Dark Places (36 page)

Her flesh under me was not soft, not yielding, not warm and comforting as it had seemed, green in the mirror, giving itself up to her own touch. It was lumpy and resistant, it bucked and arched away under me, it pushed against me with its hands and tried to get away. ‘You want it,' I reminded it. ‘You have wanted it for years,' but the flesh found its voice now and made a shrill reedy noise, a roaring in my ear like a machine gone wrong. ‘No no no!' it said, then louder ‘No! No! No!' But I had always known the answer to that one. I felt the muscles of my arms take up the strain as I pinned it down, felt my thighs overwhelm it, and roared my answer so that the voice was drowned: ‘Yes! Yes!'

The fight went out of her when I got her arms pinned: her body under mine lay squashy, slack, waiting. Her head was turned away, her hair all over it like a veil: oh, these women and their turnings-away! From having roared and panted in my ear, now there was no evident breathing going on, nothing at all moved, as if all her systems were abdicating in order to allow her to do this. With my palms against her cheeks I swivelled her face to mine and raked the hair off it. There was her face, exposed like a rock in the wind: there were her eyes; but when I forced the head around so that the eyes were looking into mine, all I could see was more of myself, two tiny versions of Albion Gidley Singer looking back at me. Lilian, the daughter I knew, who spoke to me, looked me in the eye, exchanged facts and requests for the salt-shaker, that cranky, obdurate, insolent thorn in my flesh, was withdrawing and leaving only her shell behind, the way a lizard leaves its tail in your hand.

Now that there was nothing more complicated than an empty body in the room with me, I was enabled to motion my inner man to come close. Albion Gidley Singer, pillar of the community, model husband, astute businessman, man with astonishing facts at his fingertips: that person was able to tiptoe away and leave in charge of this situation the nameless secret speck of being who lived within.

Words fell away from me as that nameless secret speck of being expanded to fill the space available to him. He was a being who did not need words, or a past, or a future, or any kind of stories spun around himself about being a model husband or a businessman with facts at his fingertips. The language of this being, no longer a speck, now a colossus straddling this moment of history, was the language of action, and he needed no lessons in the kind of action the situation called for.

Oh, epiphany of flesh! I surrendered myself to myself, and now, as never before, my skin separated me from nothing at all. I and myself were blissfully joined, and for once there was no voice judging, chiding, doubting, fearing: only this warm blank darkness like the inside of a soul, and the sounds of something labouring and panting. I heard a groan forced up from the depths of my self, and felt sweat break out on my skin like tears. I burst with the heat of bliss, and in a blaze of cells like the creation of life from mud, I gave birth to myself.

After I was made whole in my daughter there was silence in heaven. Outside I could hear a bird warbling in an insistent way, over and over tra-la, tra-la. There was a rattle of wind against the window, and a gnashing of the leathery leaves of the eucalypt beyond it. A band of sunlight lay bent across a corner of the wall like a hard problem in geometry, and close to my eye I could see pores, tiny hairs, fine creases on the gleam of skin. The shell of my daughter lay beneath me as empty as a bag. She had collapsed in on herself, proving herself to have been nothing but air in spite of so much bulk.

I levered myself up, and three Albion Gidley Singers stood: the room was full of legs in dark trousers. I looked fearlessly into the mirror, and it was myself looking out from the eyeball-sockets I saw there. It seemed that Albion Gidley Singer and myself had undergone some type of fusion. No longer was it necessary to issue curt commands to the shell I inhabited: the shell and the self were now blessedly one and the same. There was no brittle carapace, vulnerable to the right kind of sharp implement, and no soft jelly within: there was only solid Albion Gidley Singer, Albion Gidley Singer all the way through. ‘Albion Gidley Singer,' I told the face in the mirror, whose skin I now inhabited. ‘Yes, I am Albion Gidley Singer.'

Thirty-One

NORAH'S TROPICAL cruise left her brown as a savage, and somewhere along the way she had cut off her hair. ‘Oh, Albion, it was such a nuisance!' she cried when she saw me looking. ‘And everyone agreed how well it suited me,' and she spun around on the ball of her foot like a dancer so that her bangs twirled around her ears. Personally, I found it extremely unfeminine: you could see the shape of her skull now, and her head had a naked look; you noticed her eyes more now, and her mouth. But a gentleman could not be blunt. ‘Well, it is your hair, Norah,' I said in my blandest way. ‘And if everyone has told you it suits you, then it probably does.' Her hands went up to it then, smoothing it down, and she did not do any more pirouettes. ‘Well, Albion, it will grow again, in any case,' she said, and attempted a laugh. ‘And it makes a change.'

We lined up to receive poker-worked artefacts from far-flung places, and were presented with large hairy coconuts. Norah handed around tinted postcards of volcanoes, palm trees, and picturesque natives squinting at the sun, and we all listened to her tales of waves and waterfalls, fire-walking and egg-swallowing, with the right expressions of wonderment. John was particularly interested in the volcanoes. There was something disturbing in his relish at the idea of the earth under your feet corking up all that red-hot magma. ‘If you dug down far enough, it would all squirt out!' he exclaimed with unusual enthusiasm, and when he lapsed into silence it was easy to imagine him considering spades and promising spots in the garden.

Lilian was subdued, kept her head down, and did not seem to appreciate her coconut. She could not even be got to smile at Norah's stories of the
little scallywag of a monkey
that had run up her arm and snatched her earring away. No, Lilian was still determined to go on sulking, as she had been sulking for several weeks now, and even Norah finally noticed. ‘What is the matter, Lilian?' she asked, ‘Is anything wrong, dearest?' But Lilian just stared at the carpet between her feet and shook her head mulishly. ‘Lilian is going through a little growth spurt,' I told Norah, ‘and I think it has sapped her vitality. Plenty of eggs will soon put her right.'

We took a turn around the garden, and when Norah noticed the bars on Lilian's window, I explained. ‘It was a terrible danger,' I told her. ‘Why, a man could have shinned up the verandah-post and got in to her at night!' and Norah had to nod, ‘Yes, Albion, I can see that, now that you point it out.'

But I did not tell Norah about the way Lilian had locked herself in her room, and bunged up the keyhole with paper, and refused to come out until finally hunger drove her to join the family once more. Nor did I bother to tell her about a little runty boy in black—not the Duncan boy—who said he was one of her classmates at University, who had come to the house wanting to know where she was, and rashly offering to marry her. Another admirer! Lilian had certainly been generous with herself.

But even Norah had to notice that Lilian was no longer quite right in the head. ‘Albion, there is something wrong with Lilian,' she told me. ‘She seems to have some kind of funny idea in her head, but will not tell me what it is.' Of course something was wrong with Lilian: there had always been something wrong with Lilian! But I was bluff and reassuring. ‘It is just a funny little phase, Norah,' I told her. ‘Perhaps she is having some sort of infatuation with one of the boys in her class, a touch of calf-love. No doubt she will get over it shortly.'

But things went from bad to worse. There were silences, there were unexplained disappearances from the house for hours at a time, and there was an increasing slovenliness of personal habits. She spent more and more time in her room with her University books, and although, naturally, we were pleased to see her taking her studies seriously, there was something unhealthy about the way she hunched obsessively over the books, and did not want to come down to dinner.

We took her to O'Hara, but all O'Hara could do was to take her pulse, peer into her ears, and get her to say
Ahhh.
But what was wrong with Lilian was not to be heard in her chest, or seen down her throat. I rather got the impression that in the absence of proper symptoms in a patient, O'Hara had only two remedies: one was
the cruise
, already prescribed in vain for Norah, and the other was
the tonic.
But even a pint of the vile brown stuff made not the slightest difference to Lilian, who became if anything more truculent and withdrawn.

O'Hara then spoke in a vague way of
over-stimulation of the cerebellum
, so we got rid of all her books, and the empty shelves in her room gaped in an ugly way. The desk went, and so did the chair; the telescope, the taipan in its bottle, the globe of the world; all were taken up to the attic. In the end, the room was empty but for the bed, the wardrobe, and the chest of drawers. It was a room lovingly stripped of any incitement to
stimulation of the cerebellum.

‘You must be right, Albion, it is just a little phase,' Norah kept telling me, but to my mind the thing had the look, not so much of a
little phase
, as of deliberate provocation.

In spite of the bars on the windows, and the confiscated shoes, and myself sitting up in an armchair in the hall, she continued to slip out at night.
Nothing!
she shouted when I accused her.
I am doing nothing! Just being!
But I was no fool, and could see the sand on her knees, and the leaves in her hair. What kind of fool did she take me for?

There were visits from men in thick boots, twisting their caps round in their hands and complaining of the noise. ‘It is not for myself, Mr Singer,' they would say in the over-loud way of a man put up to something. ‘It is my wife, she has a bad back'—or a bad head, or funny turns—‘and the stones on the roof at five in the morning, well, it is a bit much, Mr Singer.' Then they would remember something else, and know that the wife with the bad back would want to know if everything had been said. ‘And the dogs, Mr Singer, it is not right the way she teases them, it is in their nature to bark, of course, but working folk need their sleep.'

There was a visit from a seedy red-faced man who told me he was the proprietor of a cinema in the city, and told me to keep my daughter under my control. ‘Next time it will be the police, Mr Singer, I warn you,' he cried, and left before I could quite come up with an answer. Then there was a visit from a smiling smooth man with an armful of expensive shiny books which I recognised. ‘I could hardly refuse her, Mr Singer, and gave her a pound each for them, but I thought you might appreciate them back,' and having paid for these unread books once, I was obliged to pay for them again. Once the money was safely in his pocket, he taunted me: ‘Your daughter is quite a card, Mr Singer, no doubt about it, she was telling us last time that she is in touch with a higher power, would you believe.' He kept on smiling away insistently, so that I began to think he had some other scheme to make a few quid out of the mad Singer girl. I could imagine him smiling and winking to his wife, ‘Fine family, plenty of money, embarrassing sort of thing to get around.' But I would not have any of that, and saw him off the premises very smartly.

I was not provoked by men with caps in their fists, I was not provoked by men with red faces, I was not even provoked by smiling unscrupulous booksellers. But finally, Lilian succeeded, and I was provoked.

When she ran away, and was returned to us with a policeman on each side of her, and a story of her parading the streets of Tamworth stark naked, we were forced to intervene.

The best man for this sort of thing was summoned, and emerged shaking his head. Pink-faced as a baby behind his muttonchop whiskers, he was bland and uninformative. ‘We may be able to catch it in time,' he said, ‘but there must be absolutely complete rest.' He continued to repeat his formula as the papers were being signed. ‘Rest and routine, Mr Singer, and Mrs Singer,' he kept saying. ‘Rest and routine may work wonders.'

The house was wonderfully peaceful with Lilian gone, and outside in the garden, the world seemed all sky. Scales fell from me, so that I felt air against my skin and enjoyed the caress of my clothes. Sunlight was solid, but so was I: it had to make way for me as I breasted the air like a ship slicing through waves. Molecules of air were thrust aside by my chest and fell into place behind me. As never before I was aware now of the flights of clouds across vast expanses of blue. I saw branches thickening with leaves before my very eyes, heard feathered things shrill and tweet in the dusky depths of trees.

When I thought of Lilian in the place in which she was undergoing her
rest and routine
, the blood beat exuberantly through my veins. I strode around the garden, seeing pigeons scatter in front of my authoritative cane. My boots gleamed and squeaked as if they enjoyed a life of their own. ‘Morning, Mr Singer,' someone in a cap said, tweaking at it as he came in the tradesman's entrance, and I nodded, pleased to be recognised by this minion whose life and livelihood were dependent on me.

As I strode, rousing poetry rose into my memory from some pouch filled long ago, and not explored until now. My feet thumped along the path, beating out the lines like a flail.
We sprang to the stirrup
,
and Jorrock
,
and he
,
They galloped
,
he galloped
,
we galloped all three
, I said to myself, feeling the powerful muscles in my thighs as I strode faster to keep up with the rhythm. Or was it
I galloped
,
we galloped
,
they galloped all three?
I strode around poking at the earth with my cane, a happy man.
All at once I saw
,
fluttering and dancing in the breeze
, I told myself, seeing some kind of tidy flower jerking at its stem in the breeze,
a something
,
a something
,
of golden daffodils!