The Idea of Perfection (41 page)

It had not seemed especially terrible.

In any case, in the weeks after the event, she had come to see, with a fresh sickness at the heart, that he had been planning the pulleys, the weights, for days. Perhaps for weeks. He had lain beside her in the bed, knowing that he had bought the rope, tested the counterweights. If she had to reproach herself, it was for much more than just one day.

If they thought she had taken her own life, Douglas Cheeseman would live the rest of his life the way she had lived hers for so long, with a hole in his life where the dark knowledge lived: that he was guilty. He was already a man of apologies. It would never let him go. He would reproach himself for making all that dust, for meekly accepting that she did not want a lift, for not finding words that would have made her change her mind. He would go over and over the words, would toss and turn at night with the what
if
of it.

In the end, the reproach would simply boil down to being the person he was, and not some other, better, person.

She would be the only one who could tell him it was not true, and it was already too late to do that, even too late to leave him a note.
Dear Douglas, comma.

All at once she saw that when someone
took their own life,
they
took
other people’s lives, too. They knew that, but they went ahead and planned it, and then did it anyway. They were condemning the ones they left behind to a life sentence of self-reproach.

There was cruelty in that. It was even more than cruelty, it was a kind of sadism. The worse the death, the greater the cruelty.

She had only seen the cruelty Philip had done to himself, and taken it as proof of how bad she must be. As a doctor, he could have chosen a hundred painless ways to die, but had been so desperate he had punished himself in the worst way he could think of.

She had taken it, the savagery of what he had chosen, as the final proof of her own guilt. No clearer statement could be given to her of what a terrible person she must be. She had judged herself, and put herself away in the cage marked
dangerous.

Thinking of Douglas Cheeseman suffering the same guilt, she saw it differently. His crimes did not deserve such a punishment. Perhaps hers had not either.

What had they been, those crimes of hers? A fear of revealing herself that could look like indifference, a coldness in the face of declarations, a malicious turn of phrase, and all the usual ones: dishonesty, selfishness, envy and greed. None of it was anything special. She was not a monster, so
dangerous
that she had to hide herself away for fear of the damage she might inflict. She was only that most ordinary of criminals, a human being.

She saw it all in a twist of revulsion as if a muscle was turning itself inside out. It was a kind of cramp, except there was no pain, only grief like a knife.

Douglas!
she thought, seeing his face, flinching from her last words.
No!

Move,
she told her legs, and felt them wave feebly through the viscous water.
Pull,
she urgently instructed her arms. Feebly, clumsily, the blunt flippers of hands pushed vaguely at the coldness. Slowly, uncertainly, she felt herself rising against the deep numbing pull of the water.

Her first breath felt as if it was the first breath ever. She sucked it into her chest with a long wavering effort like a sob.

She could see the dog now, standing near the basket, shaking itself in a spray of silver drops.

Hoy, she called.

She gathered breath and tried again.

Hoy there!

It heard her and came over the stones, right out into the water, until it was standing chest-deep, looking out towards her eagerly.

Hoy, she called again, and it answered her with one short
yip.
She could see its tail, going backwards and forwards, brushing the surface of the water like a flag cheerfully signalling.

Slowly, effortfully, she swam towards the bank. She kept her chin up, straining away from the water, keeping her eyes on the dog, and when she reached the bank she lay across the warm stones, feeling the hardness of them, their kindly solid shapes under her body.

 

 

Walking along the track to the road, her skin felt silky and smooth, as if a layer had been washed off. The heat pressed in around her, but her skin moved through it sweetly. Flies circled and zoomed, but at a distance.

It was a relief to leave behind the hissing of the casuarinas. The noise the wind made here, scraping the stiff leaves of the gumtrees together, was a harder, drier, more straightforward sort of noise.

When she got to the road she stood looking up and down it. The dog stood panting beside her, looking up and down too.

She listened, drawing a half-circle with the toe of her sandal. The dust was as fine and dry as face-powder, stirring in a little cloud under her foot as it left its sign.

She looked, and listened, and so did the dog, but nothing appeared around the bend in either direction. She began to walk. Ahead of her, her shadow lay black on the road so that she trod into herself at each step. She kept stopping, mistaking the sound of the blood in her ears, or the rush of wind in the leaves, for the drone of an engine. Every time she stopped to listen, the wind smudged all the sounds. She took a few more steps, the dog bobbing along in front, stopped to listen again. Even a dog would not be able to hear, if a vehicle — a white ute, just as an example - was approaching, above this constant whispering of the leaves.

She stood for a long time, looking back down the road, listening for the drone that could not quite be heard above the noise of the wind. She stood until the dog pushed at her leg with its nose, but the road remained obstinately empty.

GORGEOUS! WONDERFUL! TERRIFIC!

Freddy’s voice was soothing, calling from the darkness. The skin that was, but at the same time was not, Felicity Porcelline, was shadowless under the lights. It was arranged on the tapestry chair with its chin on its hands and a playful little smile on its lips. The hair hung naughtily over one eye, and one leg was stretched out, the toe pointed like a ballet-dancer’s.

She glanced down at it, warmly golden in the lights. The way the light fell around the thigh, the gleam along the surface, was lovely. You could lose yourself in the sheen of it, the lovely taut silkiness.

There was a kind of rumble from over in the blackness near the camera.
Thunder,
she thought, and did a different pose, with one leg up over the arm of the chair and a hand behind her head, so her breasts were nice and pointy. She thought about white lilies, four of them in a tall conical vase, their petals cool, smooth, unblemished, and felt her face go cool, smooth, unblemished as well. They had only just started the
poses.
There was all the time in the world.

The thunder rumbled again, and she realised that it was not thunder. It was a voice, a male voice, and it was not Freddy’s voice saying
That’s gorgeous! That’s perfect!
Freddy had stopped saying anything at all.

It was like the pain of tearing yourself out of a dream, back into daylight and your own flesh, to pay attention. Something was happening, out there in the darkness beyond the lights. She could not see properly, but there was movement, pieces of darkness moving against the deeper darkness.

She narrowed her eyes to try to penetrate the glare. There was a watching silence now from the breathing bulk of the shadows. She remembered not to screw up her eyes because it gave you wrinkles, and shielded her eyes with her hand instead. The lights still concealed whatever was behind them, but there seemed to be more than one shape with shoulders out there, more than one solid mass of something moving.

William’s hurt himself at school, the rumble was saying.

It had been words before, too, but she had not been prepared to understand them.

Blood everywhere, but he’s all right.

The skin went on sitting in the chair with one leg over the arm, while Felicity withdrew behind it again. It was possible to concentrate quite hard on the small crescent of shadow cast by the knee that belonged to the skin, and to examine just how the light and shade fell on the cloth of the chair. The fabric appeared to be darker in the crescent of shadow, which was just what you would expect, of course. There was nothing actually surprising or unusual about it, but it seemed quite important to go on watching it and thinking about it. For example, you could think about the fact that, if the skin stayed exactly where it was, for a year or so, there would be a little crescent where the fabric would not fade, while the lights would fade the rest of the fabric, and when the shadow was finally taken away, by the mechanism of the knee being moved, as a result of the leg contracting one set of muscles and elongating another, there would always, forever after, be a small piece of unfaded fabric just there.

They had to call me at work.

The words were becoming clearer, not a rumble at all any more, but definitely words, and at any moment the skin was going to have to recognise the voice as well as the words, and would have to go back to being
Felicity Porcelline.

She wasn’t at home. So they called me, you see.

There was a movement in the darkness beyond the lights, and there he was stepping out from the edge of the shadow.
Hugh Gordon Porcelline.
Hugh. Her husband, in his good charcoal suit he always wore, that went with being the Manager of the Branch: Hugh, that familiar stranger.

William told me. Where she’d be. You know. Where she was.

He was taking pains to explain exactly how it had all happened. He was almost apologising.

She stood up, and suddenly she was naked. Posing in the chair she had been simply innocent skin. Now she was naked: worse than naked. She was
nude.
She was bald, ugly, as if plucked. The lights went on pouring down but they were no longer friends. They were like acid: hot, dangerous, stripping her.

She could feel the air going in and out of her mouth harshly and hear the ugly panting noises she was making. She took an unsteady step, although there was nowhere to go, and had to hang on to the chair-arm to balance herself. The lights were sickening her, inexorable, implacable, unflinching. The silence was staring at her.

She looked down at her foot. Between the pale shape of each toe was a little crooked frill of shadow. It looked as though she had stepped in something black that was oozing up slowly between the toes. But, of course, it was just the lights, and that was just her foot.

Freddy was suddenly there beside her, picking up her blouse from the chair and pulling it around her shoulders. He stood in front of her, between Hugh and herself, pulling the edges together.

It’s all right, he kept saying, hopelessly pulling at the little blouse, trying to cover her nakedness for her. She stood passively, her arms pinned to her sides under the blouse.

Eventually Hugh came out of the shadows, taking off his jacket, swinging it around with a wide gesture like a bullfighter with his cape. It fell around her shoulders and covered her up completely. He did not bother with the blouse at all, but let it fall to the floor.

Come on, he said. Come on now.

It was the same voice he used with William.

Come on now.

Look, she heard Freddy start. Mr Porcelline. Listen.

No, Hugh said. There’s no need. Really, there’s no call for anything.

His voice was mild, uncomplaining.

He led her past Freddy, out of the circle of light. She watched her feet, down there at the end of her body, pushing themselves forward one by one. The stairs were too narrow for both of them, and he went first, holding her arm and guiding her down from below, as if she was blind.

When they came outside she was dazzled by the sunlight, covered her face against it with both hands. But she did not have to go far because he had the car waiting in the lane outside the gateway.

In you go, he said, holding the back door open, steering her in. In you hop.

Then she was in the car, looking out at another, different, Karakarook, the one muted by the tinted glass, and Hugh was driving slowly, as if with an invalid in the back, up the hill towards the house.

HE WOKE UP early from a bad dream about heights. There were cantilevers rearing unfinished into the sky, like the Sydney Harbour Bridge in all the famous paintings. He was up there, and people were calling for him to come down. He could see them, tiny little figures, waving their arms about. When he woke up he could still feel the gritty coldness of the metal bar he had gripped in the dream.

The southern approach had been finished yesterday. Work on the northern approach and the bridge itself could not be delayed any longer.

He had reached the inescapable moment when something had to be done. You did not need to be a psychiatrist to know that was what the dream was about.

Mr Denning,
he would have to say, but he could not imagine what might come next.
I’ve been thinking about the bridge, Mr Denning.
Mr Denning was a busy man.
What bridge, Cheeseman?
he would snap. He might even make a joke.
We don‘tpayyoutothink, Cheeseman.

Head Office would not be impressed by the petition, would laugh at the threat of Thermoses. He would never be able to get them to listen for long enough to be convinced of his idea of the modules.
Nodules?
Mr Denning would ask.
What do you mean, Cheeseman, nodules?
He would have to explain carefully about the way casting them upside-down would give them additional strength.

Mr Denning would lose patience with so much detail.
Get out there with the dozer, Cheeseman,
he would say.
Just get on with it.
If he refused, Head Office would simply recall him and send another engineer out, one who was tougher.