Quipu (28 page)

I felt very tempted to “play” with this wise, sweet man, and regret not having taken the opportunity. I’m sure it would have been exciting and memorable. However, too late—he went back to Noumea today.

1983: joseph’s redemption

As clever dick Deep Thought Weekends go (and it has been, by design, an easygoing affair, with a minimum of formal programming), it has gone well enough, in Joseph’s estimation, considering how close they all are to 1984. No forces of double-thinking righteousness have broken down their doors, torn the marijuana from the lips of those so banal as still to indulge, snatched paperbacks from back pockets and incinerated them with a gush of flaming napalm, stamped on faces forever. Perhaps it is the bucolic air of the place, the Pontes’ hobby farm. Cows lowing in the morning, sheep bleating and blatting horribly, fowls yelling their sex-crazed heads off. Pity about the plumbing though.

Joseph fights his way through the crowded main room to the lavatory set aside for the men. Three riotous fellows are crammed into the stall, firing downward shoulder to shoulder. Bladder pressing his belt, Joseph heads for the broad outdoors. I love a sunburnt country, there’s so much space to piss. There is an outside dunny here, relic of days before septic tanks but free of country flies in the cool night air. It stands like a sentry box at the end of the Pontes’ yard, surrounded by fuel tanks and pipes. A bar of light shows under its door. Another applicant with prior claim waits his turn. Bugger it.

Joe leans one hand on a fence, unzips, listens to the hiss of his piss. He is more than half drunk. His vocal cords are sore from singing. Funny, you’d never believe how many of the words you know until a whole bunch of other people hop in and give the lead. The sky beyond the lights of the Pontes’ enormous ramshackle farmhouse is monstrously black, empty, starless. He zips up as the door of the sentry box opens. Marjory steps out. The waiting shape springs for the door. Joseph hums “They’re changing Guard at Buckingham Palace.” Marjory comes straight toward him and puts her arm about his waist.

“Not palely loitering, Joseph?”

“I like to get a bit in each night, Marjory.”

“Ah, don’t we all. And how rarely do we succeed in our ambition. Sorry, that was coarse and untrue. Come and have a drink with me.” She seems as drunk as he is.

The lights are off when they get inside;
Duck Soup
is screening on one whitewashed wall. Joseph finds a bottle on a table of magazines. He keeps his arm around Marjory. They share the beer. Or is it cider? Surely beer. Hell, you’re drunk, he tells himself.

Oh Jesus, this woman with her breast against my hand, her hair in my face. I have known her too long and not enough—not at all. I can’t see her face in this light and her hair all over the place and her tongue in my mouth.

Marjory takes his hand from her back and leads it up under her sweater. It develops a sense of direction, traversing the hollow of her armpit, interposing itself between her brassiered breast and his own chest. After a warm, shivery time, Marjory turns into him, kisses him fiercely, disengages from his hold and draws him to the corridor.

“Have you got a room by yourself?”

Joseph’s tongue locks. He nods his head in the semi-darkness.

“Let’s stop quickly at my room and get something to drink.”

She knows her way about the place. She leaves Joseph in the hallway, nips inside, half-closes the door, flips on the light, rummages, is out again in a trice, light off, door closed. “I thought Ray might have crashed. He must be in there watching the Marx Brothers.” There is more than exasperation in her tone. “What room are you in?”

He tells her, taking her hand in both of his. “Have you and Ray had a falling out?”

“You haven’t been reading the papers. That was some years ago.”

“Well, yes, I mean—”

They step out again into the night, cross pebbles, locate one of the small rooms that Mario Ponte has refitted from the original farmhouse stables for such large-scale social occasions as hike convocations. Ivy hangs above the lintel. Three doors down, light spills from an open door; there is a room party warming up, shouts and laughter. Joseph has not bothered to lock his door. Quickly he closes it behind them, snibs the catch.

“Um. I don’t know if I have any glasses.”

“Bugger your social graces, dear boy, I’ll tear the top off with my teeth and we’ll hop straight into it.”

Joseph regards his friend with some concern. She has lines about her mouth he has never noticed before, and a heavy crease between her eyes. “About Ray, Marj—”

“Ah, yes, Ray. He had a Night of Fire, you see.”

It takes him a long moment. “What, the Blaise Pascal of Melbourne town?”

“The same.”

“You’re not serious. God spoke to him from a burning bush? To Ray?”

“From a painting purchased prior to Vatican II from Pellegrini’s, actually.”

Joseph’s erection cannot decide whether this is good news or bad news, and stays at halfmast, pushing with moderate force against his zip. “I thought he was dead set against eschatologies and teleological metaphysics. Or has he become a Taoist?”

“No, a Christian. He’s been born again.”

Joseph is aghast. He wishes to shriek with mirth but feels it would impugn the gravity of the case. “Not actually taken the plunge into the briny?”

“Come off it, Joseph. Ray might be mad but he’s not stupid.”

Sulking, Joseph makes a production of opening the bottle. “I had heard that it’s part of the satisfaction of the thing.”

“No, essentially Ray’s is a cognitive conversion. With ethical side effects. He’s most apologetic for the way he’s been treating me.”

“How has he been treating you?”

“Like shit. Look, shut up, Joe.” She finds a switch for the small lamp beside the bed, taps it on, rises, flicks off the room light, crosses her arms over her sweater and turns it inside out over her head. On the end of the bed, bare to the waist, she has one boot off and pulls at the other while Joseph is stepping from his own heap of clothes. He gives her shoulders a shove and she rolls back, arms akimbo. The boot comes away in his hands, followed by her slacks and high-waisted white panties. Over his shoulder they go.

“The way of the cloth is not that of the flesh.”

“Very funny.”

“It’s one of Brian’s,” he footnotes dutifully.

“Sod Wagner. Kiss my breasts.”

There’s no confusion in his erection now. Shrilling with lust, his central nervous system cascades with adrenergic neurotransmitters. He fears loss of control, pulls back to the forms of tender banter. “So you’ve finally progressed to incest.”

“To what?”

He is crushed again. “You forgot.”

“It seems so.”

“That night I stayed at your place. Years ago. ‘77.”

“You silly,” she says, hugging him down on her. “Do you suppose I’d forget that? Rather a wasted opportunity in retrospect.”

“You said it would be like incest.”

“Never mind. If that’s what turns you on, I’ll call you Daddy.” A quick involuntary shudder runs through her, and Joseph sees the edges of her mouth draw back. “I wish I hadn’t said that.”

The bed is not wide. They roll across it, hit the wall. Joseph caresses her, finds her dry and closed, wets his fingers and sends them down. After a time she sighs. He enters her. Marjory’s legs lock across his buttocks. She twists violently, rolling sideways. He fights to keep his center of mass above her. She bites him, flexing like a cat. They fall from the bed.

Joseph’s shoulder cries out, rapping the floor boards, and Marjory’s weight crushes the wind from his lungs. Dazed and angry, he finds Marjory no longer with him. He belches stale beer. Suddenly Marjory is above him, taking his prick in her mouth, the dark, moist sporran of her pubic hair coming down toward his claustrophobic mouth. He gags, extends a hesitant tongue, reaching up to hold her broad buttocks with his hands. She is making the most extraordinary grunting noises, driving his penis deep into her throat. It is the reverse of erotic. Rolling hard, Joseph knocks her to the floor and spins above her as fast as his drunken reflexes allow.

“Oh shit,” Marjory mutters in despair. “Another missionary.”

Light flickers from the bedside lamp as he catches his rhythm, rising and falling, the light spilling, not spilling, held back, so many years. On to the death. Only a tight light. Oh Marjory, the speed, the speed, the need for speed. We’ll die in our tracks. Marjory, the Night is Dark and we are Far From Home. Can you see in the dark, little fox?

Her fingers needle his back. As he winces, she goes to the side and rolls him under her once more, raising herself above him on her elbows, her breasts falling to his chest, beyond reach of his lips. Joseph lets his head rest on the dusty, rumpled piece of carpeting, closes his eyes. Marjory can dictate the pace. A quickening pulse heralds his coming. Desperate, drowning, he heaves himself above her again, comes without making a sound, capsizing to the floor. Marjory labors over him, her hand tightly gripping him, racing his dying organ to her own climax. With seconds to spare she collapses across his drenched chest.

Blind eyes. Limp hands. Her back, her buttocks. She breathes, matching his quick, slowing inhalations with her own. His head presses something hard: the door jamb. Amazing. Marjory stirs, blows a stream of air in his face. Joseph opens his eyes.

“Hello, Marj.”

“Hello, Joseph love.” The lovely scent of her.

“We’ve fucked our way right across the room.”

“On a return ticket, I trust.”

1970: believe it or not

Shakespeare Investigations

21 August 1970

Here’s what I’ve heard about Laing. A, harumph, gentleman friend of Martha’s visited the house a few afternoons ago in Bob’s absence. I spoke to this guy briefly and it turned out that he’s a trainee trick cyclist. He’s heard that it’s well known in the trade that Laing periodically freaks out and puts himself away for his own good, though actually he wasn’t certain—it might have been Laing’s offsider David Cooper who does this. Ronnie is said to play bizarre roles even when operating as a psychiatrist, such as wearing all green matching clobber down to green fingernail polish. This has evidently been accepted by his clients as part of his brilliant new methodology (and for all I know it may well be). Such roles are liable to alternation without notice, up to several times a day, so that he conveys a different personality each time to the non-professional eye. This is all a very rough rendition of utterly unauthenticated rumor, and could well be the sort of scurrilous flak attracted by critical innovative-thinkers like Laing, but it fits unnervingly with what you reported hearing. I suppose rumors tend to have that feature.

Queensland staff and students have put out a huge book titled
Up The Right
Channels
that criticizes each department and evaluates each staff member and offers arguments for student control.

Bye,

Joseph.

1970: systematically distorted communications

Rozelle

Sat 29 Aug

Dear old Horse

I write letters in my mind, I write on paper, tear them up and cry. I started crying in the lift the other day thinking of you. I have a new job waitressing in a hotel, taking meals up to rooms. A ghastly thing happened—I went to get “an inch” cut off my hair & they cut off four or five inches. I came home and wept for hours. I really did feel castrated. I can’t do anything about it. The bastard pulled my hair to the back so I couldn’t see how much he was cutting off, though I had told him. I don’t want you to see me like this which is ridiculous but I feel so unhappy about it.

a sad beast

Caroline

1970: the flight of the emu

Kings Cross

Tuesday September 8, 1970

My dear Joseph

I thought I was going mad again but I wasn’t. It’s all right now. There are tears ahead for both of us, but that’s nothing new. At least this way there’s a fresh start.

I had a dream that I was a flightless bird. A big fat emu with lice, stuck on the ground, running in stupid circles. Nothing very subtle about that. When I woke up I was crying. Lanie heard me and knocked at the door. She hopped in the bed with me, because she is a dear kind creature, and I told her how absolutely desperate and fucked up I was feeling. She said that she’d been in exactly the same state when she’d decided to just piss off, take all the money she had in the bank and buy an air fare to Malaysia and GO. It was like magic in my heart, Joseph.

Just go. Why not? I owe you that money, but I don’t give a stuff about debts to anyone else. They have just slammed me down, broken my bones. So now I have made myself a promise. I am the only one who defines who I am, what I do, where I go, when I do it, with whom, how I feel about it…I’ll get you your money, don’t freak. Then I’ll buy my ticket and fly, fly, fly.

Lanie and I saw a documentary at the co-op on the weekend about India. Like my naked heart torn open and displayed to the sun. Joseph, I wanted to go there and see all that amazing humanity, and it didn’t occur to me that there was nothing I needed to do but just go. Now it has. So that’s what I’m doing. Lanie will probably come with me, possibly only for a holiday or maybe for good. We will take Australian seeds and plant them in that strange soil, and find a guru and learn mysteries. I am not coming back. You hang about my neck. You are my burden, my cross if you like. I know that you saved my life when I went mad the first time, but now it is your turn to be my oppressor, my slave master, the tyrant caging my free heart. You are a black saint.

Those splotches are tears, yes, how banal. I do love you, Joseph, even if you have never really loved me and never really loved yourself. My mother and father loved me too, and look what that did to all of us. Distance is a knife for cutting through love. The distance between Melbourne and Sydney is not sharp enough.