Jacko (41 page)

—Do you think he's fit for marriage with anyone? Lucy asked.

—Jesus! That's a terrible question to ask me.

—But just do me a favour and say whether you think he's fit for it.

In such a deep night, north of Capricorn, amidst such impending and inhuman spaces, I did not want to say something that would torment her and spoil her small, human sleep.

—I think he could certainly be educated to marriage.

She laughed the old, rich Odeon laugh.

—Like Stammer Jack's been? Anyhow, that didn't hurt you too much eh? Lowering the mateship barrier.

—I think he could be educated and coerced. Your brand of education seemed to me to go very, very gently with him.

—Well sorry. I thought I could influence him. I was hard on him in private. But not in public you know. In public I think it's disloyal to kick up a fuss. I thought that when my parents bunged on public scenes. It didn't seem to help them much. If I did act up, it'd work the other way with him. He might take it from some other woman. Look, come and see these paintings of mine.

She was pleased to drag me away from the dusty plaza and the whole subject. She led me to her room in the brick stockmen's quarters. It was nondescript, but it had two beds. On one of the beds and around the walls and either side of the wash basin lay a number of canvases and sheets of board.

I thought they were very competent, lively impressionist and abstract versions of the Burren Waters landscape. Since she was working on technique, they were repetitive, like Monet's water lilies or haystacks. Worked over and over, in all conditions of Burren Waters light. She'd managed to turn the Emptor house into something more mysterious than itself.

I told her I thought they were wonderful.

—Come on, she said. You're just saying that.

—What would I know anyhow. But I like them enormously. Any for sale?

—I'll give you one.

The truth was I wished I could have conveyed how startling this display of her work seemed; a real phenomenon in the lee of her leaving Jacko.

—I don't know; it really keeps me occupied. You can't get that result out of playing the cello eh. It keeps me so busy. The paintings don't satisfy me in retrospect, when they're lying around the room, but making them satisfies me.

I could understand that. Compared to the imponderables of writing and music, painting was a sort of busy and absorbing art.

As we stood looking at the canvases, she asked, So, is he living with Dannie?

—Didn't you know they fell out so badly over the Sondquist business? He behaved with real style, and Dannie hated it. As far as I know he's not living with anyone. I don't want to raise any stupid hopes, but he misses you in his way.

—Oh yeah. In his way eh. Got to be careful of that way. I suppose I'll stay up here and give birth to the child, and still expect everyone to keep it a secret.

Putting my arms around her for no more than a friendly – probably a paternal – hug, I believed I could feel, through the flesh of my small paunch earned in distant bars with Jacko, the beat of her child's heart, or maybe just the pulse of its energetic growing. The heart of a riotous, reproduced Jacko. She carried that beloved enemy.

I asked her that night if she wanted to come back to Sydney with me, and try the city again. She could stay at the beach with Maureen and me. But she said no.

Three times, as far as I remember.

Back in my room, I lay on my bed fully clothed. When you grew still at Burren Waters, you
were
aware of an edginess in the atmosphere. The place was on a cusp, where water-laden air from the Timor and Arafura Seas ran up against the super-dried air from the Tanami and other deserts. You couldn't sleep at ease unless you were used to these ionic complications. Besides, I was woken from my first few minutes dozing by the muted voices of women outside. What did these voices mean? Was something being plotted? Punishment of Stammer Jack? Of Jacko? Of me as a subscriber to the same chromosomes?

I had reached a paranoid hour.

In the end I fought off the leadenness and dropped my feet to the floor and – against a terrible weight of gravity – rose to go and see where these persistent voices came from.

It was Chloe and Sunny Sondquist. Both barefooted, they trod the mauve dust of the homestead square. They were pretty clearly delineated by moonlight. Chloe wore a mumu, Sunny a light floral dress. As they strolled, Chloe would sometimes lag, as if the air was getting at her, but would catch up. I could hear that it was Sunny doing most of the talking. They passed the hangar where Boomer's corkscrew beast slept. As they drew level with the sales ring, Sunny reached back and linked arms with Chloe, and the two smiled at each other. Sunny kept talking, but you'd hear the occasional rumble of Chloe's sentences – waivers, questions, counsels.

They were sisters under the constellation of Capricorn, under a sky bright as lunacy. They strolled across the dust, and now they were a daughter and mother, the one dragging the other off to a shop to look at a dress. I heard Chloe say
Bloody hell!
and laugh.

They were heading back to the homestead now, along the line of the stockmen's quarters, the cookhouse, the office. I stepped back into my room a little. They would pass my door. I have to admit I had tears in my eyes, for Sunny the maimed daughter of course, but for Chloe's maternal kindness too. The crazed Senate candidate had become something else, something supra-political, under the uneasy moon.

Sunny was chatting away in a subdued voice, but as she passed my door, I heard what she was saying.

—Legerdemain – L-E-G-E-R-D-E-M-A-I-N. Anodyne – A-N-O-D-Y-N-E. Polymorphic – P-O-L-Y-M-O-R-P-H-I-C …

21

My wife in particular loved returning to New York in its first chill, the last of its summer humidity. The leaves in Washington Square were at that stage investing themselves in their last brave flare of colour. Maureen found the East Village, which purists said did not exist, a genuine community. The manager of Shakespeare's bookshop knew her, as did the Korean dry cleaners, and the Italian-Americans in the postal service at La Guardia Place. There were people in Dean and Deluca's who welcomed her back. She knew the actress who made the gourmet sandwiches in Mercer Street, still under-employed at the end of the summer, still waiting for the summoning voice.

When we went back to the Grand Ticino for the first time, the
maitre d'
welcomed her like a cousin from Trieste. And if she shopped at night at the local general store, again Korean, the managers would send their second oldest chunk of a son to get her home safely.

In the sorts of magazines which told you what was coming up on Fall television, Jacko's picture appeared and re-appeared, but I only heard from him once, when he left a recorded message saying that unhappily he would not be able to come to the party for the launch of my book on China, the one on whose revisions I had worked all the previous New York winter.

Jacko was clearly in California a great deal, being produced by Tracey perhaps. Since, in a sense, I had gone to the Northern Territory at his bidding, and since I might have died of thirst on the errand, I felt chagrin that he didn't seek me out for a report.

The book was published and was featured on the front page of the
New York Times Book Review
, for, as people liked to say then, what that was worth.

In November there was a further sequence of recorded telephone conversations, as if he were calling at times he knew I would be out. My wife and I were invited to his launch party in Los Angeles, the launch of the game show that is. The invitation came inconveniently late and, though my wife urged me to go if I wanted to, I decided against it. I had begun another book, and two days of flying and a night of wildness with Jacko did not seem to me to be best for it.

So the television season began, and Jacko's show was madly successful in the seven-thirty time slot on Wednesday night, in the meat of the week, the primest of prime times. I watched the credits and found Tracey's name listed as Executive Producer. I left a note for him at the bar of Mary O'Reilly's, the sentimental non-IRA bar above which he lived.

—I know you're on the other side of the country all the time, I wrote, but if ever you have time, I'm not averse to having a drink.

I hoped that did not seem like pleading. I wanted to tell him how Sunny and Delia were, even if I were forbidden to tell him the full story of Lucy. The fact that he did not urgently call to ask me about Lucy – whether I'd tell him the truth or not – made him seem more trivial to me by the day.

He still did the doorknocks, getting past all barriers, transcending them this way and that. Basil Sutherland reputedly paid him a fortune for doing three doors per week. Social commentators speculated that people wrote to Jacko begging to be included in his raids of the suburbs. He did the taping of his game show over three days in California – I quote a newspaper – and perhaps a day of that was spent practising his material and his timing. He had remarkably talented people willing to play his quiz game. Jacko picked up a small but renowned English comic, an Oxford graduate, who would answer ten questions in a row correctly, and then, at what passes as centre stage, Jacko would lift him in his arms and turn him upside down, like a wolfhound jovially cuffing a kitten. This image became talismanic in all the advertising for the show.

—It's not his success that's making him avoid us, I said to Maureen.

—I wish it damn well was, she said.

I got a call from him one Wednesday morning, when I was still working on the beginnings of the new novel.

—Aren't you supposed to be in California on Wednesdays? I asked.

He had none of the liveliness of a man whose mad show would take viewers by the scruff of their sensibilities at seven thirty that night.

He said, We've got some episodes in the can. I need to see lawyers this afternoon. Do you want to meet in the Odeon afterwards?

—I've got a workshop at seven, I told him, just to show that he couldn't expect to be put, on a whim, at the top of my list.

—Four then. What do you say?

—You still drink at the Odeon? I asked him, making it hard for him, wondering how nostalgia for Lucy must lie in ambush for him in that place.

He seemed to understand what I meant too.

—Jesus, mate, he protested. I know it's got memories eh. But it's just around the corner after all.

All right, I said, trying to sound grudging, but avid for the hour.

At four, Jacko and I had – as usual – the barman to ourselves. The gritty residue of daylight invaded the floor where Lucy had danced in her ‘waistband', singing in her helium-childish voice.

Jacko was seated at a table, whereas all our former mid-afternoon Odeon confidences had been at the bar. This afternoon, however, the Great Intruder wanted his privacy. He had lost some poundage since last I saw him and had an untouched glass of white wine in front of him. This was close to being a penitential drink in Jacko's case. To show that I would not be allayed by social boozing, I ordered water. All this must have confused the barman.

—Okay, he said when we had settled. We know where we are, don't we? You're pissed off at me for not calling. But you don't know how busy I've been. The time I've had free to ask you about the women, I've been utterly rooted. And I know something about them anyhow, from phone calls. On the other hand, you went up there under your own steam. I know that. I saw an article on it in the in-flight magazine of some airline. Makes Burren Waters sound pretty bloody picturesque eh. Not half as picturesque as it is in reality. You had the grace not to mention Sunny or Delia or Lucy. So … my apologies. I'm a silly prick who doesn't deserve his friends, and so say all of us.

—I did go up there, and I covered my expenses. But I would have preferred to be at home working on my new book, and damn the whole troop of you!

Jacko gave a throaty laugh.

—Come on. You can't tell me that. You were dying to find out what happened to all the girls. Come clean eh. You've got a mill and this is your bloody grist. You can't tell me what happened to Sunny isn't astounding. Out of the box in San Bernardino County, and into Burren Waters. Bloody astounding!

—And there's a more plebeian mystery too, I told him. How well Chloe gets on with Lucy.

—That's no surprise, said Jacko. Women are amazing that way. They have a common cause against bastards like me and the mongrel bastard. Maybe he and I've got a lot in common, even though he probably doesn't think so. Listen, are you going to take this high moral tone all afternoon?

—Maybe not, I conceded.

—I can tell it's a bloody strain for you, said Jacko.

—It's not a strain. I was always a partisan of Lucy's. Whenever you mention Burren Waters, you put Sunny first. You've got to expect me to wonder how normal that is.

—Blood-ee hell! Give me a chance. I've got enough answering to do in the next day or so.

He merely wetted his lips with his chardonnay. It was as if working for a network had made him a more seemly drinker.

—Bloody Silverarts've taken an injunction against my game show, he told me then. They say that I was still legally under option to them when I signed on with Hubie Greenspan. It'll be heard downtown tomorrow. In the meantime the network has pulled tonight's episode because they don't want to be sued retrospectively. You wouldn't believe it, but you're looking at a man people have been distancing themselves from all day. My bloody agent made me sign a sheet of paper indemnifying him for the advice he gave me at the time!

—But you had legal advice about it too, I argued.

—Jesus, and I still do. Up to the bloody ears eh.

—Silverarts can't possibly win, can they? They're not within their rights?

—Well, both Greenspan and I got advice which said I was clear to make a new contract. But now, after this writ, the lawyers are all at once more cautious. They're looking at me like someone who's just been told he's got bloody cancer.