White Light (9 page)

T
hey want to give me an honorary doctorate. An honorary doctorate when all I want is to lie here and drink tea on the sofa. A long time since I've headed west. Old stomping ground, old wilderness. No more stomping for me, I'm afraid. These fucking feet are fucked. But I get to thinking. West. The turnoff at Wickepin. The weird light. Spears of grass sticking in my bobby socks and braids. Golden dust in my hair. All those ghosts. Running through the wheat, all sweat and sex underneath my pinny. A beauty I was then. A wild creature. Any bloke I fancied. And I fancied them all. I was a mermaid. Look at me now. Prostrate on the couch, a harpooned dugong. Gregor Samsa, that's me, reclining on the fucking commission-built leather catafalque. Look at those feet. Leper's feet. Cut them off at the knees and stick umbrellas in them.

Help me up, Merv, I gotta piss.

* * *

So they want to honour me. Make a big fuss. Want me to clamber up some wooden steps wearing a gown and mortarboard, prance across a rostrum, make a fucking speech. Elocute sweet thankyous into the microphone. I'll give them a speech all right.

‘No,' I tell them over the phone, ‘I hate flying. Perth is dead for me.'

They'd forgotten all about my forthrightness.

‘It's a great accolade,' they say. ‘In celebration of your work.'

‘Stiff.'

But then I get to thinking; maybe I'm being a bit hasty. I'm not dead yet after all, and maybe Perth has changed for the better. Maybe they've got rid of all the drunks and mad bastards and con men and corruption and ex-husbands, and maybe this and maybe that. In a way, I think it might be kind of nice. Nostalgic. Romantic. On the road again. The last hurrah, instead of lying here rotting away on this fucking couch with a swollen, pouting pillow shaped like Mae West's crimson lips. My lips. You bloody bet. These lips were made for kissing, and that's just what they'll do… Ha! This couch. My final resting place, a library where every book is out of reach and the cracks in the stained glass let in a little whistle of wind.

* * *

Merv packs my ports. Don't forget my red shoes, Merv! I'm not going all that way without my lucky red shoes. This morning, early, he tells me, after insomnia has woken him again, he wandered into the lounge room and found a fox hiding behind the settee. Someone must have left the door open all night. I can picture them together: Merv staring at the fox, the fox staring at Merv; the highway silent, the birds outside just starting to twitch.

‘I think it's time you went,' Merv tells me he said to the fox. And the fox went. Here in Faulconbridge. It's a nice story. Fuck knows what it means. Too brief for a play. And who would put on one of my plays? Plays have left me now. All the stories have rolled down hill into the river. Maybe a poem, then. But what about Perth? They want to pay my airfare too, but no thanks. Bloody planes. Bloody airports. Bloody blood pressure. I'm playing hard to get. My inner ear plays up something fierce too on take-off. Bladder at landing. Even driving down the mountains in the back of the hearse shits me to tears. The river like a moat. No. I want to go by train. I want to see the desert, Wickepin. One more time. I want. I want.

So we catch the train. And here we are at Central at the appointed hour. Merv takes care of the ticketing and the bags. Sleeper compartment number such-and-such, with our own foldaway bed and a little stainless steel sink and table and a grimy railway curtain over the window looking out to the grey platform. Merv wheels me up the asphalt like a piece of luggage. Just stare straight ahead, I tell myself. Retain what grace you can. People get out of my way. I hobble up the steps onto the train—goodness the corridors are thin—smell of diesel and rail ballast. I'm holding people up. Why don't they stop staring? Merv clears the corridor before me simply by walking up it. His shoulders touch both walls. Even at eighty, he is a force to be reckoned with. Everyone gets out of his way. Everyone is afraid of what might happen if Merv were to fall on them. Fell on me once and sprained my ankle. ‘Merv, get off me foot,' I yelped. He didn't even know. He could clear a room of poets in a flash if he took it into his head. Sometimes I wish he would. And I don't mean with the tureen of mulled wine in the boot of the hearse ladled out into their thirsty cups. He has a great method he employs if he ever has to deal with recalcitrants who want my attention: he simply places a hand on their shoulder, turns them around and sits them down on the floor. They don't get up in a hurry. The trouble is so many people want my attention.

Merv settles me in our compartment, which is a hell of a lot smaller than my library. He takes care of the conductor. Presses a few bribes on him. Eventually we are off. Suburbs flash by, then paddocks, more slowly. Cows stand about like cardboard cutouts of cows. I settle in to our cabin to read through those bloody poems that young up-and-coming- prizewinning suck-hole of a poet has asked me to comment on. Fucked, I should say. Hopeless, I should say. What does he want my opinion for? Why does anyone still want to listen to me? But I won't. I'll be polite and innocuous and lie through my teeth, and people will read it as a considered judgement, as if I know what I'm talking about, and he'll get a grant and stick my comments on the cover of his next book and people will quote me in reviews. I toss the manuscript aside. For Christ's sake, Merv, help me up, I gotta piss.

It's a struggle trying to keep our balance as the
Overlander
rattles across the plains towards Bathurst or somewhere, but he finally squeezes me into the tiny cubicle of the dunny.

‘Close the door so I can't hear you,' Merv says. Never could stand to hear the sound of a woman pissing. Could stand a lot of other things though. He could stand more of my behaviour than any other man. Could stand the looks I gave to them, and received, because he knew he was the one and only. Turning awkwardly on my obese axis—there's no other word for it—I manage to click the closet door closed. Mmm, nice alliteration that, although not as nice as the one about the cows, might save it for something, that new poem maybe, about the mad old woman lost in her own house. Click the closet door closed. Click or kick? Closet or corset? Dress hoicked. Bloomers to half-mast. A vicious jolt from the train and I flop onto the seat. Ahh. The sound of a woman pissing. Sorry, Merv. Paper right there. Job well done. Bit of a rest while we're here. Enough of the lady leisurely. Ah, but fuck—I can't get up. My legs are fucked. Come on old girl, of course you can get up. If I… if I… Nngghh… Shit!

‘Merv! Merv! I'm stuck.'

And I am. I can't stand up. And I can't open the door. Jesus.

‘Dorothy, what is it?' Merv calls.

‘I'm stuck.'

Merv tries to open the door but it'll only open six inches before it whacks against my knees. He pushes harder.

‘Ow!'

‘I'll go and get a conductor.'

‘No, no.'

‘Why not?'

‘I don't want anyone to see me wedged in here with me knickers around me knees.'

I can almost hear Merv cogitating.

‘Well, what do you want me to do? You're blocking the door.'

I make a Herculean effort to raise myself, at least to pull my knickers up, but the rocking of the train makes this impossible, and a particularly violent lurch tumbles me first against one wall of the cubicle, then the other. I bang my head.

‘Ow.'

I collapse back onto the bowl, slightly stunned.

‘Are you all right?'

‘No. I'm stuck.'

‘Do you want anything?'

‘Can't you take the door off or something?'

‘The hinges are on the inside.'

‘Fuck.'

He's right. Merv doesn't say anything on the other side of the door.

‘Are you laughing at me?'

‘I'm not that brave.'

Stuck all right. Whose idea was this train anyway? I'm stuck because I'm so fucking fat. And old. I hate growing old. I hate being old. I feel like every vertebra in my spine has been jolted out of the chain. Merv passes in all the cushions and pillows he can find and I pad them around me to stop myself whacking against the walls. In other words, I make myself comfortable. Hours pass. He passes me in a book, but I can't read because of the jolting. I let it fall to the floor, out of sight. The continuous rattling of the wheels is like a dull electric shock, like holding a battery against your tongue. It's not comfortable but after a while you get used to it.

‘Do you want this manuscript?'

‘Fuck no.'

He passes me small waxpaper cups of water, which I gulp and gulp like some animal at a water hole, and in no bloody time have to piss again. So I piss. Here where I sit. Maybe this is for the best. Maybe I'll die here empty of bladder and pride; all honour gone.

After a while I say, ‘Merv, I'm hungry.'

‘Do you want me to fetch something from the dining car?'

‘Yes.'

‘What?'

‘Food.'

‘What?'

‘Anything. Anything. Anything.'

I almost sob.

I hear Merv fossicking about in the compartment and I hear him going out, the door sliding shut behind him. Even when I know he's gone, I still think he's out there, fossicking and I realise I must be delirious. I call. No answer. I call again. No answer. The rattling of the wheels is like dull music, like a battery held against your tongue. I piss. I drink and I piss and I try to read. The transaction is pretty simple. A life's work. This is where devotion to the party gets you. Stuck in a shithouse on the
Overlander
. Dymphna Cusack should be here, not me. That old commo in a tiara, swanning through Moscow in her fur coat. Well Dymphna, did you ever see red shoes like mine? The politburo loved my red shoes. I try not to think about Dymphna for a while, as the music of the train fills me. More hours pass. I think I even doze a little. Merv returns with some railway sandwiches, which he passes in to me.

‘What took you so long?'

‘I had a cup of tea.'

‘Tea! While I'm stuck in here!'

‘I've walked the length of the train looking for a lavatory. I can hardly use this one.'

‘Sorry.'

‘Are you all right?'

‘No. My legs hurt. I feel buried alive.'

It's true. I practise scratching my old nails against the door. I try to project the face of several theatre directors I could mention on to the door.

‘I can't get you out unless you let me call the conductor.'

‘No. What would the vice-chancellor say?'

‘Bugger the vice-chancellor.'

Merv has never cared much for vice-chancellors. He goes on in his expedient, male way:

‘If I passed you in a screwdriver, do you think you could unscrew the hinges?'

‘I don't think I could reach the top ones. Anyway it looks like it needs a special tool.'

‘I thought that might be the case.'

‘I wish I was fucking dead.'

‘You're only saying that.'

‘I fucking mean it.'

‘I'm trying my best, Dorothy.'

He passes his hand in through the crack. It's a familiar hand with its great thick fingers and calluses from a lifetime of heavy work.

‘Have you seen the desert yet?'

‘No, Dorothy. It's night.'

‘Night? How long have I been in here?'

He wafts his hand about blindly until he finds my face.

‘That's my nose.'

‘Sorry.'

He strokes my hair and my jowls. He says, ‘There, there. Death gives life its shape.'

‘What shape?'

‘Its meaningless shape.'

It is a great comfort to me, his hand and his words, but it still does not alter the greater fact that I just want to die.

After a while, the rattling of the wheels is no longer like music but more like screaming. I try to sleep. I try to die, propped up by all the cushions Merv has purloined from somewhere. I listen to him snoring. I piss at will, without the inconvenience of having to ask someone to help me up. I've become a baby again. The light burns all night. In the morning he passes in my medicines and food and water and pen and paper in case, he says, you feel inspired.

‘Get fucked. I'll give you fucking inspiration.'

I wonder if I have the strength to jab his hand with the biro.

‘Do you want your red shoes?'

‘No. Fuck off.'

‘I can see the desert.'

‘What's it like?'

‘Flat.'

Strangely, I do try to write. There is nothing else to do, even if it is all delusional. My handwriting is sloppier than usual. Hours pass, and then, presumably, days.

Memories, or perhaps hallucinations, come to me in my fluorescent crypt. Memories of the house at Lambton Downs, of dancing in my red shoes down Darlinghurst Road, of crusty old nuns cursing me to hell. Oh, I was a beauty then. I was a mermaid. I was the embodiment of everything an evil nun should envy. Looks. Lads. Lust. Look at them in their silly wimples and Jesus-shrouds, so ugly they'd make a camel spit. Well, maybe their curses worked. Look at me now. Hell is being stuck in a railway carriage dunny crossing the Nullarbor with only your husband's cracked, familiar hand squeezed in through the door for comfort. All the fluid rushing to your feet making them puff up and burst out of your slippers. Christ, my legs hurt. Tell me again the story of the fox, Merv. Merv, are you there? I wish I could lie down. My arse hurts. Wish I could put my feet up on my lovely couch in my own home, surrounded by my books. Why did we ever leave? I miss the mist and the currawongs. I miss the rowers on the Nepean, even though you only ever glimpse them for a second as you cross the river. If they gave me an honorary doctorate now, in here, I'd bloody well know what to do with it. No, cut the crap. I don't wish for comfort. Not anymore. I only want it to stop. Stop all the camels and flies and heat. Merv, take me home, I wish I was dead, I wish I was fucking dead. There, there, he'll say, strong as an ox, you don't really mean that. Yes, I bloody well do. When I die, Merv, when I finally fucking well die you've got to keep God out of the service. It'll be just like receiving a doctorate. Promise me, no mention of God. Just bury me with some poems and some wattle. I'd like it to be hot. And my red shoes, Merv. Make sure you toss in my red shoes, too. No one wants to see them anymore.