Janette Turner Hospital Collected Stories (25 page)

Young boys hop and dance on the sand in a frenzy of excitement, little bookies in the making, calling bets. The line is thinning out now, it's single file with bigger and bigger spaces between the dots. It's going to be a clean getaway, no one's laying odds, the tension's gone. Towels and blankets and buckets and spades and bodies move into the vacuum. Someone turns a radio on. The sand settles quickly.

Where's Leigh? Cass, disconsolate and shaken, spreads her towel and looks about for the stroller and Deb's bucket and spade. Deb, paddling down in the water all this bloody while, is unaffected, and talks confidentially to the shells in her pink hands. Cass sees the stroller, which has travelled thirty feet or so and is almost undamaged.

One by one, the heroes – the local boys – return.
Good on yer, mate!
They swagger a little and flaunt their battle scars: the bloodied mouths, busted teeth, purple welts. It turns out to have been an argument about a frisbee, a Palestinian frisbee which had sailed right across a true blue volleyball game without benefit of visa or
may I please?
Directly in the frisbee's path had been the head of a local boy.
Bloody wogs come out here and think they own the bloody beach.
Little clusters of veterans, hobbling, grumbling, strutting, climb the concrete stairs and cross the street to the Bondi Beach Hotel.

Deb struggles valiantly up from the shallows with a bucket of water and empties it at Cass's feet. Avidly, she watches the sand suck at her offering, watches the wet funnel form. “Where does it go, Mummy?”

“It goes to China.” A boy says this, a passing teenage boy who, as it turns out, is in urgent need of a listener. He is full of important information which pushes against the aching skin of his body, a body in which he is not at ease. He flops down and arranges all his arms and legs beside the child.

“You got a big bitey,” Deb tells him solemnly, running her small pink and wondering finger across his cheek. A purple welt, like a brand from a poker, makes a diagonal from mouth to ear.

“Yeah,” he says, speaking to the child but needing her mother's reaction. “I'm the one that got hit with the frisbee.” He waits. He hasn't quite decided whether to be victim or hero, he needs an audience, a soundingboard. “I'm the one got the whole thing started.” Cass can see on the surface of his skin – the pulsing tics, the flinches – a
pas de deux
of swagger and self-pity. While his hands offer their services to Deb (packing the wet sand for her, tamping it into her bucket, tapping it neatly out into pristine castle) his toes clasp and unclasp sand. Beneath the backwash of battle, he is locating a surf of emotions. “And then me mates bugger off to the pub and leave me.” The wound of his under-age status hurts like hell; he feels the purple scar gingerly, and Cass can see him translating, interpreting, deciding: he's victim, definitely victim, abandoned, cruelly neglected. His head is throbbing. “It's me Saturday off,” he says forlornly. “Gotta work shift again tomorrow. It's me only day for the beach.”

Cass touches his cheek. “You should get that cut attended to.”

“Me dad's gonna give me hell, the police and all.” His voice breaks. “You notice how they only go in gangs?” he asks bitterly, blinking hard, turning away. “Those bloody cowards, bloody wogs.” He jumps up and runs into the surf.

Cass gathers up towels and Deb, and drags the stroller through sand. No sign of Leigh. The walk home is twice as long as the walk to the beach.

* * *

Leigh is in the enclosed back patio, sitting in Tom's favourite deckchair and drinking beer with a guest, a young man in his twenties, olive-skinned, very striking. A clump of the visitor's abundant black hair is matted with blood, and there is a dried crosshatching of blood around his right eye and right cheek. Cass remembers the moment when a cricket bat hit that temple with a sick
thook
of sound.

“Oh Cass!” Leigh calls gaily. “This is Mahmoud Khan.”

Cass feels shy and ungainly in her own backyard. “How d'you do?” she says awkwardly, extending her hand.

Courtly, Mahmoud Khan takes it and kisses the backs of her fingers. He smiles with his dazzling white teeth.

“I felt it was the least I could do,” Leigh explains.

Cass, confused, is remembering the single file running toward Cronulla and cannot figure out how Leigh, how this young man …

Leigh says: “I hailed a taxi and followed, and when they ducked up to the road and across and into the alley behind the Khan restaurant …” She shrugs.

“They never catch us,” Mahmoud says, and his accent is broad Australian, more or less, with unpredictable slides and riffs. He smiles his dazzling smile. “We know Bondi like we know a woman's body, all the ins and outs, we got signals, the buggers can't keep us off the beach. Free bloody country, right?” With the pads of his fingers, he explores the crusted lump on his temple. “We gotta go in teams, though, for protection.”

Cass fumbles for words: “I'm awfully sorry … I'd, uh, like to apologise …”

Mahmoud Khan bows slightly, with only a hint of sarcasm, and Cass feels like a gauche schoolgirl who has just said something particularly banal. She blunders on nevertheless: “We're not all like that.” Mahmoud Khan bows again and his movement seems to take in the wisteria arbour, the graceful white enamelled chairs, the expensive interlocked paving.

“Well,” Leigh says, jumping up. “We'll be off.” Moving in front of Mahmoud, so that only Cass can see her, she raises her eyebrows significantly and smiles a little. “Mahmoud's family runs The Khan's Kitchen. We're going to have dinner there.” She bends over to kiss Deb, gives Cass a hug. “I'll phone,” she says.

* * *

On Sunday morning Cass wakes at dawn and feels the absence of Leigh in the air. Tom is snoring softly. Is this contentment? Cass wonders dully, studying a long hairline crack in the ceiling. Is this peace? Against the crack, an image interposes itself: Mahmoud Khan is eating Leigh's buttered body. Cass cannot put a name to her feeling. She eases herself out of bed and pads barefoot into Deb's room. In the crib, her daughter's pale ringlets lie damp on the pillow and she bends over to smell the sweet-sour innocent morning breath – which is not entirely regular; which leaves Deb's parted lips in little syncopated riffs. Quick! Cass's hand flies to her own mouth to muffle a sound, an improper noise, some little peep of the body, a lurch of fear or loss, a sob perhaps. She is almost afraid to brush her lips against her daughter's cheek.

Sunday morning ticks by and she simply stands there, watching, trying to imagine the unimaginable: Deb at ten, fifteen, twenty. Then she tiptoes from the room, pulls on jeans and t-shirt and sandshoes, and lets herself out the front door. Not certain why she feels furtive,
illicit
even, she nevertheless treads softly as a cat past the neat accusing houses, down the long hill, across the desolate patio of the hotel, to the deserted beach. She takes off her sandshoes and ties them together and slings them round her neck. She could be the only person, the loneliest person, in the world. Why? she asks the gregarious gulls. What do I want? She does not know the answer to either question. She walks, giving her heels and toes a little twist at each step for the pleasure of it.

Ouch!
Stumbling, clutching at her right foot, she sees the hypodermic she has stepped on. She stares at it in a dazed uncomprehending way, knowing it has a meaning she must grope for. She thinks vaguely of Leigh and Mahmoud Khan and her daughter's cheek damp on its pillow. Then she notices another hypodermic, just ten inches away. Then another. And something else: condoms, she realises. She starts to count them, ten, twenty, thirty, more, just from where she is standing. She shades her eyes and looks about her. There are hundreds of condoms and hypodermics. In a high strange breathy voice, she recites aloud to the gulls:
And she sees the vision splendid
/
Of the sunlit sands extended
… Nervous laughter breaks through her lips like bubbles.

This is the spot, she thinks, where Deb was playing with her bucket and spade.

In the distance, she can see the sandsweeper beginning its daily work, the tractor ploughing through sand, the mesh drum gulping in dreck and leaving a plume of pure sifted gold in its wake. She watches it, mesmerised. She knows what she wants now. She wants to go back one half hour in time, to be brushing her lips against Deb's unblemished cheek. She wants to go back two whole days, to the moment when she picked up Leigh at Circular Quay. She wants to go back a decade, a decade and a half, to the day when she and Leigh sat high in the mango tree and showed each other their first underarm hairs. Her foot hurts. She watches the sandsweeper, unable to move.

Over the roar of his engine, the sandsweeper shouts and waves. She cannot catch his words. She is thinking of something she has read about turtles: how thousands of them hatch high up on the beach and begin their mad race for the water; and how the gulls scream and dive; and how only the merest fraction of the baby turtles reaches the waves.

The Chameleon Condition

Adam first became aware of his condition one midnight, or thereabouts, in his lover's bedroom. It seemed a trick of the moonlight. Yes, he was awed, of course he was, he never ceased to be awed by the translucent quality of her skin – but it was not that. He was lying on his back and she was kneeling astride him, her breasts and her spicy perfume filling the sensory foreground. Her long hair flung itself about everywhichway in the wind of her gallop.

And there beyond her agile limbs lay his own legs, foreshortened from his pillow's-eye perspective, parted slightly, itching (it was
like
an itch) with pleasure, and …

And … ?

Startled, he raised his head slightly from the pillow. His legs were bright blue with gratification. Blue as a peacock's feather. Blue as Krishna when the milkmaids licked him with their thousand tongues.

My god, look … ! he would have cried out, except that a wave of sexual delirium barrelled into him at that very instant, his breath was knocked to kingdom come, he was caught and tossed overandover, he and his long-haired sea-horse racing neck and neck, a shoreline coming at them at a furious pace.

His lover (she was one of his colleagues at the university) flung back her hair and laughed. “I love it when you do that.”

“Do what?”

“Grunt and moan and babble like a baby.”

“Grumt?”
he mumbled, embarrassed.
“Brabble?”
And she laughed again.

“My legs,” he said, curious, incredulous, staring at them. It must have been the moon through the curtains. “Look at the way my legs are … But why isn't it happening to you?” His arms too, he saw them, confounded. And his belly, his chest. It was an incandescence, like marsh fire.

“Look,” he said, a little frightened now, holding up his arm. But the light changed, or perhaps his endorphins calmed down, and the cobalt shrank away from his extremities, condensing, darkening, bolting toward the tiny opening in his shrivelled cock and disappearing as though he had sucked it back inside himself.

“God,” he said shakily. He made an effort to laugh. “Did you see that?”

“What?” She opened a drowsy eye. She smiled. “You're so …” Like a child in a toy shop, she might have said. She found it endearing, a man in his fifties so innocent, so touchingly inept.

“God!” he said. “Oh my god, the
time.”
He groped for clothing, he kept a wary eye on his skin, he stumbled in the ropey noose of sheets. It made him jumpy the way she always kept him later than he intended, well not kept him perhaps, not exactly
kept
him. But she could hardly be said to be overly sensitive to the risks, to the situation, to the condition in which he found himself, to the intricacies –

The phone rang, and his body jerked like a rabbit's when pellet guns are about.

She reached languidly across her pillow and answered it. “Hello?” she said, and his breath stuck in his throat, waiting.

“It's your wife.” She had her hand over the receiver, she cradled it between her breasts and sat up cross-legged and let her hair fall forward, watching him gravely from under it. “Hey,” she murmured. “Hey, just kidding. If you could see yourself! You're white as a sheet.”

And he was. Literally. He could barely see the pencil outline of his body against the bedding, white on white, a quick Picasso sketch.

“Hello?” his lover said into the receiver. “Hello?” She hung up. “Nobody there. Hey, are you all right?”

Was he all right? Maybe. Colour was returning to his flesh the way lilies sip up dyed water in florists' shops, in washed streaks. He stood, but felt queasy, and had to lean against her dresser while he pulled his trousers on.

“Actually, Adam,” she said sombrely, quietly, biting her lip. “To tell you the truth, I think that was your wife. I get these calls, especially Friday and Saturday nights. The caller never speaks, but doesn't hang up either.”

He leaned on her dresser and breathed slowly. He felt ill. If only his lover, or his wife, understood the intricacies.

His lover watched him carefully. “Except once,” she said quietly. “About two weeks ago. The caller – it was a woman – asked me: ‘Is Adam there?' Sounded very formal … like a secretary, say. But secretaries don't call in the middle of the night, do they?”

“Eve,” he gasped. (Naturally his lover's name was Eve. She was, in fact, older than his wife though she seemed to him younger, he was not sure why. The career, he supposed. The vibrancy. His wife stayed home with the children and a sheen had gone from her, there was a certain listlessness … ) “Eve, I can't …” He was having difficulty breathing. “I can't seem to …”

“You're hyperventilating. Here.” She pulled the quilt over both of them, a cocoon. She let him sip carbon dioxide. “There.” They surfaced into ordinary air. She said sympathetically: “You look awful. Do you need to … ? C'mon.” And she gave him her arm and helped him to the bathroom. “I shouldn't have said anything,” she said remorsefully. “Of course, it could be anyone. It could be kids fooling around. It could have been a coincidence, a total fluke.”

Adam kneeled in front of the toilet bowl, his turkey throat stretching, questing about, making strange sounds. He looked hideously comic, and Eve, distressed, had to turn away.

“Listen,” she said. She filled the sink with warm water and soaked a facecloth in it. “Maybe I imagined she said Adam. The more I think about it, the more I convince myself I must have imagined it, because it's so unlikely, isn't it? No one actually
does
that sort of thing.” She applied the wet facecloth to the back of his neck. “Does that feel better? You still look a bit green.”

He managed to stand, then had to sit on the toilet seat, his head between his hands. He stared at his feet, seaweed-green, the colour spreading like wet mould.

“Listen.” She stroked his hair, awkwardly tender. “I think it's better if you just stop coming, don't you?” He was so bourgeois, so cautious, so … well, tediously guilty, that it was like talking to a frightened child caught on the spikes of a new school.

He took deep breaths. He blinked several times, but the green did not go away. Indeed, if anything it seemed to be getting brighter, more nauseating; it was frog-green, swamp-green, the green of moss in old half-empty jam jars. “Can you see it?” he asked, terrified.

“I think we can both see it's the best thing,” she said gently. “Not only for your own sake. And for hers, of course. But mine too. I mean, her silences … you've got to be awfully desperate … It's just not the sort of thing I do, Adam.” She had learned to let happiness come and go, without anxiety. It always did keep coming again, in new and surprising shapes. “So I think it's better all round if you just stop –”

He clutched at her rather convulsively, and she had the awkward sensation of being his mother. “What can I do?” he sighed into the warm hollow between her breasts. “I feel so
desirous,
I feel ill with desire.”

Eve was embarrassed. He had an oddly archaic vocabulary which she attributed to the afterglow of gilded academic prospects. Once he had been a golden boy, full of promise, but had slid downhill through a tunnel of marital mess and unrequited ambition into verbal pedantries, rejection slips from scholarly journals, and the big undergraduate classes. Still, he was an assiduous (his colleagues would have said “pushy”) proposer of papers for overseas conferences, and a dogged reviewer and essayist for magazines edited by friends or by former students; and so he was warmed (though never quite sufficiently) by an inner vision of himself as under-appreciated Renaissance man. And as lover.

Sometimes he brought Beethoven's most mournful sonatas and played them endlessly and asked Eve: How like you this music, beloved?

Or: One of our colleagues opines, he would say of a certain new book.

Opines!
Eve would think.

“Battersly opines …” he might say. “Though Frith is of the opinion that …” He would mention other famous names he had met in overseas conference bars. (He had given the same lecture, under modified titles, in a number of countries.)

“And what do you
opine?”
she would ask, but he never seemed to hear the question.

Did Adam opine, ever? she wondered. Could he, all on his own, opine? Sometimes she found herself expecting him to give off the smell (distinctive, Edwardian, not unpleasant) of a second-hand bookstore. He made her feel ridiculously protective.

“I don't know what to do,” he said on the night that his legs turned blue, then white, then green. He sucked her left breast, then her right. “My wife is given to many forms of subtle blackmail,” he said mournfully. “But I can't give you up, Eve. I just can't. I couldn't live without you.”

Eve patted him on the arm and handed him his shirt. There was a direct correlation, in her experience, between verbal extravagance and exits.
I am rash, I panic, I disappear.
The timidity of men was a source of wonder. The serpent, they said. The ripeness of the apple. The occasion. The woman tempted me. The wife forbids.

Was nobody ever at home?

Under all those belligerent layers, there was … ?

“It's the children,” he sighed. “My wife would threaten …”

“Adam,” she said. He seemed to her lighter than air. “Let's just call it quits as fondly and sensibly as –”

“Some of our colleagues think you're playing sexual games with me,” he complained fretfully.

“Do they? And what do you think?”

“I don't know what to think, I don't know what to … I think I'll take a … would a shower be all right, would you mind?”

For a moment she raised her eyebrows with surprise, but it was not an erotic invitation. Quite the contrary.

“Go ahead,” she shrugged. (Odd how you could never quite prepare yourself for certain insults; how the glancing blow could cause unexpected pain.)

He scrubbed and scrubbed. He washed Eve's perfume from his pores. He showered until all the green had gone and the water ran clear and colourless down the drain.

It could have been his first wife who called, he thought as he drove home. His second wife never called him Adam, she had never cared to address him by a second-hand name, a
used
name, she had invented her own. So it could have been, must have been, his first wife. He did not for a moment doubt her malevolent powers, or her vigilance, in spite of all the years. The extreme improbability of her knowing of Eve's existence weighed as nothing against his faith in her ability to go on disrupting his life. She
pesters
me, he would say. He said it often, because the results of their marital couplings persisted in linking them. The children of his first marriage had not turned out well, and occasions for the parents to confer kept arising. She's
pestering
me again, he would say.

She's a
difficult
woman, his second wife would agree. It was their sole remaining point of agreement. It was a litany with them, and gave the comfort that litanies give. The children of his second marriage had not yet reached the age of disappointment, and he pinned all his hopes on them.

Yes, it was almost certainly his first wife pestering him again.

In which case he was safe.

Unless of course it was his second wife wanting him to think it was his first wife.

These were the complications with which he lived. Some men were lucky, some were not. His thoughts weighed on him like a bruise.

A red light glared and he braked sharply, feeling querulous. What was the point, so late at night, with scarcely any cars on the road? Really, it was ridiculous, and his fingers tapped out a tattoo of irritation on the wheel. Anger, that serpentine virus, went slinking down from his head and along his arms and out to his fingertips which beat time like kettledrums on the … his fingers beat time … oh no, not again.

By the ghastly light, neon, of the street lamps, he saw his purple hands, his purple wrists, his purple arms. His whole body was a bruise.

In the early stages his condition was manageable. It was like having an eccentric tic. The colours came and went quite swiftly, as though someone were changing channels or playing with a switch or directing a movie projector at the surface of his skin.

But then days came when a tint would settle in like a stationary weather system. Blue, for instance. Not the peacock blue of passion, but the other one, a glum slate blue.

“It's rare,” his doctor told him, “but not unknown.” His doctor, it must be ruefully confessed, was rather pleased. All too infrequently did a general practitioner have a chance with the medical journals. “I've had to read up on your condition. Biofeedback research and so on, a whole new area.” The medical hands, with their long white fingers, were tented reverently; the medical throat was thoughtfully cleared. “What you are experiencing is a sort of mind-body anxiety loop, more a psychiatric problem actually.” The doctor looked tactfully out the window and coughed. “It – ah – arises when the subject has no – ah – appreciable sense of self. When he measures himself by reflected opinion. He becomes as it were, that reflection. As he perceives it, that is.”

The doctor rose and crossed to the window. “Astonishing thing, the mind.” He coughed again, very politely. “Research indicates,” he said, looking out at the city, “that subjects are afraid to speak in their own voice. That is to say, they find it necessary to quote an endorser, sometimes even for quite trivial –”

“But …” Adam objected fretfully, “my wife used to be a nurse and she says it's just tension, extreme tension, because there was this, ah, awkward situation … So she feels, my wife that is, that you should be treating me for stress. She feels you are not taking full account … She thinks I should get a second opinion.”