. . . There can be a devil-may-care desperado glamour to the great
child liar. For myself, however, I lacked the charisma to make a vocation
of lying. I struggled to regain the mainstream, someone who might be
believed one day, who might be certified as having the Truth, the Lies and
the Fantasies firmly defined and even a weapon which, by virtue of my
seniority and good name, I could impose on others. I was more craven
than my older brother,
il miglior fabbro.
After three great lies he accepted
that his state was irredeemable, scoffed at shame and guilt and
launched a blazing career. My brother was the audacious bushranger
of mendacity, the reprobate, and every word he uttered was hunted
down and put on trial. He made raids on the truth, spicing his lies
with just enough to make works of art of them. He made lying beautiful
and brave; he lied for the aesthetics of it, not just for self-interest.
He became the Anti-Truth, the great threat to the world of reason. He
became powerful in his own way, shaking the foundations of everything
my parents stood for: reason, science and a consensus on what is real
and what is not. He was king of a space they couldn't enter, unless they
were prepared to lie too. He led a charmed life, replacing trust and
veracity with stories giving off a golden glow, until disaster struck.
All of us children (there were seven kids in our family) wanted to
be heroes, warriors, martyrs. We dreamed of being the one to rescue
hapless folk from burning houses. We were each convinced, or at least
hopeful, of our staunch, unflinching bravery in the face of danger. We
would, given the opportunity, catch snakes by the neck with our
lightning reflexes. We would stand and calmly hand the frightened
people a place in the lifeboat and, dry-eyed, go down with the ship.
Silent on the rack, on the gallows, the guillotine, the executioner's
block. Bystanders would remark on our pale, calm faces as we died,
innocent of any crime, doing far far better things. We led the charge
of the Light Brigade. We were the underground Resistance. We longed
for opportunity to prove it.
My brother went to New Zealand for a holiday. He was swimming
nonchalantly in the shallows when he saw a mother and child
screaming and coursing steadily on the current out to sea. Adrenaline
rushing through him, he scampered over the rocks to the last bastion
before the open sea . . . well the long and short of it was that he, with
utmost bravery and disregard for himself, saved both their lives.
There were no witnesses and he forgot to get their names in writing,
so elated was he with the serendipitous transition he had just made
from Anti-Truth to Hero.
I think the bitterest day of his life was the day he came home.
Chest swelling, words falling out of mouth, he, with an uncharacteristic
lack of cool, poured out the story to his mother and father.
Once you are an established liar, you generally know the difference
between lies and truth. While you are in the early experimental
stages, everything you say might or might not be true, you tell yourself.
Once you are cast out from the garden with public exposure and
ignominy, you tend to accept that it was the latter. You begin to fantasise
about what it would be like to be believed, even if you were lying.
Three great lies do make a liar of you. Telling the truth slowly
becomes redundant. You have no choice but to grow up, burdened by
the weight of lies, real and perceived, and then become a novelist in
order to begin fabricating the great truths your lies have unearthed.
Ursula sat stunned for a moment, boiling and cold.
In it he stole more than her name, but it was about him, and it was, she thought, written for her eyes only. Only she, Ursula, could have picked the half-truths and the lies. He had to have known that she was an English postgrad, had to have hoped she would stumble across it.
The cheek of it! But with her rising anger there rose in her something else altogether. The delight that he would take the energy to poke and prod her! To think that he thought of her, even knew and remembered so much. She found herself weeping, humbled.
She began to sob, and smile, hugging her brother to her chest.
She thought of Gotthilf and Ursula in the abstract, looking on. How much they knew of each other! What secrets they shared. What terrible partners their bodies were. Her mind slid, in the abstract, to the reason she had shut Gotthilf out. She thought of Ugolini and
that
, coldly. She wondered how she could have let her brother go, when he had so endearingly, cheekily, been able to keep a hold on her.
How dare he! The monster. She laughed out loud. She was shaking.
She stole the copy of the journal.
The next day she was at the library at opening time and searched the Austlit database for âHoudini'. She found one entry. He had published a story in an anthology entitled
Women on Men
. She ordered it on interlibrary loan, torn now with a twisted longing and grief over the past. She kept laughing through tears at him, with him. He had really got them a good one.
The book took two weeks to arrive. In that time Ursula stopped all research, all preparation for Christmas. She scoured databases and bookshops. If he had a book, he had buried it far more cunningly than the article and the story. At first she thought that it had to be offshore; then, because her name threw up nothing, she became convinced that there was no book. Then she woke up one morning knowing with sudden clarity that there was, and that it was not published under anything as easy as their names. She searched through all the telephone directories in Australia for both his name and her own, but found nothing. She imagined storming in on him somewhere, waving his stories, calling him to account, and seeing him grin, cheekily. And the thought of having him there in front of her, delighted at the success of his scheme, filled her with a shuddering terror that she couldn't define. She telephoned and asked Pa for any information on Gotthilf's latest address. Pa was silent for a moment. Then, his voice annoyed, he said, âWe don't want any encyclopaedias, thank you,' and hung up on her. She asked all her brothers and sisters. No one knew. Gotthilf had disappeared. Then âTopend' arrived over the interlibrary loans desk. There was no bio, no further clue. Just the story.
âTOPEND' by URSULA HOUDINI
Helmut Houdini cycled from Port Augusta to Darwin in midsummer
on an old Bullock pushie with a goatskull bolted to the steering
column for handlebars, ten litres of water in panniers, a hat and a
homemade swag.
He was not an ordinary young man.
For one thing he was very beautiful. His sisters called him Rufus,
partly because he was lean and hard and golden-red and partly
because it rhymed with Dufus. Helmut had copper-gold dreadlocks,
standing out about his head like a fiery halo. He looked like a
prophet, saint or devil but he had the eyes of a celestial puppy. They
were deep set, of a bluewater ocean colour. They usually shone with
an interplay of hungers, the strongest of which was the desire for
human company.
Helmut perches with unconscious grace, staring intensely at the men
seated next to him along the bar of the Burke and Wills, picking up
their discarded words like souvenirs or treasure.
âMy oath. Them Inderneejuns f'sure.'
âYep. Guns, ammo, nukular warheadsâjust two hundred miles
thataway.' The big, miserable looking man points with the flicker of
an eyebrow. âAnd they's Muslims.' Everyone mutters.
âYup. More ammo than the whole Australian army.'
The fan sighs above them, its blades starting no planes. A gecko
is upside down on one of them.
Helmut hears the same rumbles and grumbles wherever he goes.
Darwin is squashed between the thumb and forefinger of the sky and
earth. The build-up has brought the air to the boil early and has
simmered it for months until the fine rich soup burns the nasal
passages and brains with its heady and intolerable spices.
âDarwin'll get it first. You'll see. Like in '42. Boom, out of the
blue. Fires and bits of ships all over the town. An airborne croc
bought down a plane.'
The men hmmm hmmm hmmm yeah into their beers. Helmut pretends
he too has heard it all before but his eyes leap about uncontrollably.
Mutter Mutter
Darwin is seething and rumbling with fear-mongering and
bitterness, deserted by the army and the navy to suffer its stewpot
summer alone. The Fanny Bay cannons are stuffed with tissues,
nappies, needles and condoms. One good shot at the invaders with
that lot should do the trick. No one even laughs.
Mutter Mutter
Helmut doesn't take it too seriouslyâhe is a visiting nutter, not
a beetle pinned to the earth. Darwin sweats greenness and he has
never seen anything like it. For a rufus red-desert man, who drank
his way overland in ten litre gulps, it is soothing to the eyeballs and
the words of humankind are like water.
The first mortar struck with no warning.
It had been a strange day. The air was expectant, as if prescient.
Lurid streaks stained an aqua-green sky above violet clouds. Nothing
moved. The sea was grey glass, brittle and silent. Helmut spent the
day fitting a headlight into his goatskull. He had just dossed down in
the bush on the outskirts of the city when the nightsky was split in half
by a channel of incandescent flame. The noise filled every orifice of
his body, followed by the tingling suction of an awful silence. Then the
blitz began in earnest. Darwin was being bombed to oblivion and the
sky was shot through with strafing tracers, searchlights, flak and the
screaming descent and impact of mortars.
Helmut was galvanised into action.
Legs pumping with adrenaline, he pedals madly south down the
velvet-black Stuart Highway. He imagines the lovely green city
behind him, the fires, the fish and ships smashed to bits in the
harbour. Tears run down his face, lit up in the odd afterglow of his
dim eyesocket headlights. A few raindrops the size of conkers fall
from the sky.
He pushes through the night, knowing that he is pedalling on the
rim of Australian history. The invaded city looms darkly in his mind,
smouldering as the bombing ceases and the gunfire begins. He holds
onto his strings of words, gingerly. Perhaps he is carrying their last
words on earth. He pedals. A car passes, piled up with all the worldly
goods a family could throw together. Faces stare back, reflecting his
own shocked excitement and terror, as they pull rapidly out of the
glow of his skull lights and disappear south. He pedals, eating up the
kilometres of the dark highway. The tumult dies and the machine-gun
rattle becomes faint and intermittent. The road glows ahead like a
pale knifeblade. He pedals, homesick suddenly for the burned gold
and red summer at the edge of the southern blue sea.
Two hundred kilometres from Darwin, Helmut stops with the
dawn, awed and exhausted, sombre as Anzac Day. In the Chicken
Lickin' Roadhouse the people look stunned, shocked bloodless, stoic.
He leans, wide-eyed, towards a truckie who is chatting to the girl
behind the doughnuts and Snickers bars.
âPretty bad about the war, aye.'
The truckie stares the golden boy up and down, nods vaguely and
moves slightly away, turning back to the girl behind the Snickers.
âA real topender, last night. Right above Darwin. Bloody
beautiful, if ya ask me.'
Ursula crumbled. She left the bookshops and the library and went home to curl up and think about Gotthilf. She had to see him, but couldn't move. What had happened, really, all those years ago? She, Ursula, had written nothing. Where did Gotthilf find the energy to goad, tease and love an idea of his brothers and sisters? How did he know? How did he manage to care? This absent and dismissed boy who had watched, crowed and written about them.
She stayed day after day on greying sheets, unwashed and staring.
Lilo suddenly appeared at her front door the week before Christmas, told Ursula she stank, and made her get up and have a shower. Lilo was bright-eyed, secretive, knowing. Waiting. Uninformative about her time in Budapest.
âBin writing lately?' she said, suddenly, grinning.
Lilo had found another story in an American science fiction e-zine. Ursula felt as though she had been expecting this. Waiting for it.
âThey are Gotthilf,' Ursula whispered.
It was a story that entered deeply into Arno's world.
âOUTER SPACE' By URSULA HOUDINI
Arno's computer crashed.
For perhaps three months he had sat with its gentle blue glow
illuminating his face, shining through his ears and its sweet hum
ringing on into his sleep and dreams. Occasionally he had wandered
out into the sunlight, blinking, surprised at the rapidity of the
transition from spring to summer and so on. The dog shit on the
bottom step of the crumbling stair, which had been brown, was now
white and brittle-looking. It was refreshing. He would sit for ten
minutes on his rotted sloping verandah, imagining a stream of
molecules bombarding his skin. He could almost see vitamin D. Soon,
however, he would imagine that he could see UV smashing the D,
destroying the forces of benevolent molecular health, and,
vanquished, he would turn in, back to the gentle blue.