My Life as a Fake (14 page)

Chubb was young and fit. He would have thought nothing of walking thirty miles through the bush to Govett’s Leap, half of it not even on a track, but this tiny, tiny girl with her mother’s huge eyes and her little clinging pink-nailed fingers had got the better of him. Even in her first week of life she was delectably pretty, very clearly defined lips and a fine bird-bone chin, and when she slept he would sometimes sit and marvel at her. But for the most part he was just plain knackered, sleeping like a soldier in the trenches, never long enough or deep enough, the slightest murmur from the box being sufficient to set him wide awake and back on his feet.

Yet his hearing was obviously selective, for when the back door was jimmied open, so brutally that the wooden frame was later found split along the length of both its verticals, he continued sleeping, and it was not until he was spoken to that he raised his head and stared into the dark.

Noussette? he said happily, for he had convinced himself that she would finally relent. Is that you?

You bastard, said the hard, accusing voice he’d first heard in the Melbourne court and had expected to never hear again. You unmitigated cunt, said the so-called Bob McCorkle, standing at the foot of the bed.

Get up, the intruder said, and then the light switch, an old Bakelite contrivance, clacked on. In the light of the bare hundred-watt bulb Chubb saw that the monster had captured his baby, and had it clutched to his chest with the yellow blanket spilling down below his knees.

Give me the baby, he said. I need to feed her. It was the best he could invent.

Then fetch her milk, the creature ordered. His appearance was again much altered, but no amount of drooping moustaches and old-fashioned starched collars could hide the cruel planes of his distinctive cheeks, the broad dark brow, the hugely modelled nose and chin. He now turned as Chubb rose naked from his bed and followed him into the kitchen.

Get the milk, the other said. Put it in the thing. He snapped his thick fingers. And that thing. There. Use that.

What thing?

The thing, damn you, the beast cried, pointing to a rubber teat floating in the steriliser. The tit.

The teat?

I am a poet who does not know the names of things, but whose fault is that? Tit, tight, teat, tote. What a great joke that is. Fee, fie, fo, fum.

Chubb would recall this odd conversation later, though at the time all of his considerable intelligence was focused on how he might rescue his baby. Excuse me, he said. He loped around the kitchen naked, making formula, pouring it into a bottle. Excuse me, he said as he lit the gas, boiled the water, heated the bottle in his single saucepan. All he could think of was saving her, yet his tormentor was almost seven feet in height and Chubb could not conceive of a way of injuring him sufficiently, not without risking damage to the baby who was sleeping peacefully against her kidnapper’s breast. Once the formula was warm Chubb felt he had no choice but to relinquish the bottle to him, and though the babe had been fed an hour earlier she now began to suck again.

The creature gazed down on her, fury in his eyes. You never gave me a childhood, he said.

Chubb quickly pulled on his trousers.

Can you imagine what it is to be born at twenty-four?

But Chubb had no interest in entering into what he felt to be an unwinnable argument with a large and angry lunatic.

Can you even begin to imagine the cruelty of that? Answer.

It would be very puzzling, Chubb said, I am sure.

You made my life as a joke.

It was not the last time Chubb would be brought trembling to the abyss, where he might consider the blasphemous possibility that he had, with his own pen, created blood and bone and a beating heart.

Mr McCorkle, he said, I swear to you I regret the first time I ever wrote your name.

But you will regret it more, much more. It is far too big a thing to just say sorry. There are consequences. There must be justice. I have been thinking of justice for so very long.

And where have you been thinking?

Where? You think I would tell you that?

As you like, it doesn’t matter.

You think I will tell you where I live? So you can send the coppers? Well I’m not frightened of police, as you must bloody well remember. But where I am, dear Father—and he spoke this last word so hatefully that Chubb felt the hairs rise on his neck—where I live I am not a joke at all, not a fake in any way. I am a Lord, in fact. You see, being a foreigner, no one thinks it strange that I do not know the names of things. Sometimes they themselves do not know. Where I am, if you must understand, I sleep with the snakes and the spiders and often I have named them too.
Syzygium McCorklus
, he said, and when Chubb, not understanding, questioned him about the spelling he was happy enough to provide it for him.

It is a tree, he said, and in the slight compression of his lips revealed a pride which his eyes challenged the other to undo.

At that moment Chubb had the sudden intuition that
this dangerous fellow had invented himself as some Edwardian botanist. You are in Africa, he suggested.

Wherever I am, I have put myself outside your power. I have made myself a whole man, almost—except, when I hold this child, I feel the weight of everything you stole from me. This I had not expected, but now I know exactly what I want from you.

What is that?

This is a childhood, he said.

A child, Chubb corrected. A baby. Just one week old.

But all the parts of its brain are already growing. When he touches my finger, he learns something.

She, said Chubb, watching in horrified silence as the baby’s white hand grasped the creature’s index finger.

You must give her back to me, Mr McCorkle.

Of course, the other said. Just permit me to show the stars to her.

I doubt she can see that well.

The creature was wrapping the fallen blanket more securely around the child. He was not without tenderness. Indeed, he fashioned from the folds a little hood for her head. Just the same, he said, I will tell her their names.

What was Chubb to do? Even with no child to concern him, it is unlikely he could have overpowered this giant alone. It is cold, he said.

No it isn’t, said the other.

Chubb held open the screen door and stepped out into the night behind him. He paused just a second to make sure the lock was snibbed open, but by the time he reached the front gate the creature was sprinting soundlessly up the middle of the road with the baby’s blanket streaming behind like a piece of ghastly skin. Chubb began to run. The kidnapper swung into the shadow of a jacaranda and was swallowed by the night.

Mr Blackhall was not yet late for work. He was in the hallway, standing on Chubb’s chair and—as the court record reveals— reading the electric meter, when his tenant unexpectedly dashed into the house and knocked him to the floor. Christopher Chubb had looked unwell for the past week but now, as he grasped the frightened landlord by his skinny shoulders, he appeared deranged.

Mr Blackhall, they have took my baby, or so Blackhall was quoted later. They have took my child.

Give me a shilling!

Chubb dug deep into his pockets and pulled out a fistful of pennies and threepences. Blackhall then hurried across the street to the phone box and called Chatswood police station. He was put through to Sergeant Bob Fennessey who ordered him to stay with the father, and so he did.

I never met Mr Blackhall but imagine him rather like some sort of mouse in a stationmaster’s uniform: the peaked cap, the blue serge trousers, the New South Wales Railways watch in his fob pocket, shadowing Chubb as he paced up the hallway and out into the street, along the verandah and down the side of the house by the blue hydrangeas. Five minutes later, a freshly washed black 1939 Chevrolet pulled in to the kerb and from it emerged a tall, sharp-nosed man with deep-set grey eyes and the build of a champion wood-chopper.

As Sgt Fennessey approached, Mr Blackhall drew to one
side, as one does when trying not to obscure a work of art. They took his baby, he said.

The policeman noted the way Chubb shied away from him, shaking his head like a heifer that does not wish to get into the truck. He noted too that Chubb wore no shoes and his yellow socks were worn through on the soles.

Mr Blackhall then led Fennessey into the house, which the latter discovered to be in an alarmingly neglected state, causing him to experience what he later described as ‘a bad feeling.’

There was nowhere to sit in the kitchen, but the sergeant took out his notebook. Your missus left you, he suggested.

The father did not respond.

Who took the baby, Mr Chubb? Was it the mother?

Chubb opened his mouth but the reply was like a bird lost inside a house. It was a man, he said at last.

Was this man known to you?

Can I sit down?

Mr Blackhall consulted his watch and then fetched him the chair.

Chubb collapsed onto the seat. It’s a little girl, he said, just one week old.

You chased the mongrel, did you?

He tricked me.

And he was known to you?

Here the policeman noted another significant hesitation.

I had seen him before, Chubb finally admitted, but I do not know him.

Could you describe him for me?

This Chubb could do very well. He might have supplied even more detail had not Mr Blackhall, who’d quietly retreated into the front room, now interrupted from the doorway. A word, Sergeant, he said.

On entering the front room the policeman saw the landlord holding his left finger to his small moustached mouth while with his right hand he proffered a collection of yellowed newspapers. When Sgt Fennessey returned to the kitchen it was with an entirely new sense of purpose, all his natural sympathy now neatly packed away.

Have you ever been in trouble with the police before, Christopher?

Am I in trouble now?

Don’t be a smart-arse, Christopher.

No, I haven’t.

Not even in the state of Victoria?

No.

He produced
The Argus
of May 7, 1946. What about this, then?

Have you been going through my things? Chubb demanded, and then he saw his landlord in the doorway. You bloody dill, he cried. I was never in trouble with the police. It was Weiss they prosecuted.

Don’t you worry about him, Christopher. You worry about me, because I am someone who is worth worrying about. Did you ever make a hoax, Christopher? I think you should know what a hoax is.

I do, yes.

It is when you try to make a mug out of someone. Would that be a fair definition, Christopher? Did you ever hear of Bob McCorkle? That would be a hoax, I reckon.

Having taken the paper from the policeman, Chubb looked down at the collage he had made so light-heartedly, so long ago, and only then did he understand what trouble he was in. For the moment he claimed he had breathed life into this image, he would be declared a lunatic, and once he was a lunatic he was as good as guilty. And while they were wasting
time in the kitchen, the creature had his child. At this moment, somewhere in Sydney, she would be crying for her bottle and her captor knew not even the names of the things he needed in order to care for her. If he did not tell this policeman the truth, there was no chance in hell she would be brought back alive.

He sat there, silent, unable to move or speak.

Australia is the country where a woman named Chamberlain was very recently convicted of murdering her baby on the basis of no evidence other than her refusal to cry on television. Her crime, it seems, was being unwomanly, and in looking at Christopher Chubb, one might detect a corresponding unmanliness. After all, what normal man would want to adopt a baby to raise alone? To the tabloid press, there seemed one reason a male would adopt a child: to murder it.

By the time Chubb was found not guilty, his life had been effectively destroyed. He had lost his child, his mistress, his job, his house, and the last of his friends. Yet he was not convicted, as Mrs Chamberlain would later be on just as little evidence. In this sense he was lucky. And if many people believed he had smuggled the child out of the country simply to spite its mother, this damaged only his personal reputation, not his civil liberty.

Still, he felt no joy in his acquittal, only the most colossal and unexpected emptiness. Having been so exhausted by the
child in a single week, why did he now seek her face in every pram? The man whose romantic relations had been distinguished by his profound lack of need could now be devastated by something as saccharine and sentimental as a knitted bootie abandoned on the smeary floor of the Bondi tram. Every little sign of life, even a powdery bogong moth captured inside the cup of his hand, somehow felt exactly like the child, the desperate beating of a life whose needs must be obeyed.

One might have expected this agony at least to nourish his writing, but at this moment of crisis all art seemed worthless to him and there was nothing else he had ever believed in.

The public scandal meant that even copywriting was now closed to him, and after trying a number of poorly paying jobs he finally settled into the occupation he had once invented for McCorkle, selling insurance door-to-door. Even here, inside the sixth circle of his own prank, he toiled as a mediocre salesman, always expecting that behind this door, in answer to that bell, he would discover his child. For the same reason there was not a bus he boarded or a railway platform he waited on where he was not looking for that great dark figure with its distinctive springy gait. He found himself hoping that the monster might not yet be satisfied with his revenge, so when forced to abandon his house for a flat, and that for a boarding-house, he left a forwarding address to ease his tormentor’s search.

Chubb’s slow slide towards the boarding-house took almost four years, during which, he told me, he was far too distressed to write or even read. Finally, in the spring of 1956, he received a forwarded parcel from the Australian painter Donald Defoe, once a casual acquaintance. Defoe now lived in Indonesia, which was presently most turbulent, and he seemed not to have heard of Chubb’s difficulties. The artist
was a graceful, thoughtful man who apologised for intruding on his privacy, but hoped the poet ‘might like to hear of a wonderfully mad character who has just left my house today—a shadow of the hilarious avant-gardist you invented back in ’46….’

Defoe’s visitor had been travelling with a little girl about four years old, and they’d fled to Bali from Yogyakarta, where ‘the alleged McCorkle’ had been busy learning the local language, an ambition foiled by his ‘completely tragic inability to roll his r’s.’ The artist had found the pair of them wandering the streets during Ramadan and took them in so they would not be arrested by the religious police. That first night, he wrote, ‘McCorkle recited “The Darkening Ecliptic” to great dramatic effect.’

He and the little girl had stayed two weeks, at the end of which the visitor, having drunk too much arak, declared his host a mediocrity and himself a great genius, but in spite of this Defoe had enjoyed his company. Though ‘quite mad of course,’ he had great energy and a huge curiosity about everything he saw. The painter was sorry when he took the little girl off to live in the north of the island, at Singaraja. Accompanying the letter, Chubb told me, was a charcoal drawing Defoe had made of the man and child. It was only six inches by four inches, but very powerful: the great hulking, brooding figure with the delicate child snuggled into his lap.

This all occurring before the Xerox age, Chubb had photographic copies made of both the letter and the drawing and sent them to Noussette. I am sure you know who this is, he wrote, and asked her for money so he could go to Indonesia and fetch the child. If the mother recognised the man, she made no mention of him in her reply.

‘Dear C’—and in being unable to spell out his name gave some unintended sign of the distress she felt.

The letter was unsigned. She did, however, enclose a cheque for a considerable amount of money and Chubb was, as a result, able to buy a ticket to Bali, and from there he began the long and fruitless journey to the northern coast, and thence to Java and Yogyakarta, where he finally had some small amount of luck. That is, he discovered the Agam Hotel, where ‘Mr Bob’ had stayed during the year he doggedly pursued his studies in Javanese. The owners remembered him, and happily let his room to Chubb.

No reason to stay. No reason to go. I waited.

In those days Indonesia was under martial law and seems to have been rather free of tourists, but even in the middle of this particularly tumultuous year, a certain number of Europeans made the trip along the volcanic spine of Java to Yogyakarta, where they would put up at the Agam Hotel. In 1956 these travellers would have been shown Donald Defoe’s charcoal sketch. One of them, a German botanist named Karl Burkhardt, recognised the subjects. The man and girl were living in a lodge on Lake Toba in Sumatra. The child had had very serious dysentery, and Burkhardt himself had cured her with rice water.

So, cried Chubb, he does not care for her.

Oh no, the German said, it is very touching to watch him with her, how he combs her hair and has her clean her teeth.

Chubb abruptly excused himself, went to his room, returned to the front desk, and settled his bill. He took a trishaw to the railway station and, seven hours later, at one in the morning, boarded a crowded train for Jakarta. Then began a long and difficult journey: small rebellions were erupting here and there, and soldiers were forever taking him aside to learn his business. But he persisted and finally was rowed across the eerie flat surface of Lake Toba. He came ashore on the island of Samosir, where the German said the lodge was situated.

Of course there was nothing there, or worse than nothing. He was shown the vacant lodge, and there, tucked up inside the low rafters, he found a collection of leaves and flowers all roughly glued to the brown paper pages of a handmade scrapbook. Had his daughter made this with her abductor? It was painful to imagine.

Once more Chubb fell into a slump, which differed not in nature but in degree from those he’d suffered in both Sydney and Yogyakarta.

Lake Toba, according to Slater, is breathtaking and the people are famous for their good looks and beautiful voices, but Chubb’s only memory of the place is of dreary water, interminable nights when he lay in darkness, his head aching, in a fug of burning cow dung.

What did you do there, I asked.

Black dog, Mem.

How long did you stay?

He shrugged. All he was certain of was that it was wet season when a small boy in a motor boat arrived with a letter addressed to him. The stamps were Malaysian, he said, the postmark Penang, and it was addressed in the beast’s own hand: ‘Mr Chubb, Samosir, Sumatra.’

But listen, Mem, to the note inside. ‘Dear Chubb, the little girl has died. She contracted a fever. It did not take very long.’

How horrible!

No, Mem, no. It cheered me up. That’s the point. Whatever blow he intended to deliver, it bounced right off me-
lah
. I knew she was alive, and that he now was frightened of me.