Jacko (20 page)

—Gidday mate, he told me sepulchrally. You pulled it off eh? You got to Bickham. You made the old girl very happy. You know Francis, don't you? Would you introduce me to your missus.

I did. I could tell Maureen wasn't much impressed.

Francis flashed us a smile brief as a blink. Carrying a cup of jasmine tea which she put down beside Francis, who fluttered his eyes in appreciation, Chloe joined us.

—Jesus, said Jacko, let's get into the Scotch eh.

He and Chloe went to fetch the whisky from the sideboard. We all drank hungrily, even my wife, a modest drinker. The sight of pitiable Francis drove us to anaesthetize ourselves.

Chloe said, Jacko wants to take Francis to America for treatment.

—To Mexico, amended Jacko.

—No, he isn't going to, said Francis, in a voice thin but wiry.

Jacko closed one eye, ignoring this.

He said, They sent me down to Tijuana to do a story on a cancer clinic this bloke runs down there. Southern California is full of cancer-sufferers who swear by this feller. He injects some serum he makes up from the saguaro cactus. He reckons the saguaro cactus has an astounding immune system.

Francis said, It also doesn't have a brain or a nervous system.

—Oh Jesus, Francis, said Jacko. Where's your famous open bloody mind gone to?

He turned to Maureen and me.

—The results are astounding, he told us. I don't care if they're based on auto-suggestion or hypnosis or psychosomatic fakery. As far as I'm concerned, what works works. And this guy has absolutely amazing figures for remissions.

Maureen turned to Chloe.

—What do you think, Chloe?

She shook her head. In the bright afternoon light, her withered jowls hung like old fruit.

—Oh Jesus, I don't know. But I wouldn't mind it if Francis wanted to go. I wish to Christ he did. Nothing to lose eh.

—Listen, said Francis, panting and, I felt, using up a resource of strength he'd never get back. Listen! We know this is all bullshit! Witch doctory only works if you believe in witchery in the first place. Of course the Californians
believe
in cactus juice. They think John Wayne
really
fought the Apaches.

Pausing, he closed his eyes. He looked so spiritual, in a way uncharacteristic of our callow harbour city. Only the filament of his flesh separated him from the eternal.

—I don't believe in any of that, and I won't waste my last strength going to fucking Mexico.

—But your brother means the best, said Chloe. Bugger it all, Frank.

Clearly, there was no expedition she would fail to undertake herself, or even look to Francis to undertake, as long as Francis might be saved even by sleight of hand.

—I'll tell you one thing for bloody free, said Jacko. Saguaro cactus live for nearly three hundred bloody years.

—Oh for God's sake, so do our cells. Our individual cells. There are cells in mummies that are three thousand years old. If that's life, the mummy knows fuck-all about it. Do you know what I think? I think you'd like to get me freeze-dried, and a recorded message put up my arse.

Chloe wailed and looked to Maureen and me. Sure enough, her children were killing her.

—I'm dying in the most beautiful city on earth, said Francis. The only one I want to die in. I'm dying in the city of the Bickhams and the Evans, the Chambers and the Mulcahys and the …

He had the generosity to include my wife and me in the distinguished roll-call.

—They've all seen me, he said. They aren't fooled. They know how sick I am. The Chambers know. Ask them. They saw me bloody fall!

Jacko began to mutter about what that had to do with any bloody thing. Chloe seemed awfully appeasing, though somehow I could imagine her carrying Francis onto the plane to Los Angeles, Bickham style, over the shoulder.

—I'm not going to Tijuana to suffer among strangers. I'm going out next Monday. To lunch with my favourite women, other than Chloe. I mean Hefty Mulcahy and Irma Lauber. I'm going to do that every Monday until it's impossible to continue to go. I'm not going to Tijuana to be injected with cactus juice.

Absorbing this, Jacko looked away across the room. He could not show anger in the normal way of course. Maureen and I began to move the conversation on. Jacko's answers when we asked him about New York and the show were clipped, a mere token of the volumes I would later learn from him at the Odeon. He would have liked to have gone on shouting it out with his brother, but you can't scream insults at the dying.

When we were leaving, it was Jacko who followed us down the hallway and out to our car.

—Listen, he told me, I always really admired you …

It looked to me like an unlikely claim.

—You don't have to, I'm just a friend of Chloe's.

—No, I mean as a writer. You're bloody readable, mate. Give me you any day over bloody Bickham eh. And you did that good job there. Fixing that meeting for Chloe.

—I was just a witness to that adventure. Chloe made her own way.

—Yeah, she does that. Listen, would you give Francis a call at some stage? Try to talk him round?

My wife said, Those Mexican clinics were all discredited, Jacko.

—But in his condition, what does it bloody matter eh? Ask him to do it for Chloe's sake.

The plea had some force with me. I suppose I had expected Francis to look something like a ghost. I'd prepared myself for that. But I didn't expect the old Chloe to be reduced down like that. She needed something done for her.

—You know, I told Jacko, smiling. You operate on me exactly the same way your mother does.

—Well, said Jacko, I'm her darling little bugger, aren't I eh? I inherited all her moves.

My wife shook her head at me. She was a trained nurse. Broadminded – she had once studied acupuncture – but she didn't believe in cactus serum.

—Well, you ought to think about it, he said, seeing that he couldn't get past Maureen.

My wife and I argued about the question for three days. She had worked with the dying, the
terminally ill
as they are known now. She had seen all the false death-bed hopes and understood how cruel they were. Everyone knew there was indeed no salvation in cactus juice.

On the third day I had a call from Bickham himself. I was just back from a swim in the surf, and brine stuck to my bare legs in that gluey, itchy way peculiar to humid days when you've been swimming. This was a banal condition to be in for a significant call like this, one that I might want some day to put into an autobiography – always allowing a publisher could be found. Bickham's voice on the line creaked with breathlessness. I could tell he was suffering another bad day.

—I'm lying here waiting for the doctor, he told me. I may need to go to hospital … And I've been thinking about the poor Emptor boy. You probably know the ill don't have much strength. Strength is the relevant dimension for them … Not time … In fact the ill don't think of time at all … Only, as I said, of strength. They think of wasting strength … They don't want to.

—Well, I said alarmed at the length of this speech, you shouldn't waste yours either, Michael.

—I began gasping as a child on that damn spacious great sheep station my family owned. I've tried everything … Asthma papers as a child, and asthma fucking cigarettes as a young man. I've been to herbalists and naturopaths … acupuncturists and shamans. And if someone came in here now … and told me there was a village in Anatolia where an old man possessed a substance … which would make it easy for me to breathe on a long term basis … then I'd have to say I'd want to go and get it. Even though I'd know in my water there was little chance of recovery. But at the same time as wanting to go, I would beg not to be taken … Because my mind would quake for lack of strength …

—You think Francis should be persuaded to go?

There was a silence as Bickham re-gathered that very strength he'd been extolling and regretting the loss of.

—For his own sake and his mother's, Bickham answered at last. I wanted to say that he's right to mistrust his strength … Because that's his business. Whereas, let the well worry about time … And about travel arrangements too.

I scratched my leg and said, This question's been with me for days, Michael.

It felt very strange to call him Michael. I had heard of him that he destroyed friends at the dinner table. No one had the Nobelist's gift for vituperation. Khalil was cast back upon Arab stoicism. Men gagged and women fled weeping, savaged despite their sisterly warmth. Against that background, against such a reputation, Bickham's kind advice regarding Francis took on a perverse poignancy.

—What do you suggest I do?

—Chloe has certain plans, he gasped. Mind you, it's a pity she's got to work with that other son … Such an oaf.

Jacko represented everything which Bickham had most actively and brilliantly despised at six hundred pages a time in his sundry, grand books.

—I think you … should do what you can for Chloe, the great modernist croaked, and then said goodbye and hung up.

I hadn't had a chance to wash the crystallizing brine off when our door bell rang. Jacko was there, very New York pallid in a sport shirt and slacks.

—Come in, mate? he asked.

He went lolloping down the stairs and into the living room and saw that wonderful azure and foam which is the surf off the coast of New South Wales.

—Why would anyone ever leave a place like this? he asked, and then answered it himself, Fame and bloody riches I suppose, that's why.

I got him a beer and we sat out on the deck. The cries of children, the surf hitting their waists, rose to us. The same primal sounds whenever children were struck by mother brine. I'd always listened to and marvelled at and been soothed by the rising fragments of that sound.

—I still remember, he told me, not finishing the sentence.

He still remembered making the long journey in Stammer Jack's tank of a car, through the rubberbush and the mauve desolation to Hector, then north to Darwin. And the Arafura there, the stickiest, most humid sea, full of sea wasps, brimming with fascination. That was what he remembered and was too wise to express.

—We're going to take Francis, he told me.

—He's agreed? I asked hopefully, wanting to be off Bickham's hook.

—Chloe and I are going to sedate him. Then we're just going to bloody take him.

I looked confused. I couldn't see how this could happen.

—We've got his passport, said Jacko. We'll take him on the plane. We'll tell customs and immigration that he's under sedation.

I would later get more used to the casual lawlessness of Jacko's tone.

—Chloe and I are going to take him Sunday night. If he goes to his normal Monday meeting with Madames Mulcahy and Lauber, they'll just reinforce his resistance. Mind you, the little bugger will engineer them to do that eh. From their point of view it will seem the right thing to do. He'll get 'em so bamboozled they'll beg him not to give in to his yobbo brother eh. Cunning's the last thing to die in a human being, you know. Frank's got bags of it left.

I took a breath.

—Bickham called me, I told Jacko. He says Francis should go.

—What? He said that? I'll never say another bad thing about the old bugger.

Indeed, Jacko's eyes had softened into a pitiable gratitude. He turned them towards the eastern horizon, where the waves were white-horsing out in the Tasman Sea.

—Chloe and I wondered if you could come out with us, you know, to see us through immigration and everything. You're a respected figure here. You can say he's travelling to California for treatment and the buggers at the desk will believe you eh. We've already arranged to do his check-in in the first class lounge, but if you're there with us at immigration it'll stop them thinking his brother's trying to abduct him.

—But you are abducting him.

—Noooh! said Jacko.

But neither Bickham's persuasion nor Jacko's and Chloe's desire had yet quite convinced me this wasn't abduction.

—Come on, mate. You're a bloody wordsmith, aren't you? You know the definition of kidnap. We're not holding him to ransom. He's been holding us. The little bugger.

—Does this request come from Chloe too?

—Mate, he said, reaching into his breast pocket. She wrote you a letter.

When I saw the pink envelope, and the hopeful large loops of Chloe's handwriting, I knew I was embroiled.

I avoided any further argument by the dishonest but not abnormal marital means of telling only part of the truth. I implied that Francis himself had consented under the influence of his mother's good friend, the Nobelist, to go to Tijuana. The flight across the Pacific was hardly one he was unfamiliar with.

I was vaguely grateful just the same that, on principle, Maureen did not want to come to the airport with me to see the Emptors off.

After lunch on Sunday, a limousine ordered by Jacko arrived to collect me from the beach. As I was dragged away in its front seat – Australians like to signify mateship with the driver they don't even know by sitting in the front rather than in the back of limos – I saw Maureen frowning up at me from the bottom of the drive. I was sure she suspected I'd misled her. I know it sounds thin now, even to me, but at the time, I have to plead, I believed what that sick man, Bickham, had said. And believed, too, under the pressure of Chloe's misery that there was no harm in hope and in placebos.

Fifty minutes later, we stopped in front of Francis's terrace, and Jacko appeared through the front door at the trot. He and the driver and I quickly packed the Emptors' extensive luggage into the boot of the car, and I went into the house to help Jacko manage Francis out the door and into the limousine, all under the supervision of Chloe. I was appalled at how limp and glazed Francis looked. His eyebrows flicked, trying to focus. We simply lifted him by either elbow, and I heard his feet scrape along the pavement. Chloe got in ahead of us, and when we eased Francis in beside her, she received his head on her shoulder. At the sight of this Burren Waters
Pietà
, I found myself swallowing tears. In that second, I was irrationally pleased with myself for doing something to allow Francis to meet the cactus doctor.