Living As a Moon (19 page)

For the afternoon session the audience consisted of the pressure-cookers, many of whom were mature people making a career change, and not much accustomed to poetry and theatre. A good many of them had trade experience, and some thought teaching an escape from the prison service, welfare caregiving, or fish splitting. Their concentration was fitful; several made a quiet withdrawal between scenes; one large guy wearing stock boots reacted to Matt’s performance as Falstaff by calling loudly, ‘Get rid of fat guts and bring back the babe.’ There were, however, no farcical collapses of scenery, no outbursts of booing, no particularly noticeable confusions on the stage. Just an atmosphere of patent mediocrity, and the lack of that frisson which makes acting worthwhile. It’s how it is sometimes: how it was a good deal of the time for the members of the Bard Words troupe. Even the dean’s animated thanks at the end of the performance fell a little flat.

The three guys loaded the scenery back into the vans and, as they finished, Justine appeared with a cheque from the dean. Paulie was offended: as director and administrator it was his right to deal with finance. ‘Oh, get over it,’ said Justine. ‘Here it is. We were just chatting and it made sense to bring it, didn’t it. For Christ’s sake.’

‘There’s protocol,’ said Paulie, aware he sounded petty.

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ said Justine.

‘I thought the morning gig went okay,’ said Conrad.

‘We really should spend something on the vans,’ said Matt. ‘Neither of them has a warrant, and the Bongo’s due for registration.’

‘Actually, I may have to pull out of the troupe,’ said Justine. ‘The dean’s really into drama, and thinks there should be more emphasis within the programmes here. He wants me to apply for a full-time position combining drama and responsibility for counselling and harassment issues. He says my university qualifications and theatre experience are ideal.’ She tried to keep her voice matter of fact, but she stood very upright and her face was almost luminous. An academic position, a substantial pay packet every fortnight, professional colleagues, and the freedom to do freelance acting in her own time. There’d be an office with her name on the door.

‘Oh, right,’ said Paulie, and Matt and Conrad turned away a little, as if dazzled and also belittled by the rise in Justine’s fortunes. They were nothing without her. Even Paulie had to admit that to himself. Without the slight lasciviousness of her presence they were just loser poofters to the school kids. They were the dust beneath her wheels. You had to have a leading lady. ‘Well, we’ll have to chat about reorganisation,’ said Paulie. ‘Yeah, good for you. Best of luck and all that.’ Paulie wasn’t going to beg: an artist has more pride than that. But she’d sold out hadn’t she, gone for the bourgeois security of teaching instead of following the star.

Paulie loaded the last cane basket that contained the props he called baubles — crowns, sceptres, rings with glittering glass gems the size of gannet eggs, a dagger to be seen before, some embroidered and bead-encrusted caps for married women, belts with embossed buckles, bold brass bracelets and necklaces of counterfeit gold. Normally each of them gave Paulie an indirect charge from the dramatic thrill of scenes in which they were required. But after Justine’s news how tawdry they seemed, how dilapidated the two vans, how desolate the winter asphalt of the teachers’ college and his own future. Paulie was determined not to give way to bitterness. ‘You’ll do a bloody good job, Justine,’ he said. ‘You go for it.’

After Justine’s appointment and the dissolution of Bard Words, Paulie sold both vans, and was appalled by the small sum he received. ‘I might as well have given the bastards away,’ he told Conrad as he handed over $286.44 from the final divvy up. Most of the scenery and props he sold to the Ashburton Repertory Society. He burnt the battlements of Elsinore to keep warm during an especially cold snap in August, and kept just a few costumes and baubles for personal appearances.

Paulie, Conrad and Matt had a final drink together at the Carlton, and ended in the darkness of Hagley Park doing a bit of
Coriolanus
by the duck pond. Paulie felt indeed like ‘one that converses more with the buttock of the night than with the forehead of the morning’. The full moon appeared fitfully like a great coin among the heaped clouds, and the wind shivered the oak trees. Conrad and Matt soon tired of their own performance: they had begun the emotional transfer from Shakespearean actors to entrepreneurial beekeepers. Already they felt embarrassment at Paulie’s obsessive devotion to an art that demanded so much sacrifice.

‘See you, Paulie,’ said Matt in the car park.

‘Yeah, good luck, mate,’ said Conrad.

‘If we do meet again, why, we shall smile,’ quoted Paulie. He set off first on his 50cc step-through and was overtaken by the other two in Matt’s small truck. Matt sounded the horn, Paulie shook one arm in the air, and they parted forever, unless coincidence should bring them together. It’s how things are, Paulie thought in the sudden glare of passing moonlight. People are in the forefront of your life for reasons of expediency, and then ricochet away.

Paulie decided to move to Auckland and see if his talent was better received there. He was offered one last gig before leaving — at the inter-denominational hospice in Avonhead. Fourteen people on the way out, and Paulie was to serve up his best blank verse after they’d had their lunch and medication. An unusually thick mist was closing around the building, as if to smother them all. Some inmates were in beds wheeled to the back of the main lounge, most were well down in the soft chairs. Paulie was unfamiliar with embalming fluid, but there was a waft which somehow brought that commodity to mind.

‘Professor Aardvark’s here, you know,’ said Matron Dutton. ‘He used to give readings himself before it got too much. Talking’s beyond him now.’ Paulie remembered Aardvark from the university, as did whole generations of English students. A tall, glaring man with prodigious memory for quotation, and vowels that would do a chicken proud. And there he was, still and pale, like a carved candle in the front row. It was a form of leave-taking for them all, with Paulie’s destination perhaps less absolute than that of the audience.

Have I told you that he’s not bad-looking, Paulie, with goodly nose and chin, that he’s had his share of admiration, though there’s this intensity, almost obsessiveness, that keeps him apart. Maybe it was the presence of the professor, but Paulie felt a special resonance in his own reading. His one-man performance was predictably centred on the great soliloquies, and he made them a farewell in his own way — a farewell to the Bard Words Troupe, to Canterbury, to the old pricks of the hospice, to a certain naïve expectation in himself as well. But it served also as defiant fealty to his love of language and theatre. The fog came pressing at the windows, gradually swallowing up the greenery outside and the neat assembly of clay planters. Time and place met in focus.

It was hard to distinguish in Paulie Tallis’ audience those who were rapt, those asleep, those who had expired. One small, bald woman sang quietly of love, but as Paulie gave his considerable best from the tragedies, he experienced a sense close to exultation. He was convinced, too, that Professor Aardvark’s lips shaped some of the lines, and that he nodded when, after the performance, Paulie leant down to his ear to whisper — ‘Yes, you old bugger, “Our revels now are ended. These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits, and are melted into air, into thin air.”’

That night I had gone back to work quite late. The campus never completely dies, but it had by nine o’clock reached a point of feline somnolence: the trees black fur against the paler sky, a few office eyes glowing yellow, and from no distinct direction the subdued purr of air-conditioning exhalation. My walk on the bank path, passing in and out of the more intense shadow of the willows, was a familiar one. Mallard ducks were in small clusters on the grass bank, and clattered uneasily as I went by. The humanities and media studies block forms one of the darker quads, but campus topography is second nature to me. Perhaps a gardener’s trolley, or a Papua New Guinean man trap, was set on the neat asphalt path, but we manage life by evaluating risk.

On the second floor a window was lit: that of Alan Scadding. No doubt he was pushing on with his book. A work on post-glacial landforms, specifically pluvial deposits. He’d be putting the hours to good use, while I drifted in one of life’s more persistent eddies. He’d be rattling up the pluvial word tally, or sending ingratiating messages to those people who might be helpful in the future. A born distance networker, and assiduous in working a room.

The green, electronic eye of acceptance winked at me, when I wielded the swipe card. I didn’t bother turning on a light at ground-floor level, or for the stairwell. A glass wall at the top of the stairs let in a fading glow, which glinted on the illustrated posters advertising forthcoming academic courses, as if they were theatrical productions coming to the city. Hist 307 The Johnny Reb Story. A Southern Perspective on the American Civil War: Media Stud 222 The Peter Jackson Phenomenon. A Personal Impact on World Cinema: Geog 312 Cometh Global Warming: Fem Stud. Fashion and Sexuality.

And in defiance of departmental regulation, the more urgent and personal concerns of students were there too, sometimes obscuring the course posters themselves. Two female flatmates wanted, or a buyer for a 1988 Honda Accord as and where is, people interested in aromatherapy, AGM of the Hispanic Society, a mountain bike and a second-hand copy of The
Youth Age
, by Voltain and Spruiker for sale. And all sprouting the little scissored tufts with the contact telephone number, or torn edges where these had been.

I did light the corridor that gives access to my office, so I could see to use my key. The door has a pinboard for student messages on which I display cartoons that prove I’m not a teacher of unbending solemnity. Students these days resent any distinction, any formality. The vice-chancellor was told to shut the fuck up just a few days ago, while escorting a group of Chinese dignities through the library. It occasioned laughter in the common room, but it was the rueful laughter of a lost cause.

Once inside the room, I turned on the small lamp beside the computer, and the dragonfly of coloured glass that formed its shade cast rainbow lozenges across my desk. From habit rather than expectation, I checked emails. Janis Sozlly, Cerrpll Tohorhoi, Jamaal Werner, Leon Rameddan and Judath Lltp were all eager to make contact: all purporting to be people, but most likely personally enhancing pharmaceuticals in disguise. There were valid messages, including the usual student pleas for assignment extensions and a reminder from Scadding to provide a semester course description, but only one that interested me.

The University of Illinois had advertised the position of visiting fellow in urban geography, and I’d requested further information. The reply was full and friendly, as is the American way. A Dr Walley said he was aware of my book on origins and symptoms of inner-city decay, and thought an application from me would receive serious consideration. The attachment contained a dozen pages or so dealing with the nature of the fellowship and the university, though the most space was given to the recreational possibilities of the campus and city of Chicago. I imagined myself strolling in Hartley Gardens in the fall, wearing a shin-length, dark coat, a blue scarf, a slight smile, and jesting with American colleagues concerning the idiosyncrasies of the faculty head.

The tableau failed to console, however, not just because I knew the encouraging response from Dr Walley was probably no more than the habitual benign tone of the professional administrator, but the more essential doubt concerning the advisability of an application at all. Did I have any compelling wish to spend an academic year in Al Capone’s metropolis, or was it rather that there was a dangerous thinning of the ice in my own city, my own life? I turned off the computer, and sat with the small coloured lamp still on, which draped a veil of bright harlequin colours across my hands and the papers on the desk.

The reverie was at the expense of tasks already more than once postponed, including preparations for the arrival of visiting academic, Dr Robin Blundeleir, and a session as supervisor with PhD student Adrienne Flowerday, who was completing a thesis on the societal effects of public transport. I could recognise in myself the malaise observed in several colleagues over the years — the failure of conviction in the significance of one’s life’s work. And even in the personal experience of that, one part of my mind was detached and determined not to succumb to such triteness. Psychological inertia is a grim destroyer of the professional academic, but there’s a wimpishness to it that repels. All over the world people make a stalwart fight for water, food, love, family and employment, the right to their beliefs, the right to live. And insulated from such reality the intellectual pines in secure complacency for some greater frisson of purpose.

In defiance of that I read almost one hundred pages of Adrienne’s competent scholarship, and noted a pertinent article on age and gender differentiation within urban bus users of which she seemed unaware.

I knew Ms Flowerday well, or had at least been in her company often, and as I read her work, her image was plain on the chair beside me, as her real self would be the next day: dark, clean hair drawn back from her round face, shoulders slightly hunched in concentration, Adidas trainers well planted in the carpet, and some deep ambiguity in her hazel eyes that was never expressed.

After leaving the office, I walked the corridor length and then switched off the light. The course posters and haphazard student notices were still ghostly at the top of the stairs, and I was confident of my footing because of the dim light through the full-length window. I could see the asphalt walkways like dark creeks among the night lawns.

But the release button however at the ground-floor doors wouldn’t activate. Now don’t you bugger me about, I admonished the genie of Murphy, who controls all such things. But the system wouldn’t let me go. It wasn’t the first time I’d been imprisoned within the building, and I knew of a possible means of escape — the ground-floor reprographics room was often left unlocked, and from its window I could drop into the garden below. Alan Scadding, still perhaps working in his room, would no doubt have had a more elegant solution, but I wasn’t going to importune him. ‘Donal, Donal, Donal,’ he’d say, with humorous resignation and falling cadence. ‘Always the world is in revolt against you,’ and the electronic system would be obsequious in function for him.

Reprographics was unlocked, and there was space between the two main photocopiers to reach the window. I banged the frame to force it open, and began to squeeze through. I’ve never been athletic, although I’ve the height for basketball, and in your forties suppleness wanes. For a moment I became stuck, half in, half out, with the narrow aluminium sill painful at my ribs and the latch caught in my jersey. A final heave and I was tumbled into the viburnums and hebes. I lay sprawled on the dirt and amid the dark leaves for a time. All was very quiet. There was moisture at my knee and a crushed snail came away in my hand there. The moon behind uniform cloud gave a faint beatific luminosity to the sky. There was absurdity in it, of course: A forty–nine-year-old senior lecturer lying in the night garden like an alley wino.

The posture was demeaning, and my back painful. I stood up, closed the window, moved to the path where I checked for injury by a variety of small movements. The light went on in the copying room, and at the same time a voice, Alan Scadding’s, said, ‘All sorts of stuff in here.’ He stood at the door, leaning in slightly as if the floor of reprographics had just been washed and he didn’t wish to mar the surface. ‘Rather untidy, I’m afraid.’ His companion was large, assured and wearing an expensive suit. He barely glanced within.

It had to be Dr Blundeleir, arrived and having an informal tour of the department. Perhaps it was his condescension, perhaps it was my sense of ignominy, though unobserved, perhaps just that Scadding was his companion, but I took an immediate dislike to Blundeleir. Blunderer I christened him as I walked into the dark, holding my left hand with fingers extended. Some intestinal snail slime remained, and I didn’t wish to use my clean handkerchief to remove it. ‘What do you bet he’ll be a complete arsehole,’ I said in a challenge to the ducks beneath the willows.

I met Dr Blunderer at a staff meeting the next day. Scadding, as acting HOD and director of programmes, extolled his virtues, and so did Blunderer in his reply to the welcome. It was a pity none of the mallards had taken on my challenge. There were thirteen colleagues present, and I counted those that I would save from drowning if there were any danger to myself. Four, only four, and two of those were women to whom I was sexually attracted. I began to think quite seriously of Chicago. There was a song wasn’t there. Frank Sinatra, was it? I sought the tune in my head while Blunderer entertained us with a detailed account of his speciality — architectural design and ethnicity. ‘I seem to remember something of yours on decay,’ said Blunderer, when it was my turn to be personally introduced.

‘You seem to remember correctly.’

‘Demographic, of course, not dental.’

‘Of course,’ I said. Blunderer continued to wait, perhaps in expectation of a compliment for his wit, or my reference to some work of his own.

‘Toynbee is not now fashionable, I know,’ he said finally, ‘but I find in all large cities common patterns of development that are markedly organic.’

Blunderer is formed like a macrocarpa tree stump, with no discernible neck and a wrestler’s chest so hirsute that he seems to wear a wolverine waistcoat. His family in Pennsylvania is very wealthy, having been providers of army uniforms and accoutrements since the time of the War of Independence, and although he laughs readily and shows teeth as dazzling as a sabre, I thought him contemptuous of the small scale of our lives. He often mentioned the historical significance of some of his forebears; he and his wife fly business class to Sydney to see the Russian ballet; they’re active at city art auctions.

Blunderer was initially a visiting fellow, but before the end of his stay he was offered a longer term appointment, and became my office neighbour. He finessed the art of boring conversation to a level that was life threatening. His entry into the common room caused me to experience an uneasy sense of oxygen deficit, and if long in his company I would feel a growing compulsion to cry out — not obscenity at Blunderer, not words at all, but a sort of wailing, atavistic appeal for release. The noise that one hears occasionally in the dead of night from agonised beasts in a zoo. Usually I was able to contain it; once, however, I was overcome in a staff meeting during a particularly long discourse from Blunderer on the comparative merits of mean and median marks in course moderation. I managed to simulate a cramp attack, but the outburst was a jolt for colleagues, several of whom had been asleep.

There was also a tête-à-tête, reluctant on my part, in the tutors’ room where I had gone to consult past copies of periodicals stored there. Blunderer came in for the same purpose, and hemmed me between stacks of
Our Physical World
and
Statistical Oceanography
. For thirty-three minutes he expounded on the influence of Islamic mosaic motifs on western architecture as a result of immigration. Because of Blunderer’s chest capacity he has a particularly sonorous voice, as if speaking from a cavern. I tried to concentrate on the pinstripes of his superb suit and the broader, colourful slashes on his equally fine tie. Blunderer dresses as a tycoon. I had an increasing sense of claustrophobia, both physical and psychological, and manoeuvred past him, excusing myself with the recollection of an appointment. ‘Not at all. I’m happy to share my work with you any time. Feel free to ask me again, Donal,’ he said. ‘I’ve felt at times some constraint between us,’ he added. ‘I hope that we get to know each other better.’

‘We’ll be hunky dory,’ I said. I hadn’t used the expression for twenty years. It was perhaps an unconscious reaction to the formality of his own language.

‘Hunky dory?’

‘Right as rain. Good as gold,’ I said, setting off down the corridor. It occurred to me that alliteration plays a considerable part in the formation of our idioms.

 Blunderer was exceedingly noisy within his room, exclaiming often and apparently ramming the furniture together. I thought at first he was fornicating with students, or suffered from epilepsy, but after some Sherlockian deduction decided it was no more than endemic clumsiness. Perhaps after the spacious ease of his Pennsylvanian family home he found it difficult to contain himself within the cell provided for him by the university.

Not long afterwards there was the slight contretemps with Ms Flowerday. She was crouched on the blue vinyl chair in my study as I tactfully showed my disappointment with the lack of intellectual rigour in her most recent thesis work, especially a tendency to unsubstantiated generalisations concerning the maintenance of psychological distance in Japanese commuter trains. ‘I’m sick of it,’ she said.

‘Sick of it?’

‘I’ve gone off it,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t connect with anything essential to my life any more.’

This is the type of graduate student that sits before one these days. People who go off things instead of buckling down to the sacrifice and grim drudgery of scholarship. ‘I read Dr Blundeleir’s book on Cambodian settlement patterns as interpreted through changing religious architecture,’ she said, ‘and I’ve decided to do something similar for Myanmar.’