Cosmo Cosmolino (3 page)

‘Patrick,' said Natalie, as she zipped up the case and the children wandered away, ‘tell your dream. He dreamt last night about an angel. The angel of death.'

I looked sharply at him, and he laughed. Patrick had that rare thing, a mirthful laugh. He always liked to recite
my
old dreams, as comic turns, but I had never heard him relate one of his own. I never thought of
him as that kind of person: I never thought of him as a dreamer.

The shabby walls, whose plaster was so thickly encrusted with the worm-casts of damp that it might have been French brocade, struck me then as beautiful, as original, because of Patrick's illness and the danger he was in.

‘My dream,' he began mildly, taking his time, ‘this dream which my wife has so histrionically interpreted, was that I was in a pit. Not a wet pit, but a dry one, with sides of bare earth tamped hard and packed. Really it was a lion's den.

‘The lion was nowhere to be seen, but I could feel it somewhere nearby, and I was crouching there, waiting. Waiting for the person to come who would save me from it.

‘And then a figure appeared on the rim of the pit, looking down at me: a black man, tall, with shining skin, and eyes that were slanted and Asiatic. He was dressed in splendid robes, very magnificent, and on his head was a kind of turban, a great feathered head-dress. He was even more terrifying than the lion. He was mighty. He was . . . in majesty.'

The breaths we took were not sudden, but quiet, and thorough. This was not the kind of dream-telling after which one asked, ‘And
then
what happened?' Patrick kept his eyes on the weave of the tablecloth. His eyes seemed further apart, and he held his mouth
slightly pursed, as if restrained by modesty from saying more.

He leaned over and turned up the volume of the radio which had been too low, all afternoon, for anything to be audible except the occasional hushed wave of applause; and the music we now began to hear was hardly more emphatic.

‘A string quartet,' I said. ‘That's comforting.'

It was still light. Sparrows were hopping about in the branches of a tree outside the window, and rain, earlier, had collected in the up-turned leaves with their frilled edges. In different spots, now here, now there, a load of rain would become too heavy for its leaf, and the stalk would suddenly sag and let the water pour straight down in a quick stream.

‘I like a quartet,' said Natalie. ‘It's like a family. Or a conversation. One speaks, then another; then the other two join in.'

‘No—listen,' said Patrick. ‘It's a quintet. It's the one with the two cellos.'

‘Two? Are you sure?' I said; but before Patrick could argue, the music did it for him. It gathered itself in a powerful intake of breath: it paused in a quivering silence: and it exploded.

Now I could hear the extra cello, the point of it, what it was there for.

It dropped through a rent in the net and plunged away into the darkness, crying out. It groaned a
warning: it prowled, it ranged, it lay in wait. It was the bad dream of the quartet, brooding, ravening outside the fold, and its argument was doubt and panic, a desolation as yet unlived.

‘Yesterday, for the first time in twenty years,' said Patrick with his foot on the bottom stair, ‘I tidied my desk. I found dozens, scores of postcards from you. They're in bundles, next to the dictionaries, if you want to read them.'

‘Oh, please don't keep them,' I said. ‘I bet they're awful.'

‘Awful?' he said. ‘I may never have answered them, but you went to the trouble of writing them to me; they mean something. Surely you don't think I'd chuck 'em out?'

‘You won't like them,' said Natalie as he disappeared round the stair landing. ‘I had a look. They're like out-of-date magazines that you read at the dentist. Full of false and inappropriate enthusiasms.'

‘I'll burn 'em,' I said recklessly, ‘while he's away. Do you think I should?'

I looked at Natalie's face, in the liverish light that came through the glass panel of the front door.

‘It won't make any difference,' she said. ‘That's the idea of yourself you've given him, and nothing you do now can shift it.'

She was leaning against the wall with her hands behind her and her head on an angle, so that no single footstep of Patrick's, as he shuffled across the floor of the upstairs room, would escape her attention, or go unheard.

I was already rolling mincemeat into balls and shaking them up in a paper bag of flour when I heard the front gate screech and slam. Living so close to the hospital, they could walk there in ten minutes, carrying in Patrick's old satchel only a toothbrush and a copy of
King Lear
.
The children were allowed to accompany them as far as the corner, and by the time they slouched back in I was making a salad, the meatballs were sizzling in oil, and three potatoes were toiling in the pot. The boy went straight to Patrick's chair and sat in it. The girl squirmed in under my arm at the stove; with my left arm round her I could feel her hasty heartbeat, and smell the sourness of her thick, damp hair. We kept our eyes on the contents of the pan and said nothing, but as the hot fat shrank the meatballs, as they wallowed and hissed there in a cluster, small and grey, shrivelling in the heat, fissures opened in their floury surfaces, and oozed a thin, bloody fluid.

Patrick's books were coated with creamy dust, and wedged so tightly into the shelves that I broke a fingernail working the bundles free. The postcards. So many!
I squatted on the matting with my shoulders between my knees and fanned the pictures out like a pack. They came from everywhere—Exmouth, Port Vila, Munich, Santa Margherita, Fort William, Ipoh, Ocean Grove—from the paper shops and museums and railway stations of every city or township I had ever passed through. Miramont-de-Quercy, Zahedan, Wilcannia. Augsburg, Campagnatico, Rangoon, Bendigo. Paris, yes—a copper sunset behind the Eiffel Tower, Brassaïs's
Couple fâché
with lowered eyes and backs to the café mirror. And always Melbourne, Melbourne, Melbourne, over and over the same photo in glaring greens and reds, of a tram, huffy, blunderous, manoeuvring itself with pole akimbo round the tight corner where Bourke Street enters Spring.

My will was iron. I did not turn one card over, I did not read one word. I told the cards by instinct. My regrets were organised in advance. No verbal evidence was needed to show the difference between my life, this career of blind staggering, and the way that Natalie, even while speaking to me, had kept her head cocked for the sound of her husband's foot shifting on the floor of the upper room.

It was night in the yard, and the sky was high now, and cloudless. That special smell of cities—warmed bitumen, and the plants that stubbornly grow in spite of it—sweetened the air as I crouched over four bricks
I had set up to shield my little fire from breezes. I offered the cards to it one by one, holding them by their corners with the words facing away from me. While the Australian ones burned with reluctance, being coated in a transparent layer which peeled back at leisure, the foreign ones took to the flames as obediently as if made to be incinerated. The neighbour's dog, jingling its chain and uttering grunts of anxiety, paced up and down the length of the fence, but the neighbour himself was heedless of my drama. He tuned up his bouzouki out there and began to play and sing to himself, thoughtfully, his voice moving in unison with the single notes as he plucked them: a melody, slow and deeply rhythmic, from somewhere I had never been.

‘What are you doing?' called the boy from the kitchen door.

‘Getting rid of some rubbish,' I answered.

He approached the fire in his enormous, unlaced running shoes, with his sister behind him. He liked me, we had shared a room and conversations before sleep on my visits since he was small and our mutual modesty was exquisite, but he was his father's representative tonight and he was demanding an explanation.

‘They're only postcards,' I said, ‘that I sent to Patrick when I was young and foolish.'

‘Did he say you could burn them?' he asked sternly, standing over me.

‘Not exactly,' I said, ‘but it's my right, you know, to take them back.'

‘Not without his permission. You sent them to him with his name on them. Therefore they belong to him.'

‘Legally, perhaps,' I said, turning a tram so the flame could seize its sparking pole, ‘but morally I believe I'm in the clear. He may own the cards themselves, as objects, but I own what's written on them; and anyway he knows the words by heart.'

‘Ah,' said the boy, his father's son. ‘Copyright. I suppose it's all right, then.'

‘But what about the pictures on them?' said the girl hoarsely, pushing past him. ‘He doesn't know those by heart. How can a person learn a picture by heart?'

‘Your father's head,' I said, ‘like everybody else's, is a vast gallery of pictures. Nobody will ever know what pictures your father has inside his head.'

They laughed, but their brows were in knots, and they glanced behind them to the yellow rectangle of the kitchen door.

‘Not even Mum?' said the girl.

‘Not even Natalie,' I said.

The membrane of light bulged and burst to disgorge their mother, walking, taking steps, coming out to the bonfire where the last of the postcards was turning brown at the corners and curling into a writhing tube. She saw what I had done. She smiled; she squatted
down beside me without speaking, and with a stout twig began to rake out the ashes.

Next morning everything I saw, in the streets that passed and pierced the hospital, was sharply shimmering. Capped and aproned girls flung open rows of shutters. An ambulance, silent, slid into a discreet bay and yawned there. Two pretty junkies rattled a stroller down the path to detox, while their baby, bounced and flopping, grizzled feebly with no hope of ever being noticed or comforted. What was that singing? Was there a choir? Palmtrees were clacking their hard fans above the roof tiles, boomgates floated and sank, a dog stood open-mouthed in awe before a lawn sprinkler, and every wrist that passed was manacled in plastic.

I kept moving. Something in soft soles was keeping pace with me wherever I walked, padding along silently behind my left shoulder. I walked and walked, with the thing moving smoothly behind me, and as I walked I rehearsed Patrick's version of me, the rubrics under which he had long ago marshalled into a cast-iron curriculum vitae the evidence I had so conscientiously provided: sad girl; problem with her father; full of anger; nympho; self-destructive; unstable; hyper-sensitive; a failure at marriage; unfeminine; man-hater; lost soul.

Was there a way to wipe it out? What if it happened today? I thought of Patrick, shorn and mapped with dotted lines, lying face down on a table. I imagined a
foot, clad in a soft slipper shaped like a shower cap, approaching the switch of a drill. What if the surgeon should lose his way, and broach the box of bone where Patrick's official grids were stored? What if, with his savage light-tip, he should isolate, clip out and finally excise my file from the bee-chambers of Patrick's memory? Then, at last, could I spring away free into newness of life?

I went round through the garden of Occupational Therapy, along the front of a red brick wing where tranquillised people sat sombrely in a row on a dark verandah, and up a flight of stone steps towards the windowless side of a building whose exterior was studded all over with cement hand- and foot-holds. Halfway up to the eaves a young man still wearing a canvas back-pack was flattened like a spider, legs parted wide and belly to the wall, gripping and treading, clawing, gathering balance in stillness, then swarming again across the surface of the sun-warmed bricks. I heard his slow, controlled breathing as I passed below him, and took in my own stomach muscles the strain of his spreadeagled position.

I found Natalie in the waiting room of the intensive ward. She was sitting with upright spine in an ugly dark armchair, knees together and hands folded in her lap.

People were smoking and walking back and forth, whispering in pairs, keeping their voices down in front
of straining children. There were no windows and the air was blue. Every now and then the lift door would open with a soft dragging sound and display its lighted interior like a scene on a little proscenium stage: a family hand in hand, a bald girl in a cotton gown, three medical students white with fatigue.

I pulled a chair round to face hers, and sat on it. Natalie was not the kind of person you touched. She recognised my shoes and raised her head.

‘He's in there,' she said. ‘In a few minutes we can go in.'

‘Oh, not me,' I shrank back. ‘You go. He'll want you.'

‘Come in with me,' she said. ‘You're his oldest friend. It'll mean a lot to him.'

We sat face to face, staring anywhere but at each other. Natalie was breathing hard.

‘They let me in while he was coming out of the anaesthetic,' she said. ‘He was deathly cold. Green, like a corpse. His whole body was in shock. They were wrapping him up in silver paper. He looked mad. His eyes were crazed. He was waving his arms, and raving.'

People in the room drew away from us, except for one girl, a fat teenager in stretch jeans and moccasins, who took hold of a chair and dragged it across the carpet to where we were sitting. She placed it three feet from us, at an angle but well within our field of vision,
and lowered her large bottom on to it; then, with her forearms along the rests of the chair, she fixed us like a judge or a witness and, flicking her eyes from face to face as we spoke, absorbed our words with unabashed greed.

‘Have you ever,' I blurted, ‘wished that someone you loved would die? So that the record of all your crimes and failures would be obliterated?'

Natalie gave a gasp of laughter. The fat girl caught her breath and sat forward, letting her mouth fall open.