynamic to the conversation. As we strolled along side by side it was no longer really possible for her to lip-read, so it seemed natural that she should talk and I listen. But as we wandered down the west wall of the Mitchell, pausing before the statue of circumnavigator Matthew Flinders and remarking on the presence there of a silhouette of his ship’s cat, Trim—which, at night, is projected by subtle lighting as a larger-than-life shadow prowling the sandstock walls—I found myself, out of nervousness, attempting larger-than-life gestures, nodding and waving my hands in front of me to show that I heard and understood; until, as we crossed Shakespeare Place, in the shadow of the Bard and his most famous characters grouped around him on the plinth (is he never to be free of them? Or they of him?), C gave a little shudder of annoyance and said acerbically:
I know you can hear me, I know you’re not deaf, I am. Now will you stop capering about like an ape and just listen?
And thus, as we entered the Garden via the Morshead Fountain Gate and made our way past the Glass Pyramid of the Tropical Centre, with its heliconias and bat flowers, orchids and jade plants, went on through the flying-fox-haunted palm grove where Colin McCahon lost his mind, and along down by the ponds where coots and ducks and ibis sport and great black and golden carp slowly fibulate their tails below the lily pads, heading towards the sea, she told me that she too had heard recently, out of the blue, from someone she had not seen for many years. His name was Leroy Manx and he had been a colleague of hers at graduate school in London, Ontario, way back in the late 1970s.
Strange name, I offered but she chose not to hear or not to answer.
Lee is Australian and he thought he was—she said this with a slight duck of the head and an embarrassed glance away—in love with me. Nothing came of it, she had already met the mathematician and anyway he, Lee, was not her type. Overweight, earnest, absolutely no sense of humour … but very bright. Also, committed.
I had not heard that word employed in quite this way for a while; it used to be used to describe the kind of person who espoused left-wing causes and continued to work towards the fulfilment of the socialist dream no matter what else they might be doing at the time. As that dream died or was deferred further and further into the unimaginable, the usage was transferred to those whose cause was a sustainable future for the planet and all that implies, but in this context too it seems to have fallen into disuse; and now when I look at the wor
d I think of its psychiatric meaning, to be committed, that is, locked up, confined, sectioned, put away in an asylum somewhere—as C herself almost was in that sometimes fraught year we spent together back in 1970.
Once his studies were completed, Manx returned to Australia and went into clinical practice—he was a medical doctor as well as a psychologist and hence qualified to work as a psychiatrist. At some point he began doing work for the Commonwealth and when, in the early 1990s, the Keating Labor government shamefully enacted legislation setting up detention centres in which those coming illegally into the country, seeking refuge, for whatever reason, would be detained indefinitely until their fate was decided, Manx accepted some kind of supervisory role in the enterprise. In other words he became one of those whose job it was to oversee the mental health of detainees.
An impossible task, you might think, or at least one of which the primary expression might very easily become dissimulation, or pretence, or indeed simply public relations, especially once the detention centres were privatised, as they soon were. For how can you guarantee the psychological wellbeing of those whose problem is, precisely, that they are locked up—when all they want is to be free? This was C’s question, not mine, and as she put it I saw in the scornful twist of her smile and the flash of her aqua eyes the committed person she had herself always been and evidently still was. Manx, she seemed to be saying, had sold out.
I knew what he’d done, what he’d become, she continued. I’d heard it on the grape vine, but I had nothing to do with him personally or professionally. After all, our fields are completely different. I was working in remediation, looking for therapeutic solutions, trying to help afflicted people, while he had become some kind of policeman or at least an apologist for policemen: what could we possibly have in common that we could talk about?
Time passed. She completed, though at the cost of her hearing, her family; her increasing deafness made continuation of her work difficult and anyway, once the new software (accounting, I believe) went global in the marketplace there was no economic imperative any more, no need to work, she could just be. She had inherited some family land in a very beautiful part of coastal New Zealand and now lived there, with her children and her goats, her painting and sculpture, the yacht which she and her husband sailed to all corners of the earth—not simply for pleasure, she pointed out, as if I might have suspected her of mere hedonism: We have ecological concerns too, we do research, we help where we can …
It was just after they returned from a voyage to an obscure island in Vanuatu, formerly the New Hebrides, that she received the email from Leroy Manx. He said he had come across a case he thought might interest her. A unique case, unprecedented and incidentally one that was causing the department some concern. This was an off-the-record inquiry but he, Manx, wondered if she might review the case notes for him. The constellation of symptoms (this was how he talked) suggested that the subject was in her area of expertise, there were certain anomalies that she could perhaps explicate … and so on; but the inquiry, as befitted a message from a skilled bureaucrat, was couched in such a way that no actual details were given. She ignored the provocation, refused to be tantalised, replied politely, pointing out that she was now effectively retired from that kind of work and had moved on to other things, ending with an expression of best wishes or some other anodyne phrase we use when we don’t want to hear from the person again but don’t like to say so.
Leroy Manx was not so easy to dissuade. He came back with an extended plea, which was also to some extent a mea culpa. Yes, he had abandoned his youthful idealism, yes, he’d compromised, yes, he’d gone and worked for the enemy, but in so doing had found out things no one else knew, things that could not be known otherwise than by collaboration; and now he was attempting, at one blow as it were, to put his knowledge to good use and his conscience to rest. He was no longer working directly for the government, had not been for some time; rather he was an independent consultant—this had been his role ever since privatisation. It was his job to keep the contractors honest, to make sure that abuses were not perpetrated, or institutionalised, within the detention centres. He was a kind of inspector or even ombudsman reporting back to the relevant government department, and no friend of Serco, the current contractors, who’d recently taken over from the irretrievably tarnished Global Solutions Limited, who’d lost their contract in controversial circumstances … Manx even hinted that their demise was somehow the result of his endeavours.
We were leaning on the sea wall now, looking out towards Pinchgut, the tiny rocky island in the harbour with a round Martello tower of quarried stone built upon it, allegedly by convict labour. Here recalcitrants were chained up and fed a diet of bread and water, here a gibbet was erected where incorrigible miscreants were turned off; later it was fortified and supplied with ordinance that was never, however, fired in anger. C seemed fascinated by the play of light on the water. For some time she said nothing.
And, then, slowly:
He was suggesting that he had become, or wanted to become, a kind of whistle-blower. It was an approach calculated to appeal to someone like me. I knew that. And yet … in a strange way it worked. I became intrigued, not so much by the case itself—I still knew nothing about that—but by Lee, his trajectory from idealism to damnation and back, perhaps, to salvation. You know I never could resist the appeal of a victim, especially a victim of his own folly. Lee always reminded me a bit of Lionel. You remember Lionel, don’t you?
Lionel! How could I forget? He was the only son of Russian migrants, a clever medical student we flatted with briefly in the heyday of our affair: just another in the shifting population of the young and restless who moved distractedly through our lives (and their own) at the time. Lionel was hirsute and melancholy, a man of few words and many dark thoughts, like something out of a novel by Dostoevsky. C, who was fascinated by all things Russian and who was at that time doing it, found Lionel on campus one day and brought him home with her. Somehow he stayed on, turning the sunroom at the front our small house in Freemans Bay into his bedroom, rapidly filling it up with newspapers and other papery detritus of his days.
Naturally I was jealous of Lionel, if only because of the attention C paid him: they would have long philosophical conversations which filled me with impatience. I would go to bed and wait for her, driving myself crazy listening to the murmur of their voices through the wall, hers half-cajoling, half-derisive, his intermittent and low and punctuated with his peculiar barking laugh which he only ever seemed to give out when he was with her. I always used to say there was something weird about Lionel, but C defended him … and then came the day when it was revealed that the mysterious arsonist, the incendiary who had destroyed a number of empty, untenanted wooden houses belonging to the university, was none other than our Dostoevskian friend.
This was after he had left our flat in Spring Street, after C and I had ceased living together, but still … I remember, the next time I saw her, essaying some sort of juvenile remark of the I-told-you-so variety over the fate of Lionel, only to find, to my astonishment, that she was still defending him. She had visited him in prison, visited his parents too; she knew, if not the full story, then a whole lot more than I did about his peculiar tragedy. The ambition to practise medicine, it turned out, was not his but his parents’; he had done everything he could to fulfil their dream, while at the same time attempting to follow his own, which was to become an architect—pursuing two courses of study, working nights as a filing clerk in a printery, concealing his double life from his parents and indeed from all but his most intimate friends, burning out … the crack came when he failed, for the second year running, the preliminary examination that would have given him entrance to medical school.
He believed the university authorities had discriminated against him because of his Russian background—preposterous, pure paranoia—and his pyromaniacal revenge was to burn down their houses, thereby immolating, at one and the same time, both his alleged future a
s a doctor and his dream of becoming an architect. I still remember my incredulity and my shame when I saw that C had stuck by Lionel even in the depths of his humiliation and despair; that, despite everything he had done, she could still find a place in her heart for him: one of the houses he had burned belonged to the Music Department and in that house, along with a piano and much else besides, C’s antique kauri cello, a beautiful thing which she nevertheless played rarely (it was too heavy) had been utterly burned.
Of course, I did not know Leroy Manx, but C’s invocation of the ghost of Lionel (where was he? What had happened to him when he got out of jail?) made immediate sense to me. I saw him, Manx, I mean, pale, bespectacled, fat, unhappy, with a conscience that could not be appeased, a desire that could never be satisfied (Lionel, too, lusted, I am sure, after C), importuning her with all the manipulative subtlety of a career psychiatrist, appealing above all to her humanitarianism, her inviolable instinct always to stand by the victim …
I said none of this. All I did was turn my face fully towards her so that she could see my lips move and say:
I see.
She looked gravely into my eyes for a moment then turned back to the dancing sea.
Yes, she murmured, I think you do. So I emailed Lee back and said yes, that I would, after all, read and review the case notes. They were with me in a day.
The fellow in question, as yet nameless, had come ashore on a beach in a remote part of the Australian coastline—a place called Dark Point which, it turns out, is a significant dreaming site of the Worimi people, though no one seems quite sure what, if any, significance this might have had for the castaway. He was male, Asian, in his thirties perhaps, and unconscious due to a severe wound to the head; but the wound was thought to have been caused, or inflicted, after he had come ashore, thereby solving one troubling, if minor, mystery.
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