Janette Turner Hospital Collected Stories (28 page)

Shiv bangs on the door and Groucho pays.

The verdict is “Guilty as charged” and His Honour (Mr Humpty Dumpty) hands down the maximum sentence allowed under law.

“And we cannot stress too much,” he says, “that these practices are a rip in the very fabric of society. We cannot send out too strong a signal.”

In the Law Courts Club, over Scotch, conscious that not all his colleagues agree with him, conscious that some find him unduly harsh, conscious that some are out to get him, he says passionately: “If we can save only one of those little girls, just one. I'd consider myself …”

“They don't last long,” a colleague says. (Is he for or against?) “I read that the average lifespan at the Cross, once they're hooked, is five years. Most of them are dead by the time they turn twenty.” (Is it a trap? a subtle attack?)

“Awful,” His Honour equivocates, in anguish. “Appalling. An expressway to hell. We cannot send out too strong a signal. If I had one wish …”

“If you had one wish,” Groucho asks Lisa, “what would you –?”

“Sleep,” she says. “That's what I'd wish. I wish I could sleep for a week. See, at Ebony's, we never. They charge us thirty dollars a night, but you can't get a bed till after four, then they kick you out at nine in the morning.”

“That's appalling,” Groucho strokes the tiny golden hairs on her stomach, working down, very slowly, to the underpass. “Where do you go?”

“Nowhere. On the street. Maybe sit in the park till the cops come. You gotta stand, mostly, lean on shop windows.”

“Poor little mole,” he says. He rolls her over to inspect her scars. “But you've been such a naughty girl.”

“Yeah,” Lisa shrugs. “I reckon. Hey, guess what, I did have a dream, did I tell you? Well, it wasn't a dream, not really, because I was awake, but it was like a dream. I was on the street, leaning up against a window, I was feeling good, well naturally, I'd just juiced up, and this … this
place,
I saw this place inside my mind. It was a room that no one could get to, except me. There were, like, circles and circles of hedges and no one could find me. I slept for days and days, and Shiv couldn't knock on the door. That's what I'd wish for. Hey, is something the matter? Groucho?”

Oh the pain. He holds his skull between his hands as though it might break.

“Don't spin out,” she says, cradling him against her breasts. “Shush now, everything's all right.”

“I'm going to buy the whole night for you,” he says desperately. “I'm going to buy the whole night, so you can sleep. I'll watch over you while you sleep.”

“Groucho,” she says roughly, “Groucho …” She looks into the mirror and away. She sits over him, knees nipping his waist, and bends low. “Listen,” she whispers against his ear. “I'm gonna tell you something I shouldn't ought to. Don't come back here. Shiv's been taking pictures.”

“Oh,” he says, his head in his hand from the pain.

“It's come to me,” Shiv says. “The thing I was trying to remember.”

Lisa's hands are shaking. “Hurry, Shiv.”

“Knew
I'd seen his picture, except it wasn't him after all, musta been his double, this was a coupla years back. He's the dead spit of the one I was thinking of, but. The dead spit.”

Hurry, Shiv.

“This other one, he was a judge too, can you beat that? and a dead ringer for Humpty Dumpty, he blew his brains out in a car right on the Cahill Expressway. Right by the underpass. Tow truck comes for this breakdown, and there's a fucking corpse in it with a busted skull. Coupla years back, though, and afterwards it comes out in the papers, dirty pictures, blackmail, the works. That's what give me the idea in the first place. I already made our contacts, I sent our photos, piece'a cake. There's big money coming.”

Hurry, Shiv, hurry Shiv, ahhhhhhhhh …

“I'll tell ya what's weird though,” Shiv says. “When I saw the photos I took, that's when I remembered who he is. Who I thought he was. I seen the pictures before, in the papers.”

Lisa smiles a beatific smile.

“The dead spit, the dead bloody … Hey!” Shiv says. “Hey! Shit, that's
my
stuff, what the hell are you … you'll OD, you stupid bitch, what the hell are you doing?”

Lisa smiles a slow-motion smile. Beyond the underpass, she can see the circles and circles of privet and the room that no one can reach.

To Be Discontinued

“Randomness,” he says, nodding vigorously and taking a large gulp at the same time, and Katharine watches with a kind of anguished fascination as the word splashes against his teeth and lips and disperses itself along the seams of his eighty years. He looks at the glass, puzzled, and brushes at the spreading wet circle on his shirt and jacket. “How … ?” he mumbles. It is as though he has seen dampness well up from his chest to stain him.

“And … and indeterminancy,” he says, frowning, losing the tail-end of an idea. He studies his soaked clothing, squinting down at it, adjusting perspective. A thought finds him. “Before the war, '32 was it? I'd just arrived. Dazed, you can imagine; wandering round … wandering? floating, I should say, the hick from Nova Scotia thinking
Princeton, Princeton!
and I bump into him just like that. I mean, collide. The eyes, the hair turning handsprings, you couldn't mistake … My god! I thought,
Einstein.”

He pronounces it
deutschly,
lovingly, savouring the moment:
Ein-shtein.
And Katharine sees New Jersey before the fall, the campus-green Eden, white spires, orange papery trees; she smells September-crisp air that carries not a trace, not a whiff of Hitler. Is it possible to believe in such a time? A fiction surely, pure mythos. Hitler will be, and is, and always was.

“Kann you tell me
Einstein says to me” – and the accent is mock shtammer and Teutonic spume –
“Kann you tell me, ver iss I am?”

They both laugh, o wonderful, wonderful, she says, and did you really, as he is resting a hand on her knee, collide?

“Collisions,” he says. “Random collisions. I've always maintained they are the essence, if indeed randomness can be said to have an essence … if indeed it were possible to pin down such a concept as … but since the very first novel I've …” He is patting her knee with staccato agitation, as though he were drumming on a lectern. “They've let it go out of print, you know,” he tells her suddenly, leaning forward and slopping wine over both of them. “Oh dear oh dear,” he sighs.

“Really, it's nothing, I do it to myself all the time.” She dabs at her skirt, his sleeve, with a cocktail napkin. (Will I tell this sometime? she wonders. The way he speaks of Einstein?) Nothing but uneasiness arises from the thought. It feels improper, this towering over him, perched on the arm of a sofa into which he is pleated like a shrinking origami trick, a paper crane folding its wings, say; or a bonsai oak growing smaller and smaller. Ta-ra-rum, ta-ra-rum, he is drumming on her knee, and she sees, horrified, and then wills herself not to see, convinces herself she has not seen, the tears on his cheeks.

Last time he was here, she thinks, ten years ago, it was the Great Hall; this time a small lecture room.

“Oh I've
always
…” A young student who pushes hanks of curls off her face regards him raptly. “I've
always
wanted to meet you … such a wonderful speech.” And “Unforgettable, sir, absolutely unforgettable,” says a hearty voice, beardless but with chest hair showing through its open-necked shirt. “We met back in '80 when you came to … a distinctive voice, you were kind enough to say, and since then as a matter of fact …” Always wanted, and What an honour, and Your books have always … other students murmur, pressing adoration and title pages for the signing upon him.

Katharine sees him plump up in the sofa, like a wilting narcissus that has been watered.

“I do not believe,” he announces in a sudden access of lucid energy, “I do not believe that the current course of the novel can be further pursued. Mere anarchy is loosed upon … and must have its day, I suppose.”

He strokes the cheek of the nearest student as he hands back her book. “But then it is the task of language, the task of narrative, to
connect
the random events, to divine the … Where is the novel of ideas? Where is the thunder of language? Where is the … What did you say your name was, my dear?”

At the windowsill, Katharine looks out into the campus, not Princeton, but with much the same lawns, crabapples in bloom, lilacs, no white spires however. Here the buildings are limestone, stolid grey, though greened and softened with obligatory ivy, indeed so extravagantly softened that whole walls undulate in the breeze. There's a lake beyond the massy horsechestnuts. Campus pastoral, hasn't someone called this? (When? Where? Which country? In a letter perhaps?) It is late evening, but floodlights cast a golden twilight.

She is watching the back of the biology building, waiting. And there, yes, the girl appears again, crossing the courtyard from the library, wheeling her bicycle, pushing it into the gap in the privet behind the biology building, hiding it. The book-bag causes her indecision: should she leave it in the bicycle basket? take it with her? She hooks it over one shoulder, smooths shorts and t-shirt with her free hand, tosses back her long hair. She stands at the locked rear fire-escape door which can only be opened from the inside. Open sesame, she whispers. No, of course she does nothing of the kind. She transfers the book-bag to left hand and shoulder, scoops up a handful of pebbles and tosses them at a third floor window.

Up there, the drapes part for a moment, then close again. Katharine counts to thirty (five seconds for the hallway, ten for summoning the elevator, five for each floor) and the rear door of the biology building opens. Is it the courtyard light, puddling into the door, that makes him shade his eyes, look up and opposite swiftly? He steps out as though for the evening paper, a middle-aged man, professorial, rumpled. The girl hugs him. They disappear into the building.

“Penny for them,” says a colleague at her elbow, setting his drink on the windowsill.

“God, Jim, don't
do
that.”

“Sorry. Didn't mean to startle you.” Jim leans against the moulding and yawns. “These tedious old monuments.”

She raises her eyebrows. “Do you mean me? Or the great man?”

“Whom do you think? Rather past it, isn't he? Poor old sod. Speech all over the shop.”

Why does this hit her like a punch, make her angry, make her want (oh for Christ's sake!) to cry? She says, determined to keep her voice casually level: “I thought he was wonderful.”

“Women!” Jim laughs, patting her on the head. “Sentiment, sentiment, every time. To tell you the truth, Kate, even in his heyday I found his novels turgid and rambling. But a monument is a monument. Where's Robert tonight? Toronto for the Learned Societies? Or the Montreal thing?”

“Neither. Deep in proofreading and compiling the index.”

“Ah. Mary's got a School Board meeting. Shall we cut loose and go for drinks at Schooner's?”

“Thanks. Maybe some other time.”

“Sure,” he says curtly. “Think I'll get some more Scotch while they're laying it on.”

From the windowsill, she watches the pale yellow square on the third floor opposite, the drapes drawn but backlit by a desk lamp. She sees the car pull up in University Avenue at the front of the biology building, sees the middle-aged woman get out, sees her press the night-bell by the carved oak doors, casually, not thinking of anything in particular, a routine matter, picking someone up. And the watcher at the windowsill imagines giving this picture to students in a writing class: What is the relationship between the three people: the man, the girl, the woman with the car? What will happen next?

Something of the sort was done at Harvard, she recalls, with startling results. Two control groups, one male, one female, were shown a picture: a tranquil river scene, a wooden bench near a low bridge, a couple sitting close together on the bench. The women, Radcliffe women, the best and the brightest, saw, love love love, with possible probable eventually almost certain loneliness lurking somewhere in the wings, beneath the bridge, behind the bench. But the men, more than twenty percent of the men, leaders of the future, those culturally favoured and civilised Harvard men saw homicide, suicide, jealousy, stabbing, kidnapping, rape. Conclusion of the dazed researchers: intimacy is fraught with violence in male fantasies.

She turns from the window and sees Jim setting down two empty glasses, his own and that of a student, the one with the hanks of curls and the pale pink t-shirt. Something has been decided between them, they are about to leave. Jim glances across the room, catches her eye (important to him, that, she realises), and throws her an ambiguous half-belligerent look that she interprets as:
Your loss, sweetie.
In response, she raises a non-committal eyebrow and her glass.

She looks out the window again and the woman ringing the night-bell has disappeared. Someone has pushed the buzzer that will unlock the doors for ten seconds (but was it the man behind the third floor window? Or a random response to buttons randomly pushed? Does the man in the third floor office know the woman is rising through the elevator shaft?) From deep in the privet comes a small metallic gleam: the courtyard light bouncing off the bicycle guard. The watcher sets down her empty glass on the windowsill, fishes for her car keys, and leaves while all possibilities remain open.

In the parking lot, she stands distracted by the perfume of … lilacs? Is it? Or something tropical: magnolia, jasmine? There's a dark splash either of hibiscus or Icelandic poppy. Why is she here? She looks at her car keys uncertainly and puts them in her pocket. Something, the fog that comes off water on summer nights, pulls her; she follows it, dropping below the campus buildings, down the green slope to the banks. Brisbane River, yes, St Lucia campus: things click into place.

Another reprimand for an imperfect recitation of Verlaine, it still smarts, the evening tutorial session in shards behind her. Why does the old ogre – ogress? – find them necessary, these public bombardments of scorn? The girl, bruised, turns and looks back up the sweep of lawn to the cloisters, watching. It is said that the dragon lady paces round the grounds at night, academic gown billowing, reading Proust aloud to herself: Edwina Water- house who has terrorised and taught every known Queenslander French (so it sometimes seems). Crazy old bitch, the girl murmurs savagely to herself.

But then, even at this moment, she forgives all – every Queensland student forgives all – because of EW's passion, because of fleeting visitations of vulnerability, because Edwina is such an endless generator of anecdotes: the real thing, the eccentric-in-residence.

There was the time, late afternoon, on a walk through the cloisters from the library, head down, deep in thought, and here was – gulp – too late to avoid her, Edwina. Simone de Beauvoir, wasn't it? or Colette or maybe Fran
ç
oise Sagan, or all three, who held Edwina in their wry and passionate grip for that particular half hour. And why, why
au nom du ciel?
had a student of hers not read,
incroyable!
had actually not read …
Vraiment?
the latest Fran
ç
oise Sagan.
Incroyable!
Not on the course had
rien, rien
à
faire
with the matter!

And then chalk-dusted black-gowned Virginia-Woolfish Edwina reached up with a hand on the path of a vivid thought; felt by accident the bun that lay loosely on the nape of her neck, untidy, like an improperly annotated footnote. Caesura. A break in the brisk weather of conversation that scudded by in inscrutable French blusters. With both hands, Edwina gathered up a web of the thickish tendrils that trailed across her shoulders, was brisk with her hairpin-fishing fingers, twisted, tightened, got things settled. And then, with ever-after-to-be-wondered-at plaintiveness, asked:
“Pourquoi ne m'avez-vous pas dit que j'
é
tais d
é
coiff
éé
”

“Parce que, ma professeur tr
è
s honor
é
e”,
her speechless student could not even stammer, “because I am terrified of you.”

And who could have believed you cared a jot about the state of your hair?

Crazy old bitch, the girl by the river thinks fondly, remembering. By the boathouse she rummages under the bougainvillea for her bicycle, looks at her watch one more time. He's not coming tonight then. Some days nothing goes well. Will he ever come again? Did she dream him? Can she pass French? Is she stupid? Who can expect happiness to last?

She pushes her bicycle up the slope which is of course endless, which rims all the way uphill into past and future like Escher's waterwheel and begins again again begins again. Again: this is a forlorn ritual, pleasurably painful. She will wheel the bicycle through the crescent of cloisters just in case, though he has never … and cycle home past King's College looking up at his lighted window.

Through the cloisters a shadow moves towards her … no? yes, over there where the oleanders huddle darkly. No. Though there
is
someone coming from the direction of King's … a speck, a mist, a shape, I wist. I wished, I wish, she sighs. Pathetic. I place him everywhere.

“My god,” he says, slamming into nothing. “It's really you, it's
you
, I was afraid I was, I thought for sure I'd have missed you, didn't think I had a
hope
… We had a speaker after High Tea, I couldn't get away.”

She squeezes her hands tightly around the bicycle grips – this is not really happening, she knows it – then slides them along to the cool and rational metal.

“You look as though you've seen a ghost,” he teases. A hand brushes her cheek, light as air, and for a dizzy second she has a vision of the essence of things: the whole Queensland quad a shimmering cotillion of electrons.

Particles, photons, neutrinos, the fizz and bounce of them, the dip of years, the curve of time, she has to blink. And how did they get down to the bank again?