Cosmo Cosmolino (4 page)

‘Look,' said Natalie. ‘The only person in the world with a full inventory of your crimes is you. You can burn things, wish death—but the past is still the past and you're still the same person.'

‘I know,' I said. ‘I know you must be right. But—'

‘But what?' said Natalie.

We were both shivering. The fat girl's eyes were on my face, waiting for my lips to move.

‘But what if he forgets everything?' I said. ‘What if it's all up to me? He was my first real friend. Everything I ever knew about friendship I learnt from Patrick.'

‘Oh, don't start that,' said Natalie, closing her eyes. ‘You're worse than he is. Can you imagine how many times I've heard all these tales? You can't
know
how desolating I find that kind of sentimentalism.'

‘But listen,' I said. ‘He
did
things for me. He was
faithful
to me. He was
there
.
He bailed me out of the
lockup. I was in a cage in the back yard of the police station and I saw him coming through the gate. And once a doctor put drops in my eyes to dilate my pupils, and Patrick took me by the hand and led me home.'

‘All right,' said Natalie. ‘That's enough.'

‘He sent me the money for an abortion,' I ground on.

‘Stop now,' said Natalie. ‘Shut up.'

‘I didn't even know which bloke it was. I wrote to Patrick in Sydney—I hadn't even
seen
him for two years—and he sent me fifty quid the next day. In pound notes. In an envelope. No questions asked.'

‘Yes,' said Natalie. ‘Yes.' She leaned forward with her elbows on her knees: I could see her teeth. ‘But what
I
want to know is—what did
you
ever do for
him
?'

‘I can drag it back,' I babbled. ‘He thinks I've forgotten it all—but I can dredge it up. All of it, if I have to—if he can't remember any more.' I began to bawl. ‘I'd lie at the foot of his bed like a dog,' I said, ‘if it would do any good. Tell him that, Natalie.'

Natalie stood up.

‘
You
tell him,' she said. ‘Tell him yourself.'

The intercom on the wall next to the ward door spoke a name and Natalie ran to answer, putting her mouth right up against the metal; then she beckoned to me. I followed her in. She had a way of walking which suddenly seemed to find its purpose: she put her feet down firmly, but with a light spring, as if her knees
were never completely straightened. She was ready for anything, with this walk. Anything at all would find her ready for it.

The air in the ward was dense with anxiety. Entering it was like wading against a surf of rhythmic moaning, whether human or mechanical I could not tell. Down the aisle between the two rows of beds trod Natalie, lightly and quickly. I saw the first body. That's not him. The head, shaved and with a bloody modess pad clapped to the back of it, was turned away from us in a hard, unnatural position: dead, an Auschwitz victim, someone who had perished in agony. I kept moving but Natalie stopped. She
stopped
.
Wildly I tried to read the name on the clipboard. It was Patrick.

He was suffering. He was crying out. A nurse rushed to him with an oxygen mask: he rolled to grab at it and the force of his in-breath seemed to suck it on to his terrible face; then, seeing us over its rim, he tore it away and reached out his left hand to where we stood, two of the
women in his life
,
gaping with shock and fear at the foot of the bed. We were tripping over each other to defer. Frantic, Natalie pushed me: ‘Go on!' I blundered to the side of the bed and seized his hand. It was warm and very meaty, but it was not my place to go closer, to approach his face, his wounded head. I kissed his hand, squeezed it, and laid it down for Natalie, who took hold of it as I scrambled out of range. He fought to speak to her, her ear was against
his face, but his grunts were swallowed in the weird soughing that filled the ward, the sound of the room itself labouring for breath.

Natalie backed away and I fell into step behind her. She was almost running. The big door flopped shut after us, and the waiting faces lifted and swung in our direction like a shoal of satellite dishes. I looked at the clock. We had been inside for barely a minute.

‘What was that noise?' I jabbered. ‘I heard a noise.'

‘I didn't hear it,' said Natalie. ‘I block out everything.'

She kept walking fast, barging towards the elevator. She certainly did not need me, but I hurried in her wake, and down in the lobby she paused long enough to turn her blank face towards me, and nod.

‘I'm going home,' she said. ‘Don't come. I'm going home.'

I stood still, to let her get away from me. When she had become a member of the crowd, I walked slowly, on chalky legs, through the lobby of the hospital.

It was cool there. The hallway was wide and clean, and the floor was made of green marble tiles that shone. I looked up at the stained-glass windows. All I could make out was a figure standing with its arms spread wide and its bare feet balanced, low down in the frame, on what looked like a stack of sandbags. No: they were clouds.

I thought I would have something to eat, somewhere. And after that I had better find myself a hotel.

I tried to walk briskly towards the door; but somebody was standing in the shadow of the huge sandstone pillars which supported the entrance porch. It was a child in a cape, a little boy.

He was hunched over from the waist, working with ferocious concentration on a black metal object he was holding in both hands. His head was bent over his task, but as I walked towards him I could clearly see his face in profile, and trembling with shock and distress though I was, my steps shortened of their own accord, for I felt that I knew him, that in some book or gallery I had seen his picture, or a picture of somebody like him. Out of respect I placed my feet more lightly on the marble floor; and just as I drew level with him he straightened his spine, raised his head, and extended his gun arm towards me in a slow, vertical arc. I saw then what he was: I recognised him. I stood still in front of him. I presented myself: for he was no longer playing. He was here on business, acting on orders. He was a small, serious, stone-eyed angel of mercy.

Kim's father
was supposed to come down from Queensland or wherever he lived to straighten her life out for her, give her some good advice, pay her uni fees and so on, or even take her back up there to live with him. He promised he'd be there in June, for her birthday, but for some reason he couldn't make it by the date. Then it was going to be August, then September. She was hanging out for this. She stopped going anywhere, in case he turned up while she was out and the others in the house let him get away without giving him her message, to make himself at home and wait ten minutes. First she used to sew, till the machine broke down, and anyway the whine of the motor was starting to make her nervous. Then she drew, or wrote for hours in her diary. Then she read, lying on her bed in a worn-out old nightie, nibbling at the ends of her
hair, but she said the books she was supposed to be studying were so boring that she kept dozing off.

Then things got to the point with her where all she could do was sleep. Awake, whatever she heard threw her into a state of nerves: the wind when it bumped, a bird in a tree outside the window, the water rustling down the gutters when the council workers opened the hydrants. Her fearfulness filled Raymond with impatient scorn, and relief that he was not after all the most hopeless person he knew. The morning a truck poured a ton of blue metal chips down in the lane outside, he came back from the kitchen and found her on her knees in the corner with her head in the dirty clothes bag. He thought of laughing, till he saw that her eyes were bulging. There was a primary school behind where she lived. She couldn't stand the noise the kids made in the yard at playtime, their screaming. It made her grind her teeth and blow her nose till it went red. ‘Somebody must be hurting them,' she whispered. ‘They're hurting each other.'

‘You're stupid,' said Raymond irritably. ‘That's a
good
sound. Aren't kids supposed to be a good thing? You shouldn't freak out over something that's
good
.
What's the matter with you?'

By October, though she lied about it, she was swallowing day by day in threes and fours the pills she got from her mother and sleeping the time away buried so flat in the quilt and pillows that when he came in he
had to feel around to make sure she was still there.

‘Get in,' she mumbled, too doped to open her eyes. ‘Less go to sleep.'

The nightdress was twisted up round her waist and her skin was loose, like old sacking. She had about as much life in her as a half-deflated dummy, but without complaint she opened her legs, and he kept his face turned away, to avoid her breath. She grunted, that was all, and when he rolled away she made a limp effort to attach herself to his back; but she was a dead weight that could not hang on. Her arms' grip weakened and her torso fell away. The cool air of the room shrank his bare spine. She snuffled, and a light rhythmic click began in the open membranes of her throat. He would have got up straight away except that the tick of her breathing matched itself briefly to his heartbeat, and at the moment of focusing on the leaves outside the glass his mind lost its grip on the edges of the furniture and slithered away into a comforting nest, a sty of warm webs and straw. Then the parrot screeched, in somebody's back yard, and he woke.

He raised himself on one elbow and looked back over his shoulder at her. She was only a small girl, with small bones, and her head too he had always thought of as small. Wandering round the city, the day after she had first dragged him home from a party where he was lurking sourly in a doorway, always too old or too awkward, always wearing the wrong clothes, he had
found himself fitting words together in the part of his mind that no one knew about: he practised remarking casually, ‘She's buttery', or ‘She's well-toothed'; but he never fell into conversation with anyone who looked interested in that way of talking—Alby certainly wasn't—and now her face, like any drugged sleeper's, was as thick, stupid and meaningless as a hunk of rock. He saw that there was nothing special about her; that he was superior to her after all. She was damaged goods. The pills were not to blame. The pills were doing him a favour by reminding him of something he had always known was in her, in any girl that age who would do what she did with him, and you could tell by the moron face they made when they were doing it, all vague and grinning. He imagined, propped there in his twisted pose while his insides congealed again into blankness, how he would describe her in the café if any of them stopped talking long enough. ‘She was more out of it than I've ever seen her. Mate, she was'—he would stick out his flat hands, palms down, and jerk them sharply apart—‘
out
of it. This gig's over. People who can't get their shit together should just go and
die
.'

It was late in the day. If he got up now he could make it to the Hare Krishnas for a feed. The girl downstairs was getting ready for work. As she called to her cat, her clogs on the cobbles of the lane made a sound like a tennis ball bouncing. While he pulled on his clothes, blocking out the irritating click of Kim's
open mouth, he ran his eyes over the floor, checking for dropped coins, a screwed-up five dollar note, the price of a coffee, anything he could use.

On the boards between the bed and the door stood a pair of heavy black rubber-soled shoes. Their laces were still in bows. She must have yanked them off in her rush back to the big dipper of sleep, and yet they were placed tidily side by side, and although they were months old they still looked new, since the only wear they got was when she walked over to her mother's every couple of days for pills and maybe a leftover from the fridge. All the girls wore these shoes. He felt nothing about the style. He only noticed the shoes because the neat bows jigged a memory which was gone before his mind could lumber round to it: something about laces, something about tying a shoe. He hesitated, then he stepped over the shoes and went out of the room. The door clicked shut behind him. The air of the stairs was thick with the smell of cooking broccoli.

Four days passed before he came back.

He too spent them horizontal, in his brother's boarding house room with his pants unzipped, holding across his chest Alby's big acoustic guitar and picking at it tunelessly, or rereading the collection of seventies comics from under the bed: epic acid landscapes, hulking heroes in fur leggings, pinheads, VW buses full of frizzy hair, a stoned cat, girls with huge legs in
boots and mini skirts, and a special way of walking called ‘truckin''. That world, drawn in square boxes and balloons of words, he knew. The real one he was lost in, but so lost that he didn't know he was lost. His father was dead, his mother was stupid, his sister had run away; and as soon as Alby got back he would be on the street again. He lived untouched inside a grey casing through which he watched, dully, how other people behaved, and sometimes tried to mimic them. He saw that they remarked on the weather, and he tried to remember to look at the sky, to see if there were clouds in it. He saw what people ate, and he bought some. He saw that they talked to make each other laugh, and he dropped his mouth open to make the sound ‘Ha. Ha.' He saw that when a band played, they heard something; he saw that they danced, and he tried to lift his feet. His whole life was faking. He thought that was what people did.

At six o'clock on Tuesday he cleaned himself up and went out. He passed Kim's mother leaving the Lebanese take-away with a felafel roll in each hand and a heavy-looking bloke coming down the step behind her. ‘G'day, Ursula,' he said. She nodded, but the bloke gave him a dirty look and Raymond dropped his eyes. He got himself some chips and ate them as he walked to Kim's, stopping for a look in the window of a secondhand shop that sold things Alby might need: a stringless guitar or a plastic record rack or books with
titles like
Chiropody Today
or
Welcome to Bulbland
.
The tattoo shop was open. The artist skulked right down at the back, crouching in a burst chair with wooden arms. No thanks. You could get Aids off those needles, though maybe a little anchor, a bluebird . . .

The small concrete yard of Kim's house was scattered with faded junk mail and plastic pots of grey dirt and stalks. He tossed the chip paper against the fence, wiped his hands on his thighs, and pressed the buzzer. She might ask him if it was ‘a nice evening'. That kind of talk she picked up from her mother. He directed his eyes upwards and saw grey: a grey sky, grey air. It was not raining. Was that ‘nice'? The clog girl opened. Her boyfriend was in a band and once, when he had gone away on tour without taking her and Kim was staying the night at her mother's, the girl, who Raymond believed fancied him, had blundered into Kim's room bawling, wanting an audience for her sob story. She was disgusting. Raymond lay there on Kim's bed, staring up at the girl. He said, ‘Oh, go away. Go away or I'll shoot you. To put you out of your misery.' Now, seeing who he was, she turned away without speaking and headed for the back of the house. From the foot of the stairs, before he started to climb, Raymond glanced after her. He saw her shoulder and heel disappear into the kitchen. The bulb hanging there was lit. It swung slightly, and the shadow above it swung too. This he would remember.

Kim's door was closed. There were no voices, and no light showed under it, so he turned the handle and walked straight in. The room was stuffy, and almost dark. He stepped round the low bed, flicked back the curtain and pushed up the window, wedging it open with a hunk of chair leg she kept on the sill. Better air came in under the raised curtain, and at the same instant, in the tree right outside the room, a bird started to sing. He could see it, in against the trunk. It was a small bird but a loud one, and it was shrilling and yelling without any tune, making the kind of racket that sent Kim into fits. He felt a surge of meanness. Holding up the curtain with one hand, he turned his head to watch her wake.

The bed was a turned-over confusion of materials. Only the crests of the folds caught the light. Where was her face? Was she even there? This stupid bird! It was louder than a whole treeful of cicadas and still she didn't hear it. There was a pale bit of her up between the pillows: was it a cheek or a forehead? He stood there with one hand tangled in the curtain, feeling for a nail to hook it back. It caught, but still the light on the bed kept darkening: he was straining to make out her face. Outside, the bird shrilled and thrilled. A bit of her hair had got twisted across her chin. He pulled his hand out of the curtain folds and threw himself to his knees on the very edge of the mattress. It bounced. The smell hit him. Her mouth, half open, was clogged
with vomit and alive with a busy-ness of insects. His head and torso jerked back as if on a rein. He made no sound, but across the ridges of his windpipe rushed the shrieking, the squalling of the bird in the tree behind.

He reeled down the stairs and out on to the street. It was almost night. The rooflines of the houses sliced a green and bitter sky. Bells tinkled in showers and somebody was feebly panting, but otherwise the soundtrack had shut down. He kept walking, bumping the shop windows with his shoulder, dragging the soles of his rubber thongs. He blundered past a man sharpening his fingernails on a red brick wall, a bare-faced waitress swabbing terrace tables, a busker unpacking a saxophone in a doorway. He was heading for Alby's, if Alby's still existed; it must, it must, and he travelled slowly, trying to keep himself unfocused, for if he stayed submerged long enough he might surface at last flat on his back under Alby's scratchy grey blanket and open his eyes to see Kim standing crossly beside the bed, trampling Alby's comics with her heavy shoes, scowling at him and biting the split ends off her hair. But the night went on and on, and he ran out of vagueness. It gave out on him. He came to the end of it, and then he knew that nobody on earth, nobody he would ever hear of or meet had the authority to rescue him from the cold fact of what had happened; and yet, as he slunk along the avenue where the mercury vapour lights flushed and whitened, he gazed with stupid
longing at the line of spruikers outside the porn clubs, kings of the pavement, big fast-talking dangerous boys in long black overcoats and greasy little ponytails who moved him to awe as angels would, they were so tall, so graceful, so inky with unused power.

He was shoving his spare shirt into a bag when the knock came at Alby's front door. What day was it? Sun was shining. It felt like afternoon. He opened the door and Ursula was standing there. He looked quickly behind her for blokes, but she was on her own. Her face under the sunglasses was fatter, and she was dressed in black.

‘Get in the car,' said Ursula.

A taxi was waiting at the kerb, with the door open and the motor running. He hung back.

‘Do up your fucking shirt and get in the car,' she said. Her voice was hoarse and she smelt of grog, not beer, something stronger and sweeter. His legs weakened. He had not spoken for two days and he could not speak now. He followed her to the cab. As she climbed in ahead of him, he saw the gold chain round her ankle.