Praise (24 page)

Silence.

I said, ‘This must be thrilling for you, day after day.'

‘Well, at least I'm on men today. Men are a lot easier.'

‘That makes sense. Does it get busy?'

‘Sometimes. Not today. Mondays and Fridays are the big days. Friday everyone comes in to make sure they're okay for the weekend, then Monday they all come in again to make sure they're okay
after
the weekend. They don't have a clue.'

We waited again.

Then she took the wrapping off. She pulled the lamp down over my hips and switched it on. The plastic fingers took me again. Probed, pulled.

‘Ah-ha.'

I looked down. ‘What?'

‘Here's a little one. See?'

I looked. My penis had grown a bit. She was pointing to an area about halfway down the shaft.

‘I can't see anything.'

She peered at it again. ‘It is only a small one.'

‘What now?'

‘We'll get rid of it. I'll dab it with some acid. It'll turn black after a couple of days, then drop off.'

‘Drop off?'

‘It won't
hurt
.'

She went off, came back with a small bottle and a cotton bud. She dabbed the wart with a clear cold liquid. It didn't sizzle, it didn't burn.

‘Now,' she said, ‘this one will fall off, but you'll have to come back regularly for check-ups. You'll be infectious for about a year, so if you do have sex with anyone, you
must
use condoms.'

‘I don't think it's likely to happen.'

‘Even so, don't forget.'

‘I won't.'

‘Okay. Now we'll test for all the other diseases. Syphilis, gonorrhoea, herpes, a few more of the regular ones. Okay?'

‘Okay.'

She went back to the table, picked up a scalpel and a small, sharp hook.

She held them up. She looked at me.

This might hurt a little.'

‘Hey. No one told me there'd be
hooks
.'

‘Ah. Well, there has to be
some
pain for the men. We have to be fair, don't you think?'

She pried open the eye of my penis, and sank the hook in.

After she was finished I went back into the waiting room to wait for the results. My prick was stinging. Cynthia's revenge. The doctor hadn't even noticed the tattoo, right on the head: ‘Property of Cynthia Lamonde.
NO TRESPASSING.'

It was an unworthy thought. I deserved more than a stinging penis. A stinging penis was something to be amused by. I thought about Cynthia's cramps after the abortion, about the black clotted blood. There was nothing funny there. I read some more magazines. After about twenty minutes the doctor called me back in.

‘All clear,' she said. ‘Nothing but the warts.'

‘Good.'

‘Of course the
AIDS
results will be a couple of weeks yet. You have to come back then for your first check-up anyway.'

‘Fine.'

I went back into the street.

I walked back home, sat down. Vass came in. ‘You hear what happened to Bill?'

Bill lived in the room next to Vass, across the hall from me.

‘I was drinking with him up at the Brunswick. Just sitting there, drinking. Then I could smell shit. I said, “Bill, can you smell shit?” And he was white as a ghost. It was him. His arsehole had ripped open, just ripped right open! There was shit all through his pants. I called up an ambulance. The manager threw us out. Told us never to come back.'

So much for a warty penis.

‘I didn't think that was possible,' I said, ‘to just rip open. How is he now?'

‘Dunno. The ambulance took him off. The poor bastard stank.'

‘So why'd it happen?'

‘He said he hadn't had a shit for weeks. I think he must've just burst.'

‘Jesus.'

Vass was looking around the flat. ‘Where's the little lady?'

‘She's gone. Gone for good. She flew to Darwin yesterday.'

‘Aaah. That's a terrible thing ...

‘Yes, it is.'

‘You okay?'

‘I'm okay.'

Later that afternoon I called up Rachel.

‘Has Cynthia gone?' she asked.

‘Yesterday.'

‘How are you?'

‘Not too good. I think I had a nervous breakdown at the airport.'

‘I heard about the Coke bottle. Cynthia was crazy, Gordon. She had to go.'

‘I know. But it wasn't really her fault. I mean, I was fucking up her life, she had to do something. Love isn't rational. Listen, are you doing anything tonight? Could I come over?'

She hesitated. ‘I really should be studying, but okay.'

I hung up and drove over. I picked up a cask of red on the way. She looked at it when I arrived. ‘Planning a big night?'

‘I have to celebrate. I went to the STD clinic today. I've got genital warts.'

I filled up her glass, filled up my own. I sat on the couch, Rachel sat on the floor.

‘Genital warts?'

‘Cynthia gave them to me. She'd had them so long she developed cervical cancer. They cut it out in hospital.'

We drank and talked. It was a stable, sane conversation. Rachel was good for that. And I liked watching her, listening to her, hearing what she thought about the world. We talked about men and women. About what went wrong between them. Rachel traced all her own disasters with relationships back to a lack of understanding. She wanted to understand people, she thought it was important. I wasn't so sure. In the end I preferred to be mystified.

Rachel herself still mystified me. She wasn't like Cynthia. Cynthia had impressed me, amazed me, but on a certain level I
understood
what she was doing.

We turned on the TV. Rachel stopped drinking after four or five glasses. I drank on till one or two in the morning. Then Rachel said she was going to bed. She asked me what I was going to do.

‘I can't drive home. Can I crash here?'

‘I'll get you a mattress.'

‘Thanks.'

She produced the mattress, set it up on the floor with some sheets and a pillow. I was drunk. I stood up and said goodnight. I kissed her on the forehead. It was the first time in my life that I'd kissed her anywhere.

‘Rach,' I said, ‘do you ever get lonely?'

‘All the time.'

‘Look, if you ever want someone to sleep with, I mean, just to
sleep
with, to lie in bed with, I'm available. It's nice to sleep with someone, and wake up with someone. People should do it more often. You know what I mean?'

‘Thanks, Gordon. I know what you mean. It's nice of you to say that.'

I
didn't know what I meant. It'd just come out. It was the pain. I was lonely already. But Rachel was never going to say yes to me, no matter how nicely I put it.

Still, she was nice enough to me in the morning. She didn't feel like studying, so we went for a drive out around the bay. Sandgate and Redcliffe. We walked along the beach, around the shops. She talked about her course, about what she thought she could do with it. I listened. Administrative Sciences meant nothing to me, but I was interested because it was what
she
was interested in.

We drove back to her place. I pulled up outside.

‘Thanks, Gordon,' she said. ‘It was a nice day.'

‘Yes. I enjoyed it.'

‘I might see you over the weekend.'

‘Okay.'

She got out. I drove home.

I had drinks with Frank that night. I told him about the genital warts. I told him about the hook. He was appalled. He knew he had to get himself tested too — he and Cynthia hadn't used condoms.

We were in a bar in the Valley. Frank was buying. I didn't have the money. I wouldn't have now, without Cynthia. Sooner or later I'd have to get a job. I wasn't sure I was even employable any more. The idea of work depressed me greatly. It wasn't just the hours, it was having to work for someone else, to act as if I gave a damn about their business, their customers, their money. I didn't think I could fake it any more.

Frank said, ‘What are you gonna do? Write?'

‘I can't write, not anything that'll sell. I think an institution is my only chance. The army, a hospital, a religious order... somewhere where they feed you, give you a bed, keep you alive. It'd be enough.'

That night I sat down and wrote my first letter to Cynthia. It was long, emotional, drunken. Next morning I sent it off without rereading it. I couldn't even remember what was there.

This was Friday. I went down to the post office and mailed it Express Courier. I'd promised Cynthia I'd get it to her by the weekend. Monday would have to do. It cost me seven dollars. That night I called her. I spent a long hour listening to her cry and argue at thirty-seven cents a minute.

I said, ‘I can't afford these phone calls, Cynthia.'

‘I don't
care
. I can't make it if you don't call me.'

She wasn't enjoying Darwin. It was hot, the house was too small, her parents were oppressive, there was nothing to do, no one to see. I told her about the warts. That cheered her up a little. She asked me questions. What had I been doing? What was I wearing? How was my penis?

I answered, but it was unwilling. I was feeling trapped and hateful again. She was right, it wasn't over. I loved her, I wanted her to leave me alone. If there was some way I could stop calling, never speak to her again. But there wasn't. I couldn't do it. It was bad now, but it'd get better. Something could be saved. Something had to be saved.

I mentioned that I had spent the day with Rachel.

‘
Rachel
?' cried Cynthia. ‘Oh shit. Of course. I'm out of the way now. You can fuck your little goddess at last. Christ, Gordon, she's so dull! You don't have to settle for shit like her!'

‘I'm not going to be fucking Rachel, not even if I wanted to. And leave her alone. You don't know her.'

‘Sure. She's
frigid
, Gordon.'

‘Cynthia, stop it.'

‘Why should I? What the fuck do you care?'

It went on. I suspected it'd be going on for months, years.

I'd always be paying for it.

At thirty-seven cents a minute.

I didn't see Rachel that weekend, but she rang me the week after that. Her exams were over and she was going home to spend the weekend at her parents' farm. No one else would be there. The rest of her family was holidaying at the coast. She wanted to know if I was interested in coming along. Just for a break.

I was.

I said, ‘We can take my car.'

‘I'll pay for some of the petrol.'

‘Don't worry about it, Rachel.'

‘I didn't ask you along just for the sake of a free ride, Gordon.'

‘I know.'

We drove out on a Saturday. Her parents' farm was at the eastern foot of a mountain range that arched out into the wheat plains from the Great Divide. It was a forty-minute drive from Dalby. The mountains were low and rolling, bald and grassy in some places, heavily rainforested in others. Her parents' fence line followed the boundary of a national park. They ran cattle. I'd been there only a couple of times before. Short visits. When Rachel and I were at school.

I liked the mountains. They were modest and lonely and no one bothered with the national park much. From the top of them, looking west, with binoculars, you could just make out my own parents' farm, maybe thirty or thirty-five miles away, out on the plain.

We drove around for the morning and then stopped off for a late lunch at one of the small local pubs. There was no one else in the bar. We drank, talked, watched the odd car go by. Towards dark we picked up some drinks and drove on.

Her parents' house wasn't so different from my own parents' house. Large and ugly, bits tacked on here and there as the family grew. But the farms themselves were different. Cattle compared to grain. I knew nothing about cattle grazing, except that it seemed a harder, poorer life than grain growing. And things were different for Rachel, too. I was the ninth child out of ten, she was the first child of eight. She could ride a horse. She could round up livestock. All I'd ever learned to do was drive a tractor. To watch the world crawl by at three or four miles an hour. They were import-ant things to remember about each other.

Rachel cooked dinner. We sat out on the back verandah in the cane armchairs and ate and drank and looked up at the hills. It was calm. Cynthia and the flat and Brisbane seemed a long way away.

‘It's a pity I hate all this now,' said Rachel.

‘You do?'

‘It's not the farm itself, it's the attitude. My parents, my family. They don't understand what I've been going through in Brisbane, or what I want to do. It's so incomprehensible from the point of view of life out here.'

‘Indeed it is.'

‘What is it they get from this sort of life, anyway? What do they
want
from it?'

‘Just survival, Rachel. That's what it always comes down to, in the end.'

‘I don't believe that ...'

‘No, I was talking from a personal perspective.'

She looked at me.

‘I can't believe that either. You couldn't be content with that, Gordon. Just having existed for sixty or seventy years.'

‘It won't be that long.'

‘You didn't always think like that.'

‘No, I didn't. Or maybe I did. It's hard to tell, looking back, what I really believed.'

‘You should read some of the old letters you wrote me.'

‘God, no. All that love in them, Rach. No wonder you told me to stop it.'

She didn't answer.

I asked, ‘Are you embarrassed by it, these days?'

‘You mean by me and you? No. I never understood what you were going on about. I certainly never felt the same. And for all that you kept telling me that you loved me, you never actually said much. You never do. I don't know if you know this or not, but you don't express your emotions very well. You act decently enough towards the people you care about, sometimes, but you don't
tell
them anything.'