My Life as a Fake (8 page)

And here, said Chubb, he glared at me.
Choy!
God save me. What eyes he had.

In Kuala Lumpur, Christopher Chubb rose and, for perhaps the tenth time, retied that brown and yellow sarong. Of course, he said, I was that liar, but I couldn’t be sure how much he knew. Was this anger all for me? Nothing was clear except that he was mad as a bloody hatter. I did not try to argue, I held my breath.
Sarung tebuan jangan dijolok, mati kena ketubung
Do not stir up a hornets’ nest, as we say, you’ll only be stung to death.

Yet there was no escaping either the teller or the tale. He was held like a cow in a crush. My first disappointment, his captor continued relentlessly, was to discover Weiss was not in his bed, and it was only after hours of wandering from Café Latin to Molina’s and back to Café Latin that I found him, saying good night to you at the top of Collins Street. It was by then almost five in the morning, but my bottle of wine was still ready in my coat pocket and there he was, my publisher. I could not have been more well disposed towards another soul on earth.

Of course I did not doubt that it would be a shock for him to meet me. Given that he thought me dead. Rather than frighten him in the street I decided to confront him in the safety of his own home. He lived in a flat in Flinders Lane, a very short walk from Collins Street.

You are doubtless more worldly than I am, the madman told Chubb as he brought him within sight of the children’s
graveyard, where, beyond the cemetery’s perimeter, they could see the solitary Skipping Girl sign glowing in the dark-blue eastern sky. I have been called a genius by some, he said without irony, and perhaps that’s why I have very little experience of this world. What I know and what I don’t know are difficult to categorise for people like you—who understand so much about the world and so little about me.

He paused. Chubb felt a moment of crisis had come and he glanced around looking for something that might serve as a weapon.

His captor glowered at him. Is my story dull?

No, not at all. I was thinking that I wished I knew more about you.

Well, I will tell you this, he finally said. I have a very thorough knowledge of the internal-combustion engine but a simple term like ‘silk stockings’ can throw me into the greatest of confusion. Explain that to me if you can?

Not knowing the currents of that injured brain, Chubb was afraid to answer the riddle. He said he did not get it, not at all.

I am trying to tell you, the giant said simply, that I behaved unwisely by forcing Weiss’s front door when he would not answer it.

You broke the door?

For a moment all that great weight of animus seemed to dissolve. His shoulders slumped and he released Chubb’s wrist, raising his large hands to his cheeks.

Alas, he said, I frightened him. I did announce myself, of course. I am Bob McCorkle, I said. And it was not as if he had not seen my photograph. He’d published it himself. You must have seen it too.

Chubb thought, He knows I made that photograph. He is challenging me, but for what end?

I am Bob McCorkle, I told him, he said again. I am your author, Mr. Weiss. But he shrieked at me to get out. Shrieked! At
me!
He was dressed only in shirt and underpants, but he was my publisher. I loved him. I took off my coat and held it out so he could cover himself but he struck it from my hand and cried, Monster!

I tried not to be upset by this. I had come through that door because all my best thoughts and wishes were centered on his person and all I wished to offer him was release from the suffering he had met on my behalf. I picked up my rejected coat and discovered the bottle I had brought to share with him had been shattered. The whole garment was soaked with wine, the pocket filled with broken glass. It was wrong of me to be offended. I am Bob McCorkle, I repeated. And to prove it I began to recite my poems.

And there and then, in Melbourne General Cemetery at six o’clock on a winter evening, he set his great heavy legs astride and, having once more taken Chubb’s wrist, commenced a strange and passionate recitation.

‘I had often, cowled in the slumberous heavy air …’

Chubb knew the poem, of course, but nothing had prepared him for this performance of it, the strange and passionate waving of his free arm, the twisting of the head, the eyes rolled back like a blind man playing jazz piano. And the voice, which its original author had always imagined to be some variation of standard BBC English, was here so fierce and nasal, hoarse, ravaged by failure and regret. Chubb had heard a recording of Eliot reading and judged it as boring as a sermon, but this man was like a tethered beast, a wild man inside a cage.

This was and was not the poem Chubb had written. It had been conceived as a parody and the first key to the puzzle of the hoax, but this lunatic had somehow recast it without altering a word. What had been clever had now become true, the song of the autodidact, the colonial, the damaged beast of the antipodes.

My God, Chubb said. What did Weiss make of your recital?

He said I was a fake.

And what did you do? Chubb asked this with some considerable dread. A confession now seemed imminent, and he feared the consequence would be his own death.

I showed him the piece of scalp I had cut from Vogelesang.

And then?

He fled from me, the man said wearily. I followed him like you might go after a kitten that has escaped its basket. He was trying to climb out a sash window and I called that I meant him no harm, but he said I should cease tormenting him, that he had been tormented more than any man alive and I must leave off. And you too. He spoke your name and said I was your creation, that you’d put my parts together. All
this time he was trying to get out the window. I swear I didn’t go near him. I don’t know why he would choose to climb out the top but the chair tipped and slid out from under him and he fell to the floor, giving his head a mighty crack against the wall as he did so.

And died.

I killed him, yes, the man said, and in his distress he once again released Chubb’s hand.

In Room 604 of the Merlin Hotel, Christopher Chubb opened his own hands, whose lines of fate and love were highlighted by the oil of bicycles.

I was free, he said. I ran like a rabbit through the dark. I fell and rolled and came up running.

Next day, he said, I had a bruised face and a twisted ankle but I knew I had to go outstation. I dragged my old duffel bag into Spencer Street and spent three pounds on a second-class ticket to Sydney.

On that thundering day in Kuala Lumpur I could not guess what talent the remainder of the McCorkle manuscript might reveal. Thus far I had seen no more than the fantastical aura surrounding it, had glimpsed only the carapace; in other words, the story. To say I was intrigued by both is to understate it, but given Chubb’s history of trickery I felt it unwise to proceed too eagerly. And that was how I became a fake myself, pretending that I would ‘write him up,’ not for an
instant imagining that thirteen years later I would sit down here in Antrim’s gatehouse to do that very thing, and much more besides.

I had no understanding yet of what I was flirting with, no idea that Chubb’s story would soon send me travelling to Singapore and from there to Sydney and Melbourne in a vain attempt to establish the true nature of this gigantic man who had emerged, so I assumed, from the darkest recesses of Chubb’s disturbed imagination.

Three years later I would be in Australia again and, after I had driven those dreary six hundred miles that separate Melbourne from Sydney, I understood not a great deal more, only the vast distance Chubb had fled from his phantasm.

Chubb had been a sort of beloved boy in Sydney literature, respected not only for his precocious learning and the rigor of his arguments but for his ferociously high standards. The boy from Haberfield was known for the small number of poets he would allow into his library: Donne, Shakespeare, Rilke, Mallarmé. He had been born into a second-rate culture, or so he thought, and one can see in that austere bookshelf all the passion that later led to the birth of Bob McCorkle—a terror that he might be somehow tricked into admiring the second-rate, the derivative, the shallow, the provincial.

I heard about this bookshelf many times, but more often it was his affection for Jelly Roll Morton that his friends remembered, the long boozy nights when he played race music with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, a sweet private smile emerging from the shadowed corners of his lips. In this context, men never failed to mention his attractiveness to women. They came to him, they said, without him having to do a bloody thing. He played the piano and they rubbed his monkish head.

Yet when he returned home to Sydney after Weiss’s death, he made no attempt to contact anyone he knew. He told me: I was a murderer, I had no face. I could not bear it, Mem, to feel such shame. He stayed away from Paddington and Darlinghurst and Kings Cross, places where he might run into fellow poets and artists.

Before long he got himself a job in advertising, writing fashion copy—a perfect hiding place for such a High Art character. He bought the first of many suits, a white shirt, a grey felt hat—Sydney was a sea of grey felt hats in those years. Then he rented a shabby semi in Chatswood, a lower-middle-class suburb which he had always thought hateful and life-denying. No-one here would give a damn for poetry or David Weiss.

That is where these were written, Mem. He did not say ‘by McCorkle’ and I did not ask. But it was clear I was to be given the parcel immediately. My throat was suddenly quite dry. I poured cold tea and drank it while he peeled off the black tape with his habitual care. Finally, from the two plastic bags he withdrew a thick sheaf of paper bound with a red rubber band which broke just as he removed it.

When he held out the bundle, I was frightened to display my greed.

Read, Mem, he insisted.

These pages were dry and dusty to the touch, typed on crumbling yellow paper of a variety once used for mimeographs.

Please, take your time.

But not one of these lines bore the vaguest resemblance to that single page which had so excited me. Are these by Bob McCorkle? I asked, speaking as if he were completely real.

Read, he said.

That is, no.

I did read all forty-three poems, if only to hide my huge irritation from their author, whose stomach I could hear rumbling not three feet away. It is one thing to get this sort of drivel in the mail, another to judge it in the presence of such neediness. Though well accustomed to rejecting poets, I could not think of a single encouraging remark to offer him.

If this was his ‘real’ poetry, then I preferred the fake. True, these had none of the obfuscations that sometimes marred the ‘McCorkle.’ Nor did they have its life, its wildness, its nasal passion, the sense that nothing on earth can matter but a poem. Frankly, these dry yellow pages were priggish, self-serving, snobbish. The Poet in these verses was a paragon of art, of learning. His enemies were Philistines and Trolls, and in particular there appeared and reappeared a strange little narrow-shouldered man with hairy thin wrists, white-speckled shoulders, a shining eggshell scalp. He was variously The Judge, The Executioner, The Spy. And in hopes of cloaking my disappointment with these dreary quatrains, I talked eagerly about these menacing phantoms, making much of their physicality.

He understood exactly what I was doing. Silently, he retrieved his pages and, without once looking at me, entombed them again inside their plastic bags. Seeing as you admired them, he said, let me tell you these personae are all based on old Blackhall.

Of course I had no idea who Blackhall was.

The Landlord. The Spy. Can you bear to listen? I do not wish to bore you.

Absolutely, I said. Of course. I picked up a pen I would rather have hurled across the room.

Mr Blackhall turned out to be not only Chubb’s Chatswood landlord but also the local stationmaster. He was moreover, Chubb said, a compulsive and unapologetic snoop. Each night there would be a handwritten note in the kitchen.
‘Mr Chubb, you left the tap dripping.’ ‘Mr Chubb, would you please mop up the bathroom floor?’ What could I do, Mem? The rent was very low. But when I realised he was going through my verse, I was not happy-
lah
.

As Chubb described the little traps he set to prove the landlord’s intrusions, his mood improved. Mischief showed in his fleeting smiles and his hands became precise, pincered thumbs and forefingers as he explained his various stratagems. It was a gift, he said. For that whole year, it was my most intimate human dialogue, me and my voyeur.

I asked if he had been lonely. No, he was quite content. The job was easy, the money good. Also, he said, if I had not become a copywriter I would never have seen Noussette again.

Was that Weiss’s girlfriend?

This, it seemed, was absolutely the wrong question, and having seen him cheer up I now had to suffer his irritation.

His brow furrowed as he fussed with his sarong. What a thing to say!

But this is the same woman John mentioned?

Obviously another bad question.

He shot me a hard glance. Slater was taunting me, yes or not?

I beg your pardon?

Saying how he wished to sleep with her.

How could that be taunting you?

Typically, he turned away from so direct a question.

There is an urge to always match people, no? We expect a couple to be
samah-samah
, equal in attractiveness, so I must tell you Noussette was much more attractive than I was. No contest-
lah
.