The Vivisector (38 page)

He swallowed her dregs for company, and went out shivering into the raw red morning. The glitter, and all the brandy he had swilled, made his eyes ache, his mind function only furtively. He was glad he could see no sign of Nance: it gave him the chance to get down, bitterly, achingly, on his knees, and have a look for the lost ring. He worked very quickly, full of irony and disgust, turning over dead leaves, scuffling sand and pebbles, but quickly, and quicker, in case Nance showed up. In more assured privacy, in less harried circumstances, he might have settled down to enjoy a spate of self-pity.

Now there was no time. He stank. He hated himself. He hated Nance, who didn’t show up, however, to receive his hate in person.

Supposing she had left him? He raised his head, listening to the possibility of that.

He called: ‘Nance?
Nance!
’

Perhaps it was the early morning air, but his call was returned to him, clear and youthful, out of the mouths of rocks normally heavy and sullen with heat. He continued calling, not yet begging; in fact he darkened his voice with anger: and it kept floating lightly back. He who was a man had been reduced, it seemed.

‘Naa—aance!’ his voice nancied back to him.

He more or less, no, he wasn’t running, but got back as quickly as he could, to the house, to find some reason for assurance.

The old draw-neck leather bag with metallic sheen and choker of embossed waratahs was lying where it had been left, and the handbag, stuffed with credentials and the tools of her trade. Nance hadn’t left him—or had she? The shoes. She hadn’t. Nance’s soul, such as it was, might have drifted loose, but her professional body couldn’t have walked off without the shoes.

He would have liked to celebrate his relief in some of the awful brandy, but the three bottles were stone-dry.

There had been a fourth, he remembered. He went out very quickly. He no longer called, but looked, with an intensity which cured his aching eyes and head. A curtain of cold sweat gathered on his eyelids waiting to fall.

In the meantime the sunlight had sharpened. Its glass teeth met with glass. Along the ironstone ledge directly below the house an explosion had taken place, he realized: of glass, and less spectacularly, flesh. The splintered glass almost rose from the rock to slash his conscience, but the flesh made no move to accuse. Nance in her black dress was lying like an old bashed umbrella on a dump. There was nothing of the curious sinewiness of nervous inquiry and recall which had distinguished her body the night before. The fall had rucked her skirt high up her big white legs, now heaped like left-over trimmings of dough or marzipan. One big white breast had squeezed its way to freedom. If it still suggested life it was of the very passive kind: of some variety of great polyp plastered to a rock. He couldn’t look at her face: the sun had golded it with too savage a brilliance.

He began climbing slithering crashing grazing sideways down his ribs snapping the wire of plants his nails tearing at finally torn.

On arrival, he stalked round her, hoping something he had experienced before this encounter with the full stop of suffering might help him deal with it; but nothing in his life or art did. He got down at last beside her, on his knees, and laid his forehead on a rock, the corrugations of which didn’t fit with his; as he hung there, sweating and trembling, groaning aloud for the inspiration withheld from him.

 

All through the nightmare of police and ambulance which Nance’s death brought on, there was something real pricking at his mind, something he had forgotten to do, until, finding the axe in his hand, he began to hack. But the board on which the self-portrait was painted, turned the blade. The axe too blunt? Or was he too weak in his present condition? He scraped a while ineffectually at the board, its surface still encrusted with his own faeces as well as paint. Then he took the scarred monster, eyeing him to the end, and threw it out as far as he could over the gorge, his lungs straining. It clapped and clattered at first, before bowling rather tamely down, only occasionally whamming against the side of a tree, then drowning in total silence.

At least in this instance nobody would inquire whether it was murder or suicide or accidental death.

Most evenings toward sunset, the bench the council had fastened to the pavement was fully occupied by neighbourhood acquaintances. Although they would sit staring out over the wasteland, with its deep swell of lantana and sudden chasms of ash-coloured rock, the landscape meant less to the rate-payers than their glimpses into one another’s lives. Even a total stranger could be persuaded to ignore landscape while exchanging the snapshots of experience, particularly as the sun was going down. But on this occasion, as the blind sockets of the white-faced houses squeezed together on the opposite cliff, reflected their evening illusion of gold, a solitary figure had possession of the bench.

It was too good to last, however: a second form was bellying towards it, down the street which sloped along the vacant land. The man on the bench averted his face, and from sitting somewhere about the middle, immediately moved to the far end.

The new arrival looked only fairly expectant: what he hoped for was a yarn, and so many people nowadays were surly. A large man, he advanced at a deliberate pace, breaking every now and again into a somewhat less calculated toddle; but his confidence appeared immense in planting his broad buttocks on the bench for nothing short of a long stay.

‘Well,’ he began almost at once, ‘nobody can complain about the weather, can they? I’d say it’s set good.’ He laughed slightly as encouragement.

Then he looked towards the one he hoped he might persuade to become his temporary companion; but the other shifted where he sat, and made what was neither an answer nor a groan.

The large man waited. The other was younger than he had estimated from a distance; he took a quick look around to see if there was anyone who might suspect him of wrong intentions. Then he laughed again, louder than before, his fat-chinned laugh. Of course this stranger wasn’t all that young: not young at all, in fact.

‘I like to take a constitutional,’ the large man confessed, ‘after I’ve shut up shop. Got to think of your health, eh? Business isn’t everything.’

Again the other didn’t come good with an answer, but made a noise which he seemed to hope might pass for one, while settling deeper in his overcoat.

The fat man would have liked to stare at what he had found. He did glance deeper than at first, but quickly away, and grunting it off.

‘Never seen you around before. Get to know the local faces from running a grocery business. I lead a very normal life. It’s the right way, isn’t it? Plain food, regular evacuation, and fresh air. So I come down ’ere every night while the wife’s preparing somethun for tea.’ He coughed, and his teeth made a pebbled sound. ‘Don’t live in these parts, do yer?’

‘Near enough,’ the other said, shifting again, and reorganizing himself inside his rather shaggy overcoat.

The grocer would have liked to assess the stranger’s status, but it wasn’t easy. Too many contradictions: good clothes, not old either, probably very good before sloppiness set in; good hat too, of an excellent felt, the band of which had been allowed to get sweaty; made-to-order brogues, with white scars in the tan, and laces tied anyhow.

‘That’s a fine overcoat you got,’ the grocer couldn’t leave alone. ‘I like to see good cloth. I’d say, at a guess, that was imported. But it’s English.’

‘Oh? It could be. Yes. I think it was.’ The stranger sounded unhappy.

‘There’s nothing like English cloth. Of course we was all English in the beginning, unless you count the Irish. My old man used to say—’e come out from the West Country: “Nobody need be ashamed if ’e brushes ’is clothes, shines ’is shoes, and ’as a decent
haircut
”.’

The stranger’s hair was decent cut, even fashionable: those side pieces like the Prince of Wales’s. He had let it go, though: needed trimming.

Suddenly the grocer overflowed. He leaned along the backrest of the bench on which they were sitting, and stuck out his pulpy hand, and said: ‘My name’s Cutbush—Cecil Cutbush. It’s a funny sort of name, isn’t it? But you get used to it.’

There was a marbled moon coming up behind them almost before the sun had gone. Cutbush sighed. He didn’t understand why the stranger hadn’t completed the exchange of names like any other decent friendly bloke. He didn’t hold it against him, though. Perhaps the man had his reasons: could have been a released prisoner or something like that.

The grocer sighed again. ‘It does me good to come down ’ere. If it wasn’t for the dew I’d be tempted to sit on indefinitely. And the wife. She’d create if I didn’t come in. Says she’s afraid of murderers.’ He paused to look over his shoulder. ‘It isn’t that at all,’ he resumed. ‘Can’t satisfy ’er nowadays. Doesn’t want to leave me alone. Even during trading hours. “You’ll ’ear the bell, Cec,” she says, “and as often as not it’s only a kiddy come for a pennorth of lollies.” There’s no puttin’ ’er off. And at our age.’ He realized, and added: ‘You’re younger, of course. It’ll still come natural to yer.’

For a moment he suspected his new, desirable, but peculiarly unresponsive friend hadn’t been listening to him. Then again he could tell that he had. He was the kind that can listen and think at the same time: deep.

‘She’s a bloody awful cook,’ Mr Cutbush changed the subject, or almost. ‘But I didn’t marry ’er for ’er cookun.’ He laughed his rather throaty laugh. ‘And got what I asked for. I shouldn’t complain. ’ He remembered to inquire: ‘Does your missus do yer well? At the table, I mean.’

‘I’m not married.’

‘Go on! You don’t say! There’s time, though.’ The grocer glanced towards the other’s crutch.

Here and there on the shore of the lantana sea there was a glint from tins not yet completely rusted.

‘Perhaps you’re better off, mister. Knock up a grill at yer own convenience.’

The stranger apparently didn’t hear. He sat staring out over the lantana-filled ravine: a potential suicide perhaps?

There was a sudden outbreak of what might have been taken for murder by anyone not in the know; the grocer was: he knew it as the laughter of lovers locked together in the lantana depths.

As an antidote to possible embarrassment, he turned and said to his difficult friend: ‘Not much of a view, but a touch of nature in the middle of the city. I can see that you’re a nature lover.’

The man laughed for the first time. ‘Yes and no! I was watching the skyline. There’s a very brief pause when the houses opposite remind me of unlit gas fires.’

Obviously a nut. But an educated one. To humour him, the grocer asked: ‘D’you think the phase is on its way?’

‘I’m afraid we must have missed it—while you were talking.’

‘Well, if I made yer miss something, I can only apologize.’ The grocer flounced on their common seat.

They sat in silence for a little, while the sunken sun tightened its vice on the last of the horizon.

‘No.’ The stranger had sunk his chin: you could almost see down the rims of his eyes. ‘I don’t think I missed it after all.’ It came so long afterwards, Mr Cutbush couldn’t at first understand what it referred to. ‘Or if I did, I must have wanted to.’

He turned his first smile on the grocer, who appeared captivated by it: fatter, complacent, broody; but suddenly again, tentative and uneasy.

‘I had a peculiar experience tonight,’ Cutbush wet his lips, and decided to share it. ‘I looked in at the window, and saw a person—gentleman—standing without a stitch. Had everything to hide, too.’

Though he threw open his hairy coat, the stranger evidently wasn’t prepared to reveal more than his naked thoughts. He leaned forward, hands locked between his knees, chin thrust at the growing darkness.

‘I came here this evening,’ he said, ‘because I particularly wanted to be on my own. I don’t know why; most of the time I am alone; though I have more friends than I can cope with—or acquaintances, at least. I am not in need—of anything, or anyone.’

He challenged the darkness so aggressively, the grocer recoiled. ‘Okay, okay, mister! Good for you!’

‘When I saw this house I bought—several years ago—I said to myself: “This is the house I shall work in, and die in.” It’s not in any way an exceptional house. You can walk about in it, though. And it’s on a corner. It has entrances on two different streets—so that you can easily escape from a fire—or a visitor. Oh, it’s
pleasing!’
He unlocked his hands, and immediately locked them again.

The grocer sat looking at as much as he could see of the hands. ‘If you have a house, that’s something,’ he suggested listlessly. ‘Not everybody can afford to buy their own home. Not everybody’s that successful.’

‘I can’t say I’m not successful—
now
—not that it means anything. ’

The grocer spat. ‘I dunno.’ The conversation was becoming too clever. ‘This house—’ he yawned,—‘is it in this neighbourhood? ’

The stranger continued leaning forward in the dark the sun had left and the moon hadn’t yet demolished. ‘I had another house. It was burnt down. Fortunately. Yes, I think—fortunately—in the bushfires which came soon afterwards. You see, I had a friend who died.’

‘A friend, did you?’ Revived interest made the grocer shuffle his behind around on the bench. ‘And ’ow did ’e die, sir—your friend?’

‘I don’t know, and shall never know. They couldn’t decide—whether it was suicide or accidental death. Or murder. Well, of course it wasn’t murder—because I’m here. She could only have fallen over. She was drunk—and maniacal. That’s what they decided. It was too obvious.’

‘Was your friend a lady, then?’

‘I’ve been accused of loving myself. How could I? When I’ve always known too much about myself.’ He stopped so abruptly his breath made a sound like a snore. ‘I wonder why I’m telling you this?’