Jacko (16 page)

—This is a superb exhibition, I told Erich.

—I saw yours too, on the beach, said Erich with a vulpine smile, as if that too were a crime against culture.

—Listen, I've got to go and congratulate the photographer. Nice to see you, Erich. Look forward to your next book of verse.

I found the photographer, and waited for him to be finished with interviewers. When he was free, I asked him how it was that he had taken the picture in Centennial Park instead of in Bickham's own beloved home?

—I didn't have to force him at all, said the photographer. Bickham goes there every day, after lunch, no later than three.

—Centennial Park?

It was a superb picture. It didn't look like Centennial Park in high summer. It looked like a park in Lausanne, against a sky as severe and exacting as modernism. There was a sweet tension between Michael Bickham's winter beanie, which may have even been in the colours of some football club if one didn't already know that Bickham despised that sort of thing, and that stern heaven and wintry parkland. The photographer must have gone to the spot on one of Sydney's occasional, full-blown winter days.

—He walks every afternoon? I asked. Even in bad weather?

—Well, his emphysema's not so hot. But he trundles around. He loves it.

I felt delivered of a weight. I could now approach the gorgeous boy Emptor with my intense, astounded sympathies, and I would have something to tell his mother to distract her from her bruised flower of a boy.

I was so pleased with the new knowledge that I called Frank Emptor the next morning. He was in, and I told him how grief-stricken I was for his sake and Chloe's. He was restrained and very calm, and asked me if I would come up for afternoon tea with himself and his mother the following day. He put Chloe on then, and I commiserated with her and then told her I had some good news about Bickham. I could hear that she was for a moment delighted. It was a comfort to her. So I felt bound to say that it was sort of indirect news. Even so, she was cheered.

She said, I still want to see Bickham and quiz him irrespective of what's happened. It all has a bearing you know. I thought my bloody children would live forever in their perverse ways, and now my mad flower of a son has the mark of death on his forehead eh. Good of you to call. Francis likes and admires you. You had that good talk at the opera.

Though liking or admiration could not be based on such a fragile foundation, I wanted to be counted in, a partner to the tragedy. I shrank from contemplating the damage presently being done to Francis's triumphantly sybaritic cells.

I went up to town the next day, crossed the bridge and found the sweet little streets of Woollahra. Abnormal, all this coming and going between the primeval beach and the racy city, and beyond it to Francis Emptor's fashionable terrace. When I rang the bell, Chloe came to the door. She wore a business suit but was barefooted, just as in Burren Waters. She hung around my neck.

—Oh Christ, she told me, holding on to me by the neck, a fierce, demanding embrace. I didn't know that this would happen. I thought the mad little bugger would go on being a mad little bugger for good. Let's go inside.

In the living room, looking out at the Japanese garden he had installed, Francis sat in a large armchair. Though he was dressed stylishly (white slacks, white cricketing sweater, rope-soled shoes), the way he looked filled me with a mortal shock. The full cheeks were shrunken, the skin of his wrist looked dry and was scaled with dead flesh. The skeletal condition suited him even less than it might have most people, given that there had been so many broad planes in his face to cave in and atrophy. His wide-set eyes flashed out at me a sort of grateful welcome. In what I saw as his thirst for life, he needed to renew himself and take nutriment even from casually known faces.

When I asked him the usual trite question, he said, I'm fine now. It's only for a day or so after radiotherapy that I feel appalling. I don't want to know anyone immediately before, during or after it. I don't even let Chloe come to hospital with me. I just get the old reliable limo service to collect me, take me, bring me home. At that stage, I'd rather be helped up and down stairs by a near-stranger.

According to Hefty's demand that I bring Frank some nice wine, I had with me a bottle of vintage Perrier-Jouet.

—For when you're feeling better, I told him.

—Oh no, he said, I'm fit enough to choke down half a glass.

Chloe was already fetching from the cocktail cabinet behind Frank the little silver clasping device designed to withdraw recalcitrant champagne corks.

So I opened the bottle and Chloe held the glasses for us, and Frank choked down, in fact, nearly two glasses, urging me to drink the rest. Chloe would not help me. She had got a can of her habitual Carlton Draught from the kitchen. On her way back to join us, she picked up two letters from Francis Emptor's sideboard. She stood behind him, just as once she had stood behind the stockman called Merv. She pushed both of the letters down over my shoulder, in a manner which meant I should consider them. I couldn't see them in detail, but I could see that they carried, embossed at the top of each, the names of physicians – crops of letters followed the names. I thought I saw a San Francisco address on one of them. They were both addressed to Frank's GP in Woollahra. My eye grazed over such words as,
topical lymphoma, pleuritic chest pain, dyspnoea
. A number of technical tests were mentioned, and radiotherapy and eventual chemotherapy invoked. Displaying the frightful news like this, Chloe went on dolorously shaking her head. At last she gave it up, withdrew the letters, returned them to the dresser, and came and sat with us.

I asked after Jacko. I did not know him then the way I would get to know him in New York a year or so later, but I had read that Basil Sutherland, or maybe more correctly Basil Sutherland's chief initiator of tabloid television, Durkin, had taken him away to America to work on the morning and current affairs programs of Vixen Six.

Jacko, said Chloe, was working hard in New York. At least she hoped he was. If she found out that he was only chiacking around there, she'd be bloody cranky with the little bugger. Jacko claimed he'd get home next month to see his brother.

—Anyhow, she said, delicately patting Francis's shoulder, you're with the old girl now. Better than all those bloody nancies you used to surround yourself with eh. And Jacko says he's coming home. Christ knows when your sister will see you. Far as she's concerned, we're all limbs of bloody Satan.

Francis wet his lips with the champagne and laid his head back against his chair and smiled sideways at me. The fading Keats couldn't have smiled more seraphically. I had an obscene suspicion, which I sat on at once, that Francis may have been getting some pleasure from the more operatic aspects of his dissolution.

After we had finished our drinking and our talk, I got ready to leave. Promising further visits, I shook hands gently with Francis, and Chloe followed me to the door.

—Well, she said softly. Well. Poor little bugger went to see a doctor in San Francisco while he was there for the opera. Human hope, you know. But it's all bloody futile. The San Francisco people came up with the same diagnosis.

Tears were spilling down her brown cheeks. It was terrible to see her possessed by such mourning.

—I can't stand thinking of that, the poor little bugger, going to a second doctor in another country. Hoping eh. Or wanting just to get out of the death bloody sentence.

I took her in my arms and kissed her on the forehead. It felt sun-roughened and salty.

—Listen, I told her. When Francis's having the radiotherapy, why don't you go up to Centennial Park for a walk. I've got it on good authority that Michael Bickham goes walking in Centennial Park every day after lunch. Around three o'clock, my source says. And it's a free country. You can confront him. The miserable old sod would have to talk to you.

She stared at me, becoming lively again. I had an impression that, inside her cocoon of grief, she was pulling her bones together.

—You'd come with me?

I shook my head. I did not want to seem to ambush the Nobel Laureate in alliance with a cattle station matron.

—Listen, Chloe, I don't mind coming in from the beach to see Francis, but I'm a writer and I need to write every day. It's just not easy for me to break up my day and come up to Sydney at lunch-time and walk in Centennial Park.

—Oh yeah. But it's okay for you to go two thousand bloody miles to Burren Waters, isn't it? Taking two days to get there eh. You've got enough time to go all that bloody way and interrupt
our
bloody pattern!

I shook my head. There was a stinging justice to her argument. Her hard, bunched face was aimed at me. She would not let me off the hook.

So we made the arrangement. Next time tragic Francis Emptor went off in his limo for his radiotherapy, Chloe and I would go walking in Centennial Park.

—I'll ring you with the details then, said Chloe, appeased for the moment.

Not only did Francis Emptor have radiotherapy to attend to, he kept up his Monday lunches with Hefty Mulcahy and Irma Lauber, patron wives of the Opera. Hefty Mulcahy told me it was touching to see the way the waiters were now affected by Francis Emptor's signs of mortality. The increasing loss of hair, the thinness and the pallor.

Francis managed lunch bravely, though his appetite – said Hefty – was shot.

Chloe herself never got invited to these events. She was as contemptuous of those
opera tarts
as Hefty Mulcahy was of her. It was on one such Monday, a glittering Sydney winter day, clear and dry and barely cold, that Chloe called me and told me that this was her day for trying to meet the great modernist Michael Bickham. I pleaded and sought excuses. But Chloe insisted. She knew her day and her hour.

Again I drove in from the northern beaches of Sydney into the centre of the city, over the Harbour Bridge. Later, in Jacko's and my absence, they would build a tunnel, but for the moment that arched bridge had to carry all the Sydney-bound traffic. Off to the left, the immensity of the Harbour and the white-sailed Opera House were a case of art and nature cajoling each other. That Monday, however, I crossed into Sydney like a man going towards public humiliation. I feared being no more than a joke at Bickham's table and even in his inevitable biography.

The traffic conspired against me by being light, and within fifty minutes of leaving the beach I was collecting Chloe from Francis's terrace house. For the possible encounter with Bickham, she was wearing an emerald green business suit, which didn't go well with her high tan and her ample but sun-kippered look. The suit, just the same, signified serious planning and the taking of thought.

—You look bloody lugubrious in the service, she told me.

It was a short drive to the park. We found a place to put the car, in the park itself, down near the Showgrounds and the Sydney Cricket Ground. The earth of Centennial Park, as we entered it, was green and heavy from recent rain, and had that heavy plum jam smell which reminded me of the sodden Rugby League fields of my childhood.

—This is where he'd walk? asked Chloe closing one eye to focus on me.

—It's the end of the park closest to his home.

—Well, that's not exactly what I asked you eh.

—I'm not trying to cheat you, Chloe. If he walks, it will be around here. Now listen, I don't want any accusations if he doesn't turn up. I'm doing my best.

—Jesus, you bloody Sydney people have such thin hides.

We strolled up a path which fringed the bridle track, and then out onto the pleasant greensward, designed in the British manner with lots of imported trees. The park was founded on the hundredth anniversary of European settlement, 1888, by a colonial government which had a nostalgia for the centre of Empire, for England and its flora. It was this fact which had made it possible for the photographer to get that undifferentiated European look into the portrait of Bickham.

Chloe kicked the park's heavy sod with the toe of her shoes.

—Jesus, if all Australia was like this, we could run four cattle to the acre.

Hooded for a severer sun than this, her eyes squinted out over the parkland – open ground screened by trees at the Randwick end, pleasant hillocks at the Paddington. Those two poles had been, honoured in test matches at the Sydney Cricket Ground, where bowlers, pace or spin, operated from either the Paddington or the Randwick end. We were bowling up from the Randwick end, trying to take the wicket of the sublimest novelist of the age.

He was nowhere in sight at the moment, and I reassured Chloe that we were a little early. I filled in time by asking how Stammer Jack was.

Chloe said, About as good as he's entitled to be. I've got to go back for the Brahma Breeders Ball, you know. He might have a stammer, but there are other parts of the bugger that act more directly eh. There're a couple of tarts in Hector gof their eye on him. He's a very attractive man in a dinner suit, Jack Emptor.

I wondered what any seducing woman would think, if she got Stammer Jack alone, of his purple, demi-gangrenous ankle.

—You notice I don't have any Wodjiri women working in the house? He's got too much of a weakness for the bloody Wodjiri women. He and his father before him.

She looked behind her and grabbed my arm.

—Jesus, is that him?

I turned and was sorry to see that it was. No one else in Australia wore quite the same knitted cap of the kind Michael Bickham had worn in the photograph in the exhibition. And then there was Khalil's chunky form beside him in windcheater and suede cap. They were making slow progress, but seemed to be enjoying the day. Moving in from the Randwick end. Bowling for the Immortals XI.

—Let's not turn around straight away, I pleaded. It'll look as if we've been lying in wait. Let's walk up to the monument there, and then turn around.