The White Body of Evening (36 page)

“Besides the most dubious of testimonies nothing connects him to the girl.”

As they watched the crowd file into the theatre Paul thought about Wedelkind and wondered what role he had played in the affair.

“And they all know that tonight they’ll see Alma Tirtschke die a second time,” said Hamish. “Why do they need to see that?”

“Because the good burghers of Melbourne like a bit of sadism. Always have. If we were allowed to throw Christians to the lions they’d be showing up in droves.”

As eight o’clock approached Paul retreated to the wings and Hamish took his seat near the front of the stage.

A large man with a double chin and a few tufts of black hair on his onion-shaped head leant over towards him.

“Can bet on a bit of strife tonight. You’re from the press, ain’t ya?”

“Yes,” said Hamish. “The
Melburnian.”

“Well ya can bet there’ll be a bit of trouble. Look over there.”

He pointed to the end of the aisle at a thin, bespectacled man neatly attired, despite the heat, in a dark suit concealing a vicar’s collar.

“That’s Percy Gambell. Any Saturday night you can hear him preaching on Little Bourke and Little Lon at the whores and Chinks. A right one he is. A real fanatic for good Christian virtue.”

The curtain went up, revealing one side of the Eastern Arcade, which ran on a diagonal from the top of the slanting stage down into a darkened space at the very front.

A balding old man, wearing a monocle and a dark cloak, escorted a large, oafish chap with ugly metal teeth down the length of the arcade, past a fancy dress shop, a photographer’s studio, a tattoo parlour and a peepshow.

“Now listen here, my good man,” the old man said, by way of offering advice. “If I had your charms I wouldn’t be hiding them away. You’re an ex-Digger after all, and the women respect that.”

A woman, evidently a prostitute, exited a door into the centre of the arcade. The oafish man looked her up and down. At the urging of the old man in the cloak he moved closer, blubbering something inaudible to himself.

“Get away from me, you beast!” the woman shouted, giving him a good kick, which sent him scampering back towards the front of the stage.

“This is what our fighting men get,” the old man told the audience. “They’ve seen their mates killed in the mud of France and on the cliffs of Gallipoli. They’ve fought for their country and the empire. They’ve witnessed their mates blown to pieces.”

A few members of the audience laughed. The vicar at the end of the aisle coughed loudly.

“Cut the palaver and let’s have some blood,” someone said impatiently.

“Shut up,” said another voice.

A crowd of ragged-looking figures appeared at the top of the arcade and made its way through to the end, finally clearing to reveal a solitary figure. The audience fell silent at the sight of the little girl carrying a gas balloon. She had long auburn hair that shone under the stage lights, and wore a white cambric blouse with blue spots, a navy-blue tunic and a panama hat with a red band, just like the real Alma Tirtschke had worn on the day of her murder.

“Oh, yes,” said the old man as the oaf eyed her eagerly. “She is Innocence itself.”

The girl looked into the shop windows, oblivious to the two men in the foreground.

Hamish squirmed uncomfortably in his seat.

“Will they do her in onstage?” the man next to him whispered with evident relish.

Hamish wondered what Paul was capable of. He imagined the girl stripped naked in a filthy back room and then, a moment later, her body draped theatrically over the cobblestones.

“I can’t watch this,” a woman behind him said as the actress strolled down the arcade, pausing in front of a window to look at herself. She posed coquettishly, pushing her auburn hair over her shoulder, and then turned back the way she had come.

“Oh yes,” said the old man as the girl vanished at the top of the stage.”A real little jewel.”

Percy Gambell stood up, as if on cue, and shouted at the audience. “It’s an outrage! They’ve made that innocent little girl into the whore of Babylon. It’s despicable. A sin against decency, an insult to us all!”

The audience’s attention was now diverted just as the lights were dimmed further and the oaf scampered off after the girl.

“An outrage!” the man shouted again.

There was a deafening shriek from the stage. The girl was being dragged into the foreground by the man with the glistening metal teeth, who fumbled at her tunic.

“Stop it!” someone shouted.

“I can’t watch!”

Someone from the audience leapt up onto the stage and kicked the would-be murderer away, pulling the girl clear of him.

Gambell waved his clenched fist in the air as if it were a hammer, and in response a group of young men climbed up onto the stage and began demolishing the set. Cardboard walls and frames tumbled like gigantic playing cards revealing the confused innards of the theatre – props, costumes and ropes dangling backstage – as actors and stagehands fled into the wings. The stunned audience was now on its feet. Some people stood transfixed, reeling with the shock of it all, while others made for the exit.

At first Paul thought the commotion was merely the audience’s predictable response to the theatre of terror. But when he saw the sets falling apart and the actors fleeing backstage he too took a few quick steps towards a rear exit. He feared the turmoil of the mob and the possibility of his public humiliation more than the indignity of slinking away like the cowardly captain of a sinking ship. He was on the threshold of the exit when a few burly ushers reasserted control of the theatre, kicking the small band of rioters offstage in a flurry of fists and flailing boots.

To Hamish, still in his seat, this finale looked like a marvellously directed piece of onstage violence. Bodies moved in the half-light and faces were blank with the effort of concentrated savagery. One of the rioters clutched his broken nose as blood gushed over his chin, only to be knocked to the ground before he’d made it back into the aisles. The young woman playing Alma Tirtschke gave him a kick in the balls as she confidently resumed control of the stage, strutting about with a look of brazen defiance.

“Fuck youse all!” she screamed.

I can always go back to Europe, Paul said to himself, feeling the utter hopelessness of the situation. He assumed a manful air of proprietorial authority and approached the actress with his hand outstretched in a gesture of consolation.

“Fuck you too!” she screamed at him. Make-up ran down her face and her dishevelled auburn wig slid off to one side.

“That’s telling him, love,” someone in the crowd called out.

Egged on by this the would-be Alma Tirtschke seized the last remnant of her professional dignity and launched into Paul, pounding his chest with her fists and kicking him in the shins.

“Fuck you! I shoulda known better. Pervert! They all said you was a fucking pervert!”

“Bravo,” the crowd yelled. “Good for you, love. Let him have it!”

Hamish was still stuck to his seat. As he wiped the moisture from his upper lip he could again smell something, his own stale skin perhaps, or traces of dry semen. He looked at the little brown freckles on the backs of his hands as the lights came up. He had the hands of a savage, made for working the land or digging coal from the earth. He remembered how, years ago, they had made him self-conscious in front of Ondine. He felt dirty, unfit for human society, a creature stitched together out of other people’s nightmares, a patchwork of desires that bled at the seams.

He watched Paul fend off the enraged actress and finally crawl away defeated to the wings as the crowd continued to jeer him. His friend looked worse than simply shaken.

Finally Hamish dragged himself through the stifling air of the Bijou out onto the street. A crowd had leaked out of the building and was assembled on the pavement, angry and still harbouring the potential for further mayhem. Someone had kicked in a glass panel advertising the play, but the heat was quickly sapping the mob’s energy. By the time the police arrived there was only a handful of patrons remaining. The rapturous tones of their outrage amply indicated that, all up, the ruin of Paul Walters had supplied them with a highly satisfying night out.

Later Hamish tried to write a review, but the words refused to come. He lingered at his desk, distracted by the humidity. Finally, in the small hours of the morning, watching fluttering moths throw shadows on the wall, he put a piece of paper into his old typewriter and lethargically began to tap away at the keys, conscious of the thickness of his fingers, barely aware of what he was writing.

It was hours later when Paul eventually left the Bijoux. He had been sitting in the bowels of the building drinking Scotch from a bottle until he was confident that the cast members and stagehands had left. He couldn’t bear the thought of confronting them again. The would-be Alma Tirtschke had quit and now there would be interminable arguments about contracts, terms and payments. The theatre alone had been booked until the end of March.

Sitting under an old stage light, he caught a glimpse of himself in a dust-covered mirror opposite him. He was pale and bloated. His black hair, plastered to his scalp with sweat, was thinning, and his skin had turned pasty. For the first time he noticed that his jowls had become fleshy and swollen and that his stomach had turned into a round gut. He took another swig of Scotch, stood up, unsteady on his feet, and walked out through the wreckage of
The Gun Alley Atrocity.

Outside, Bourke Street was stifling, but quiet, as if the city had been drugged into a deep, torpid sleep by the asphyxiating darkness. There were sounds of music and debauchery somewhere in the distance, but these were remote and mysterious, merely serving to highlight the eerie stillness of the night. Paul clutched the Scotch, which he poured down his throat every few steps, and staggered in the direction of the Arcadia Club, the last refuge of the ruined. He had been brought low a third time by the cursed colony and was now ready either to leave for good or to sink lower still into the ranks of the destitute and forgotten, the casualties of the city who drink themselves into oblivion after it has hacked away all hope.

When he got to where the Arcadia had been a decade earlier he found the headquarters of a theosophical society selling cheap pamphlets about the way to God. But he was drunk and doubted that he had come along the right part of Little Lon. He tottered back up the alley and tried to reorient himself.

“Bad luck there,” a voice said to him out of the shadows.

He turned sluggishly to find Max Wedelkind stepping out into the glow of a streetlight. The man was dressed in a buttoned-up suit and still wore his straw hat. Insects of a thousand different shapes swarmed about him, attracted by the light, but he barely seemed to notice.

“I’m glad my acting days are long gone,” he said. “Mighty tough audiences nowadays.”

“Go to hell,” Paul slurred.

“But I was flattered to see that you hadn’t forgotten me in your little drama.”

Paul could barely stand and suddenly felt as if he were about to vomit. His jaw went slack and his mouth filled with warm saliva.

“Oh, very nice,”Wedelkind snickered.

Paul propped himself up against a wall, and slowly slipped down into a sitting position, his legs splayed out on the pavement.

“The problem was that your Alma Tirtschke was too cheap. Completely ill-suited. Where in the devil’s name did you find her?”

Paul eyed him suspiciously. Wasn’t it Wedelkind who sucked him into the theatre in the first place? Wasn’t it Wedelkind who held the strings that guided him through all his botched endeavours, Wedelkind who was the presiding genius of his ruin? Paul closed his eyes, trying to get it all straight in his mind, trying to unravel the tangled knot of decisions and motivations that had led him to this wretched impasse. In his drunken state he saw his wife melting into his sister’s arms, kissing her with a passion that she had never shown him, giving herself over to the power of cold blood and still, limpid eyes.

“I’m telling you, the problem was with your Alma Tirtschke.”

“Don’t say her name again,” Paul said,”or I’ll thrash you.”

“Alma Tirtschke,” Wedelkind dared him, his eyes almost popping out of his head.

Paul blinked. Wedelkind was holding the child by the hand. She was wearing the same tunic and the spotted blouse the actress had worn earlier that night.

Paul blinked again, then closed his eyes and shook his head. When he looked up the girl was still standing in front of him.

“What is this?” he said.”Take her away from me!”

But the girl bent over him and let him smell the floral scent of her innocence. Her cheek brushed his, her hair fell into his eyes, and her lips touched his so softly that he doubted they were human. She helped him to his feet and led him across the road to a warped little house which opened into a warren of rooms and connecting hallways. The air was hot, almost too hot to inhale. In the darkness there were other forms, little more than blurs, moving languidly as if slowed by the heat. Paul thought he could see a slender white body slip out of its tunic and blouse. But he could barely breathe and his eyes were already heavy as he felt the soft lips again brushing his and the gentle, beguiling hands pulling him down.

He slept for what felt like years, through vast tracts of time stretching him across the ages of man. He was giddy with the incalculable, with huge numbers measuring his mortification, the empty depths of his own soul, the infinity of his nothingness brimming with the bitterness of humiliation.

Slowly the rottenness of the place worked its way into his dreams and he forced himself awake to find that he was lying in the arms of a much older woman. His head ached. He felt as if acid were coursing through his veins, burning him from the inside out. He was still too drunk to move off the mattress. He must have fallen asleep again when he heard the woman’s voice whispering to him. He had the dim sensation of her breath on his ear, but heard the voice as if it were crawling about inside him. “I’ve always hated you. We all do. All of us hate all of you.”