Jacko (29 page)

I deceived and consoled her on that score, and then asked her about approaching Bickham with the offer.

—No use talking to me. He bloody sacked me as a friend and spaghetti cooker.

—Sacked you?

—I didn't say the right things about the bloody Wodjiris. His bloody loss. And mine. I wouldn't mind taking this present mess to him and asking him about it. Mind you, the longer you spend with a writer like that, even a supposed bloody genius, the sooner you find they know sweet bloody nothing about humans eh.

—But you still talk to him don't you Chloe?

—It's him that's not talking. The miserable old bugger. Won't let me in the door. And Khalil says, I can't disturb him Chloe. That's Khalil's version of bugger off eh.

This was no help to me at all, though I had a sudden sense that Chloe was about to be liberated. Her voice and her body would expand again in Burren Waters. As she had confessed to me at Place de l'Opéra, she wasn't up to the weight of urban conspiracies.

We said goodbye fondly, and I wished her well and hung up. I now was faced with calling Bickham direct.

I would not call him that day. I waited until well into the following evening.

I dialled in dread and to my horror it was Bickham himself who picked up the phone. I heard his sepulchral Yes?

—Oh Michael I didn't expect to get you, I said.

—Khalil is out doing some shopping.

—Well, I hope I'm not intruding on your writing.

—I've just finished. I start at four in the morning these days. Are you calling from New York?

As always, I felt absurdly flattered that he knew any details of my life. I passed on the invitation to him, reddening as I did so, feeling foolish, knowing that I sounded over-anxious. Now I felt passionately aggrieved at the institute and the smooth novelist in upstate New York for landing me with this job. I told Bickham I'd tried to contact Chloe Emptor to arrange that the message be passed on casually through a friend at some convenient time.

He said, Mrs Emptor. She's not my friend, I'm afraid.

—No. She told me that.

—The woman is a throwback to the age of Paterson and Lawson. She's a monster.

—Well, I can't make any judgement on that, Michael. But I did think this proposal was of sufficient weight to pass on to you.

—Since I wouldn't go to Stockholm to receive fifteen times as much, did you think I'd really come to New York?

But I was pleased to hear that he sounded more amused than chagrined.

—What can they do, for example, about the climatic variation? he asked. Because that always puts me in hospital.

—Of course. I'm sorry I didn't think of that.

—No one does. I get misjudged for it. People think I'm being anti-social, don't they? Whereas, I just want to keep on breathing.

—I think it's of paramount importance that you do.

—Thank you, he said. Perhaps after my death you could remind people that my respiratory ailments played a large part in my behaviour.

—I will do that on every occasion I can, I promised. Always assuming I don't go first.

—Thank you. Tell the New York people that I decline with regrets.

He hung up at once. I stood pole-axed by my telephone. I had been given a mission. I had become his champion. How many people had he similarly recruited? I found myself hard-headedly and fondly asking myself.

No one would be more faithful a defender than I.

And then the worst thing happened for Lucy. The woman, the dungeon master's wife, called again.

She told Lucy that she was recklessly using a telephone credit card. Her husband would be angry when the bill came in.

How that must have horrified Lucy. The burden of information to be passed to Dannie.

16

Through an electrical accident, I found myself taking a demented part in the argument, a part which would prove to be something very close to the part Michael Bickham had taken in the question as to whether Francis should be taken to Tijuana for saguaro juice serum or not.

I had never had a very accurate understanding of the American electrical system. I had never understood why some plugs were marked
Shavers Only
, and why power points in American bathrooms had little yellow and red reset buttons. If pushed for time I would use any power point for my shaver and shaver power points for other appliances, since in Australia all power points were equal, and equally accommodating to the electric shaver.

I had now become more careful with the act of shaving itself. Age is the condition in which your bristles begin to look not like the product of testosterone, but like a curtain of ashes on the jaws. Nature was casting me forth, kindly supplying me with the first of the dramatic props I would need – if I were lucky – for my ultimate nursing home role. My stubble, which had once been reasonable and even a little too masculine to take out to dinner, now stood on the jowls like dust on a church pew. Hence, my late afternoon trim-ups.

One afternoon, whether in the wrong power point or for whatever reason, my electric razor turned into a brilliant yellow ball in my hand. My brain instantly turned to stone. I felt myself dragged backwards across the room by the shoulders and tipped brutally against the step which led up to the spa pool which served us instead of an old-fashioned bath. The air felt full of what I thought of as sizzled ions, and I could smell the metal stench of the razor's demise. The flesh of three of my fingers and the pads of my hand were burned, and some of the skin was already sloughing away. I ran cold water over it all, and with my left hand safely jerked the shaver plug out of its socket.

I felt angry and insanely wary. The electrical systems of Manhattan had taught me too harsh a lesson. The power surge had carried into my hand a sharp little measure of paranoia.

My wife came back with some jackets from the Korean dry cleaner and was immediately competent, making soothing noises and applying burn cream gently to my scalding hand. Then she led me downstairs, as I carried my hand in front of me, and we got a cab in Lafayette Street to take us over to St Vincent's Hospital in the West Village.

Until now I had thought of St Vincent's in terms of its distinguished reputation and literary repute. Everyone knew it had served such figures as Dylan Thomas, Brendan Behan and Delmore Schwartz
in extremis
. Now I brought it my humbler talent and small but screaming injury.

A young Chinese doctor injected my hand with anaesthetic, cut away the dead flesh, and had me put to bed in a pleasant enough public ward. It was too early to dress the wound, and a burn specialist would need to look at it to decide on treatment and the necessity of a skin graft. The hand worried me barely at all, but the feeling of constriction and panic in my head was harder to negotiate with.

It was, in the spirit of the city, a loud but not very sociable ward. Though there was certainly space for me amidst the other patients and the trays and tables and bed pans, I felt somehow enclosed. I put my earphones on and listened to PBS, but even that gave me a sense of being confined. In the middle of some engrossing view on Mozambique or Azerbaijan, I would tear the phones off and reach my mouth upwards for free air I did not, objectively, need.

When I slept it was feverish. In some of my dreams I found myself to be a woman. I did not like the transmogrification – not because the change itself worried me, but more because of the relentless way the idea of being a woman frantically weevilled into my brain. It was a misrepresentation; that was what upset me. It was, I have to confess, associated in my jangled mind with being flung across the bathroom, with being a token of electric savagery.

I knew I would not rest properly, or get over the wild electricity of it all, until I fretted that all out, until my dreams became random again.

My recurrent dream was that I was a young woman, even a girl. I was afraid, but anxious to please. I stood by what you could call a rural freeway in clearly perceived country, not New England or New York, somewhere of lower rainfall, alfalfa and onions and orange trees. Perceived down to the last branch, this place. The average rainfall in the dream was perhaps eight to twelve inches. Traffic I was anxious to appease raged past me, indifferent to my good intentions.

From the direction of a carpark, a young man walked up the verge of the freeway. He carried a very large book in his hands, and, as he approached, opened it to one of the middle pages. His manner of carrying it was a little like an altar server with missal: the spine of the book and its clapboards held against his chest, its open pages faced towards me, his fellow ritualist. If it is not too melodramatic to say, the glare of this landscape had no impact on the face of the pages. The pages were darkness itself. He raised the dark book to my lips. Confused, but on the basis of a childhood church-going memory, I kissed it. It tasted of fur, like a pelt. Before I could withdraw, he – as I knew he would – closed the dark book on my head. I became an iota in the darkness. I was damned in the hairy black world of that book.

So I would wake gagging, and my little yelps, my cries for the compassion of passing motorists on that busy Californian-style highway, were lost in the rowdiness of the ward and the echoing joviality of nurses about to go off duty in New York.

Having suffered that dream three times one afternoon, before
Jeopardy
had even come on the ward TV, I found a quarter and went down the hallway, carrying my hand like a separate and delicate artefact in front of me. I dialled one-handed and found that both Emptors were out.

But it turned out that they were on their way to visit me. Before
Final Jeopardy
, they appeared in the ward, hulking Jacko and the sylph Lucy. They both wore conjugal kinds of faces which would have better fitted people whose marriage was older and more static.

When they arrived my burned hand was resting in a supportive mitt of cotton wool, the injury itself bared to the ceiling.

I tried to behave myself, but the book of darkness was too close to the surface of my brain. The confinement could easily be tasted, again like cat hair on the tongue.

I said straight away, I'm sorry Lucy, but I've got something important to tell you. Saving the Sondquist girl is more important than your dignity. I'm sorry.

My lips were bubbling with the words and I was weeping. Only later would I think that this had given me more authority.

—This girl is in darkness, Lucy. The woman who called you knows where in the darkness Sunny is …

I remember tacking on sundry
pleases
and
sorries
and
I can't help myselfs
.

Jacko had the grace to keep quiet while I compelled Lucy with my prophetic voice. Naturally I was ashamed, but not as much as I was afraid. The heat in my face was not from blushes. It was the purest fear. The
McNeill-Lehrer News Hour
wasn't even on, and I had had the dream so often already, and the limitless night remained.

—I'm not saying Jacko's not a prick, I told her in his presence, and then wept over that.

Jacko looked so sage and sad as I said it. There was no anger there, and I thought that, though he acted the fool, this proved he wasn't one really. Lucy began to look wan, just because of the pressure I was putting on her. Though the truth was the pressure was already there, and I confirmed it in my mad high pitch.

At last Jacko attempted to mention normal things. He asked me was my wife coming to the hospital. I began to weep again, because even that cherished face couldn't save me from the dark book.

—Jesus, mate, he told me, putting a hand on one of my knees, we've got to get you some sedation stuff. You've had a bloody great whacking shock eh!

I saw him go out of the ward. Old men with oxygen hoses up their nose called after him in voices aspirated with emphysema:

—Hey, Jacko, catch your show. When ya coming to my place?

From my bed I could see the hallway, where Jacko talked to a young Indian doctor. He confided in the man, touching the white-coated shoulder, cajoling, frowning. He came lolloping back, and I felt a childlike gratitude, an ineradicable devotion. Such enormous, paternal shoes, I noticed, on the hospital floor. He had to get them made up out of haunches of leather by a bespoke bootmaker in Queens.

—He'll have you fixed, mate.

Lucy took hold of my undamaged hand.

—Stay a while, I pleaded.

The hand healed faster than the appalled soul. It took only a day or two of medication – and my wife, who knew from her earlier career in nursing how to talk to doctors, firmly kept on reinforcing Jacko's demand for sedatives – before the dream became less specific as to landscape, grew to be as confused as dreams should be and carried only an average freight of night fear.

When poor Lucy got a call from the woman, she dutifully passed it on to my wife so that I in turn could be reassured. The woman wanted to know if Lucy ever came to San Bernardino. She let Lucy know that, because of recent storms, Ess had at least been taken out of the lined and furnished pit in which she had been living – the first pit, that is. Not the new one he was digging. Her husband had tried everything with that first pit, said the woman, talking, according to Lucy, like a typical handyman's wife. He had put in an electric pump. He had laid a new drain. The second pit he was digging for his future infidelities had also flooded, even worse. Expansion plans were, for the time being, cancelled.

There was a Ramada Inn in San Bernadino where she would willingly meet Lucy. She had been thinking of all this for a long time, she said. A woman in her position needed a confidante, but having another woman on the premises, sometimes hidden, sometimes frankly acknowledged as the family babysitter, made things very difficult. When Ess was allowed to be visible, people wanted to know why she had come back. The effort of explaining that detracted from the friendship the wife sometimes felt for Ess. For while she was locked in the box for all that time, the woman and her husband had been able to put around the easier story that Ess had gone home to her family.