Earthly Powers (48 page)

       It was a fair-sized piece of cartridge paper. On it had been copied in careful enlargement the image of Philip at the wicket. At least the stance was identical, but there were terrible changes. Philip's face held a sardonic rictus under the cricket cap. His gloved hands grasped his own penis, grotesquely enlarged, and forced it to spray downward an equivocal fluid. The cricketing flannels were bunched about his ankles, the legs were thin and hairless. A black humanoid clutched him about the thighs and seemed to be buggering him. "Do not try to destroy it," Carlo cried. "If you ever require evidence—" Mahalingam, moaning bitterly and then starting to curse again, lifted himself in pain to a standard pattern PWD dining chair. "What is your rank?" Carlo asked him.

       "Temple master, ough. What have you done to my boy? Are you not satisfied with killing ough one?" He squinted painfully.

       "There is not the time now," Carlo said, "to determine precisely the nature of what you call your boy. When he wakes we shall know if we are here to know. Or if you allow him to wake. Call off your dogs from the other, this is an order of the higher powers."

       "Uccidiamolo," I said.

       Carlo shook his head many times very sadly. "That cannot be done. You do not fight him that way. He will only call off his dogs alive." Mahalingam staggered over to the sideboard by the dining table, grasped the bottle of whisky, unscrewed it shakily, drank.

       He said, "Too late, padre, as I must call you. Nature will have its way. Get out of my house before I harm you both."

       "You will not harm either of us," and Carlo carefully kicked his shin. Mahalingam howled. "Magister templi, magistrum verissimum cognosces." He held his cross out to Mahalingam, Mahalingam promptly spat on it. Carlo seemed delighted. "Good, no hypocrisy. You do not dissemble your hatred. Remember me. In various forms we will have other meetings. Ah." The boy on the floor had awakened. He saw in horror and wonder his defilement. He flicked his eyes from one to another of us in bewilderment, then painfully levered himself up. Mahalingam howled Tamil at him. The boy did not seem to understand. Ma 2 halingam made hitting movements of recovered burliness. The boy responded with a kind of animal wonder. Then he was aware of physical pain. He put his hand to the crown of his head and brought it back to look at dried blood. He did not seem to know what it was. "Give him what money you have," Carlo said to me. "He will remember where he has to go. 'Wherever he goes will be better than this place." I had seventy-odd Straits dollars in my pocket, nearly eight pounds. The boy took the notes unwillingly but he seemed to know what they were. "Pergi-lah," Carlo ordered. Without salaams the boy hurried out in his defiled dhoti. Mahalingam squinted at his departure, scowling, but said nothing. "A very ordinary boy," Carlo said. "Perhaps a good boy."

       "About Philip," I said. Carlo shook his head, though not sadly. "Are we going to let this bastard kill him?"

       "You will not call me bastard," Mahalingam cried.

       "No, not bastard," Carlo agreed. "There have been some good bastards. Servant of the father of abominations say, of the seducer of men and betrayer of nations, creator of discord and of pain. Also dirty, smeared with abominations, glorying in filth and disease. Let us leave him to seethe and boil in his wickedness. "

       "Can you do nothing more?"

       "If you know where his gabinetto is," Carlo said, "that filthy drawing you have between your fingers can be thrown down it and washed into the waters. The waters will not be corrupted. He has done his worst."

       I began to sob. Mahalingam looked at me with interest.

       On the way back Carlo said to me, "He is going to die, and you will now start cursing me because I could not effect a miracle. Our friend the stregone was right when he said that Nature will have her, its way. That it is too late. I was needed before, long before. Blame circumstances, the bad weather, nobody's fault." "He wins. The black bastard wins."

       "What do you mean, wins? It's a long war. We know who will win at the end. Was I expected to reduce the stre gone to empty skin and bone and then pump him full of the Holy Ghost? That would be a long battle and even then I might lose it. God gave his creatures free will, all of his creatures. Tonight surely you saw a small victory."

       "But Philip dies."

       "This is a man you seem to love. What do you love in him? You know the answer to that. What you love in him is not going to die. You have pure cleansed spirit there, I have already cared for him as I would for a son of the Church. What I say of him now is what I have said already of my father. It is better that he die and move on to eternal life. You lose him, you think. You have lost nothing. A bodily presence, a voice, the gestures of friendship." Carlo looked at his right arm and found his black brassard missing. "I must have lost it in my agitation," he said. "It does not matter. It was a hypocritical thing. Listen. You are to go to the house, I will take you there if you can remind me where it is. I will go to the hospital. I do not think it can be long now." I made noises of rage, hatred, frustration, loss. "Stop that," he cried. "Rejoice. For God's sake try to rejoice."

CHAPTER 39

The cemetery of Kuala Kangsar is almost filled with graves of British soldiers who fell in the Perak wars. Philip was interred there, though in the presence of neither Carlo nor myself. With the sinking of the waters and the end of the rains Carlo had gone back by train to Kuala Lumpur, two days too late for his midnight mass. I left for Singapore, very numb and thin, handing over the task of packing Philip's effects to the department of the District Officer. I was, on Carlo's instructions, to ignore the sentimental appurtenances of the terrestrial life, books and photographs and a tobacco jar with the arms of the University of Manchester. The real presence was now in purgatory, along with others of the invincibly ignorant (though that was all to change, Carlo said, there was only one communion, as the vincibly ignorant would in time be taught). I loved a soul, he kept saying, even as the train pulled out, and if the soul did not die neither did love. All was for the best, I would see. I never did wholly see.

       I travelled with eleven other passengers on the SS Archippus, a merchant vessel that called at innumerable ports of the Dutch East Indies and ended up at Darwin. I tapped away at Lion City in my cabin, came late to meals, posing for self-protection as a man of sorrows. The town of Darwin was wretchedly dull, but it suited my state. Life, bottom heavy like a kangaroo, was concentrated in the southern territories; up here in the north only the telegraph station sent dry hints of the existence of a world of action. It tapped, and I tapped on my verandah at the rest house that called itself a hotel, sending away my greasy beefsteaks hardly bitten. I swam in the tepid treacle of the Arafura Sea, which was patrolled by an armada of Portuguese menof-war. On the coast tree ferns and pandanus palms. Inland termite menhirs seventeen feet high. The kookaburras did not laugh, for, it was said, there was nothing to laugh at. In Perth and Adelaide they roared their heads off. I would not be staying in Adelaide: I did not wish to break down in the presence of the wife of a man who ran a 2 sports store. I walked south of Darwin to the fringe of the forest, seeing cycads, baobabs, a tree all pink and white blooms. I approached the tree, and it at once broke and flashed and whirred into a hundredfold flock of galah birds, white-bellied, orange-crested, their wings of the hue of the tea rose. Nature, which had taken away, began to give again.

       I heard there was a man called Ted Collins ready to emigrate to Alice Springs. He had bought an old Ford truck that was to be laden mainly with petrol cans. I met the man and said I wished to move south, adding to myself: cautiously approaching life again. Go halves on juice and provisions, he said. It was a thousand-mile journey, a week's travel with luck. He was a burnt taciturn man made mournful by working as a carpenter in Darwin. He seemed to foresee bright lights in Alice. He was to show himself dourly expert at firelighting in the desert wastes, in the termite territory of abandoned cattle stations, cooking soggy bugger-on-the-coals with powerful tea in a billy. He said little. Three hours out of Darwin he said: "It's all bloody well cut off. Like God had snipped it off with a bloody pair of scissors.

       "It was cut off two hundred million years ago," I said. "Mammals that lay eggs. Marsupials. You don't find them anywhere else."

       "Look at that bloody lot there," he said. It was a locust swarm of budgerigars moving south to nip fresh forest buds, having eaten as much as they could in the north. They flew at our speed: thirty-five miles an hour. Collins accelerated. "Bloody birds," he said. "Bloody animals hopping about. Bloody abos."

       "If you don't like it why don't you leave?"

       "Stuck with it, ain't I? My granddad did that for me. Australian, ain't I? We've all got to take what we're given. It's in the bloody Bible, that is."

       "Bugger the bloody Bible."

       He was shocked. "You don't want to say that. I had an uncle said that and he was struck. Look at that bloody lot there." This time it was fruit bats in a flock, a squadron of little angels of black death to southern orchards, on their, distance no object, way.

       "Is there anything you like?" I asked when we were sitting at sundown by the cooling truck and he was watching the billy boil. He looked up at me with suspicion, saw I was sincere, said: "I like something nicely made. I like something nicely mortised and tenoned and a good polish on it. Then the bloody white ants get to it and chew it up. They do it from the inside, so that it looks all right from the outside till you lay your hands on it. It's the mockery I can't bloody well stand." Then he looked at me with some cunning and said, "What is it you do for a living?"

       "Did nobody tell you back in Darwin?" I inserted the tab of a can of bully into the nick of the opener, turned, heard the fairy sigh of the death of the 2 vacuum, turned with more vigour. "Books, Mr Collins. Books are what I do for a living. I write books."

       "What kind of books? Tecs? Buffalobills? Dizabils?"

       "What are dizabils in the name of God!"

       "Where they have these girls in their dizabils and he lays his hot hands on her trembling with passion. What you might call dirty books."

       "My books are very clean, I think. Good clean stories."

       "And you're going to write one of those about bloody Darwin? Nothing goes on in Darwin, mate, clean or dirty. You must be mad. Money, you make money out of it? You're carrying money now?"

       "I have what is called a letter of credit. I take it to a bank and get cash on it." The corned beef flopped onto a tin plate and squatted there in its thin robe of fat. "Why do you want to know, Mr Collins?"

       "I've not charged you anything except tucker and juice for the truck. And it's me does the work of driving to bloody Alice."

       "You'd be doing that anyway. Do you want money? I don't have irch cash. I have to get from Alice to Adelaide, remember. Besides, there was no talk about money before we started."

       "If you write stories for a living then you have to tell me bloody stories. That's only right."

       "Are you serious?"

       "Too true I'm bloody serious, mate. Starting tomorrow. Give you time to think them up."

       "Dizabil stories?" The skysign of the Southern Cross flashed on.

       "The lot. Tecs and nedkellies. And dizabil ones too."

       So from Birdum to Daly Waters I told him the story of Beowulf and Grendel, which he pronounced kid's stuff. From Daly to Newcastle Waters he got The Miller's Tale and from Elliot to Powell Creek the putting the devil in hell story from the Decarneron. From Powell Creek to Tennant Creek I told him The Pardoner's Tale. This impressed him. "Serve the bastards right," he delivered, and he asked for the tale again. All this was doing me good. From Tennant Creek to the Devil's Marbles just before Wauchope I gave him the plot of Doctor Faustus, and he said it shows no bugger ought to go buggering about with what goes against Nature. From Wauchope to Barrow Creek I summarised Hamlet, and he said it was a bit bloody farfetched. From Barrow Creek to Tea Tree Well Store it was Paradise Lost, but he was suspicious about my alleged authorship, saying that his old dad had told him something similar when he was a saucepan lid. From Tea Tree Well Store to Aileron I gave him Robinson Crnsoe, but then he stopped the truck in the fierce heat to give me fair warning. He'd read that story in the papers somewhere, he said, and there'd been an abo on walkabout in Arnhem Land that some bloke had called Man Friday. Pinching was pinching, he said, whether it was yarns or money, and I might get away 2 with that with the ignorant, but there were some you couldn't put upon with no amount of codology. So from Aileron to the start of the Macdonnell Ranges and the distant smoke of Alice Springs I appeased him with The Turn of the Screw. As we drove into Alice he summarised my storytelling gifts and shortcomings, saying that a story was like a table, a matter of good carpentry, and that if I kept on with things like that one about the three jokers meeting death under a tree I might get on all right and make a bit of a name. So we shook hands and parted over a last pint of pig's ear after a steak with a couple of fried eggs on in dusty Alice, and I took the Port Augusta line to Adelaide, hell of a bloody journey. Then I took the slow chug to Melbourne, where all the talk was of the fierce drought and the fire that had erupted to the north of the city, eucalyptus going up with a stink of an explosion in a coughsweet factory, and a cliff-face throwing back the hot wind onto a clump and setting it off with spontaneous combustion.

       The most soothing and at the same time humbling thing I saw in New South Wales was in Professor Hocksly's aviary, where a bowerbird had set up a tunnel of twigs through which to chase possible mates, decorating the GaudI-like structure with blue and purple flowers and feathers and stolen laundry bluebags, and I saw him painting the damned thing with a twig in his beak which he dipped into blue and purple berry juice. So much for the spiritual pretensions of art. Staying a week in Sydney at Phillips's Hotel in King's Cross I gained weight and a small beer paunch. I could even bring myself to watch a cricket match. There was no evil in this vast blue air, I thought, and then I read in the Bulletin about some mad joker breaking into the little kangaroo and koala zoo in the suburbs and slaughtering seven adult leapers and three j oeys. I sailed to Auckland and there, in a bookshop, was recognised. I was persuaded into giving a talk to the local literary ladies on The Novelist's Life and said yes, travel is useful, one meets people, hears things, gets ideas. And your love life, Mr Toomey? asked a big half-Maori lady. That was when I had to walk out.