Notorious (31 page)
The nurse looks at me with an odd crumpled expression.
‘
It’s
pashmina
,’ she says. It is contempt scrunching her face.
I give up on asking her about the pills the shrink makes me take.
If wrong questions get you contempt, what does hanging yourself or
slicing your inner thigh with the bread knife get?
The chauffeur takes me home to the Manse. The mansion. Or as
my brother called it, the Mausoleum. Neither of us liked it. It didn’t
like us: if you tried to rest on the big stone blocks of the high estate
wall or the low wall on the terrace, the cold ate into you, pushed at
you, made you move away. My mother said the black wrought-iron
draped around the house was black lace. But my brother called it iron
spider webs. They cast odd shadows, not just on the verandas but right
through the house, smudging the white marble floors and making the
white walls look as though water was running down them. It didn’t
matter how much art my mother bought, the paintings never looked
as good as in the showroom: the rooms were overcast, the colours
dimmed, the vitality leached out.
When we first moved there, when my father became suddenly
rich, I was too young to understand why we couldn’t play castles with
cardboard boxes in the living room or drape blankets over the furniture
the way I used to with my brother. The marble floors struck back
at us, just like the walls. When we tried to play chasing games, we
slipped and fell. We weren’t held and cushioned like we had been with
our old scuffed and curling linoleum. We bruised right from the start.
AUGUST 21:
Usually I make allowances for my mother, for all she has
been through, for duty’s sake, for the sake that I really don’t care. But
today is different. I overhear the nurse saying, We found the blood in
Anna’s room.
I come home for my afternoon nap. My mother is in the hallway. She
has a tan and new blonde hair. The hair is literally new: it is someone
else’s, sewn in to lengthen hers, to give it body. Someone else’s body.
‘No lipstick,’ she says, looking me up and down. She never calls
me by my name any more. ‘I expect you to come in and be social.’
I go in. A pall of boredom has made the room almost warm. I say
hello to a circle of shiny nodding foreheads. Shiny chins go up and down.
Someone says, accidentally too loudly, That must be her real nose.
‘Now that you’ve had a little rest, what are you thinking of doing,
dear?’ someone else asks kindly.
‘I’d like to buy a lamp so I can walk through Sydney looking for
an honest person,’ I say.
Silence soaks up the goodwill like blotting paper on a cat’s mess.
My mother laughs, grips me above the elbow, saying over her
shoulder, ‘She’s still a little stressed.’
Outside, she digs to the bone and hisses, ‘Do you want people to
think you are mad?’
I know she is suffering. Misery is making her sag, despite all the
plastic surgery. Everything sharp must go. Even my shapelessness
pierces her. But I can’t help myself.
Won’t two of us missing be hard to explain, at tennis?
I’m sick of you kids, she says.
Kid, I say. There’s only one of us left now.
For my brother and me, our favourite spot was a grass-covered ledge
which jutted over the bay. We loved to lie there, our feet dangling over
nothingness, the warm earth hard all along the spine until the sudden
drop off and the silky feel of bare air between the toes. The welcoming
sky was laid out, a cloak of blue with a lion’s face clasp. My brother,
who had just started going to Europe for my father’s business, would
tell me that in Poland, the clouds were so low you could reach up and
touch them. Not like the far-off gauzy smears here. The clouds were
the best things about Koloshnovar, he said.
From our ledge, we looked across to the bridge webbed against the
sky. At dusk, the cars pass in wet clay-coloured streaks, only their
headlights distinct. You can’t see the people inside clearly, our house
is not that close, but you can see the lights as the cars go forward. It
looks as though the darkness is devouring them from behind.
Winning,
says my brother.
Back at the Manse, the car stops exactly parallel to the wide steps.
I thank the new chauffeur and tell him not to get out. He smiles shyly
at me, his face pale in the gloom.
My father is crossing the marble hall. I hadn’t realised he was home.
I would be glad to see him, if he was glad to see me. The chill from
the floor makes my soles curl. I wish summer would come.
My father looks at me warily. He has the same shadows under his
eyes as Anna’s magazine models.
‘Dad.’ I go to hug him but he catches me by the elbows.
‘For God’s sake, you’re too old to call me Daddy. And the doctor
says you’ve been faking your diary entries again.’
He opens the study door. Sometimes I think you’re sending me bad
waves to make my business go wrong, he says, and slams the carved
oak door.
The last few times my brother was home he didn’t come to the ledge
even when he said he would. Finally I figured out that he had gone
back to his old high school, the first one, the one he liked. I find him
sitting near the statue by the football field. It is chilly. The stadium
lights throw halos in the winter night. The wind wrestles the branches,
sending shadows across the statue so the roughened stone seems to
breathe. The statue is a man, wearing a loincloth and holding a dagger.
He stares straight ahead, his right arm clamped by his side. His left
is folded, pinned across his chest – this is a figure of right angles and
straight lines – and across the throat of the small leopard writhing
there. The leopard is almost finished, the feline body hanging limply,
the tail kinking down his hip. Man and leopard, caught in an instant
of time, frozen in a moment of extreme anguish.
I stare at my brother. Why strangle a leopard in the moonlight,
opposite a football field where even now the swelling shouts of the
players, creased by the light wind, graze the grey stone?
AUGUST 28:
I know you want reality, doc, but how accurate is it going
to be if I am doped up on pills? Already I feel only what I see, and I
am seeing almost in black and white. I have a new dream: children in
black caves are drawing butterflies on the wet walls. I go closer: white
wings, white heads, white eyes. But I know when I turn my head, the
wings will be red.
SEPTEMBER 5:
Another week: nap, hospital, nap, a nightclub filled with
starbursts of white light. The beetle seems to be building a nest under the
little bridge. I watch it with interest. I ask the shrink to let me off
the tablets but he says no. Dinners are long silences and the void of the
empty plate which my father insists on setting. My mother does not
eat. Of course, the anniversary is coming up.
SEPTEMBER 10:
Anna gets thinner, if that is possible. She has tried to
kill herself again, stealing another patient’s tablets and crawling behind
the boiler in the basement. She had a vial of blood, like the one they
found in her room. Anna says the blood is my brother’s. But I know
that cannot be true.
I read in the back of the car about a homeless man who was living
in a tree on a riverbank outside a large country town. A large town,
not some rural enclave. The tree had been set alight by five teenage
boys. The tree burned and the man died.
He was Polish, says the chauffeur, whose name is Tadeusz. He is
Polish, too, and he heard about the case from his chauffeur friends
who know all the gossip because they drive judges and police chiefs.
The boys had been from rich families. I stare at the newspaper. The
story is twelve lines long. No photo. The man was sixty years old. He
had a name. He was younger than my father.
But why? I say, helpless.
Tadeusz shrugs. ‘For kicks maybe. To feel.’
No comfort, not even in a big tree.
When I arrive home, the police are there and an ambulance,
and two of my mother’s friends in tennis dresses, cheeping. She has
smashed up the place again, all the mirrors are broken and she
has scrawled obscenities all over my brother’s room. The words are
in red paint, which looks black in the late afternoon light. My father
has taken her away and the maids are already washing down the
walls. The room was painted in white gloss after the last time so it is
easy to clean off.
Why wasn’t it you? one of my mother’s friends says when she thinks
I am out of earshot. I go upstairs. I know as soon as I open my bedroom
door that I should have hidden the bonsai. It is lying dismembered in
splots of earth, little flesh sculptures, the roots already drying out. The
beetle of course had been stamped flat.
I sit in the dark for a long time. When I look down at the dirt
spilled on the thick white carpet, there are little black dots. Ants have
come from nowhere to clean up my beetle, take it away. The spilled
dirt makes crevasses in the squares of moonlight. The ivy in the wooden
lattice on the wall outside scratches at the breeze.
Far away, a phone begins to ring.
I go downstairs slowly, certain it will stop by the time I get there,
or someone else will answer it. But the maids have finished and gone.
No-one answers and the phone keeps ringing. I go into the dark study.
I have never felt so tired. The curtains are half parted, the room is
awash with black milk, I am swimming through it, moving backwards.
I sit down behind the desk. I pick up the phone.
‘Come now,’ says a voice with an accent. ‘We are waiting for you
in Koloshnovar.’
‘No – what? It is too cold.’ I reach out, fumbling for the switch on
the desk lamp.
Static flares at a great distance. There is a click.
A new voice, faint but unbearably recognisable. ‘You have to come.
They want the book.’ His voice is cracked by static, or pain. He says,
‘Bring the book. You have to come now.’ It is my brother.
Another click. The line goes dead.
Light blazes on. On the desk are two identical bottles. One has my
prescription on the label, the other has a name – a woman’s name – I
don’t recognise. The pills inside the bottles are almost exactly the same
size and colour. My father leans against the door.
She didn’t know what she was doing, he says.
I know.
After a minute, he asks who the phone call was for.
It was for me, I say. He straightens but the shadows stay, under his
eyes and around his mouth. The next day I booked a plane to Poland.
‘T
he next day I booked a plane to Poland,’ I say. ‘Stop it,’ says Devlin. He grasps my shoulders. The dark presses in around us.
‘What did you say?’ I shout at him. There is water, wet and cold, on my cheeks, there is salt in my mouth. It can’t be tears.
He says, confused, ‘I brought your diary.’
‘I thought you were my brother.’ I twist. He doesn’t let me go. The trees scratch the dark bowl of sky.
There is just the two of us. I know I’ll never see my brother again, probably never even find his body.
The cold eats into my spine. I shiver and put my hands over my eyes. Devlin’s grip on my arms tightens. I sense he wants to – what? push me away? pull me to him? There is that familiar smell – the Scotch and mouthwash.
He is a dark shape in front of me, boxing me in, unable to help. I feel dark ice growing around us. I say, ‘You can’t comfort me. You can’t even help someone in distress because you’re so damaged yourself.’
His face is a dark country of valleys and shadows. I visualise him putting the handcuffs on me. I want to hurt him. ‘You’re an indecent man. You could have helped.’
‘You?’ There is a note in his voice I read as contempt. I bunch my fist and hit him across the cheekbone. The blow knocks his head to one side. He doesn’t turn back immediately. His profile cuts into the lighter patches of snow on the trees.
I think, I never reached you. You compartmentalised me, like everything else.
I say, ‘I’m sorry.’ But when I see the snow in his eyes, I know that apologising isn’t enough this time. Why, in my deepest core, do I still think that I can control him? Nothing has ever hinted that I am right.
He says, ‘How do you want me to comfort you?’ He jerks me to him, rubbing my back ferociously. ‘Like this?’
‘Stop it.’ I wrench my arms free but he grabs my hands between his hands. ‘This?’ he says, unsteadily. He gathers me hard against him, rocking back and forth maniacally, so I feel the strain on my lower back.
I get my hand up, around his neck.
‘Dev.’ I put my forehead against his chest. Then – I can’t help myself – my whole body relaxes into him, I close my eyes.
His arms falls away but I don’t move and after a moment he puts one arm around my shoulders, the other around my head, shutting out the moonlight. I am held, in warm dark.
