Out of Time (4 page)

‘Pick it up, you little veg!'

James did not respond. He seemed not to understand what was expected of him. His passivity enraged the boy further.

‘Pick it up!' he yelled, starting to walk towards James. He received no answer. The boy himself did not speak again, but continued walking, purposefully and silently. The other boys lounged and watched. Some were smiling, some looked bored, a couple seemed concerned, annoyed. Although James trembled as the boy approached he did not move; indeed he did not take his eyes off his face. Time had become stagnant; the boy, without walking faster, continued to stride
towards James, pressing the space between them. Then he reached James and with a swing of a clenched forearm knocked him down. James was astounded to find himself lying on the grass. The sky seemed shaken and so did the ground. He looked away from the boy, towards the goalposts at the end of the field. The boy stood over him for a moment, then, frustrated, swore and stamped away to the ball. He had to wipe it clean before he could pick it up but, that done, he gathered it and kicked it to his friends. He ran back to them without another glance at James.

James lay in the grass for some minutes. After a while the ball rolled near him again, this time accidentally. A younger boy collected it then came over and looked curiously at him.

‘Are you all right?' he asked.

James did not reply and the boy ran off to his friends, calling, ‘I think he's retarded or something.'

James got up suddenly and walked away. He came to the fence again and doggedly climbed over it. As he crossed Wilson Street he decided that he would walk down the street in huge zigzags, left to right then right to left, then left to right. . .

SOMETIMES I LIKE
it like this, and sometimes I don't. Some days are peaceful, some days are bad. On the peaceful days I think the bad days don't matter but on the bad days nothing could be worse. Those are the
days I can't sleep and I can't wake. I think about dying and every time I hear and see a word about death I lose my breath and my heart gets heavy and wants to stop. It happens when I hear an ambulance or see a TV show where someone dies or see an advertisement like ‘Deadly to Insects' or hear a song or catch someone talking about death. I lie in bed and watch the clock and time never passes so slowly while I think about how long it'll be before my turn comes and how bad it'll be.

Once I went into a church. It was so cool and quiet in there. It was like they'd caught Nature inside stone. The light fell across the floor in squares of life and death. High above, a fan slowly turned. I walked along the sides, scared to go in the middle or near the front. All along the wall were small sad stories. ‘Aged 19.' ‘Aged 23.' ‘Aged 8.' A man dressed in black came out of one doorway and walked slowly to another. He opened the door there but, changing his mind, closed it and went back out through the first one. I held my breath but he didn't see me.

I slipped along one of the seats, then cut across the central aisle and slid onto a seat on the right hand side. On the board in front of me, but higher than me, were some numbers. I closed my eyes and sat there, wondering when it'd happen to me.

IN THE MURKY
grey of a Melbourne twilight Tiffany found she could not rely on others to keep out of her
way. She had to concentrate more than she wanted on the people and obstacles that crowded the footpath. It left little time to think about her client, even though his name flared from every newspaper poster and was shouted by every newsboy's voice. It was not until she was on the tram and able to sink gratefully into an offered seat that she could concentrate on him, and his limited, inevitable future.

‘Inevitable,' she thought grimly, ‘if only for political reasons'. Americans had become so unpopular with civilians. She had already been told unofficially by powerful friends that there would be no reprieve. There was no sympathy for him as a man and no special circumstances to plead on his behalf.

Funny, she had not expected to be moved herself by any sympathy for him. As the only woman at the Bar she was used to getting unpopular cases. She remembered untying the pink ribbon, in her still, silent chambers, with a sense of hopelessness. Perhaps if she had approached it more positively he might have fared better. . . with this thought she put her head back on the seat and closed her eyes. She wouldn't take any more clients on capital charges. It was too hard to leave the cases behind when you went home at nights.

A voice interrupted her: ‘Excuse me miss, me and me friend were wondering. . .' She opened her eyes. A middle-aged woman with an old coat and shapeless hat was peering into her face. ‘Were you the lady we saw in court today? With that American fellow, the murderer?'

She nodded and gave a little smile. This happened occasionally.

‘My word, you did speak well for him. But the jury didn't take long did they? Fancy you being on the same tram!' Tiffany nodded her head again and closed her eyes, but the voice went on: ‘Me and me friend, we think he must have been one of them deserters. They do say there's a lot of them up in the bush.' Tiffany did not respond. She could not be bothered saying to the woman, as she had already said to her friends, to her colleagues, to the Court, that the American Army had done thorough checks and had no record of him. Whoever he was, he was not one of theirs. But people believed what they wanted to believe. Calling him a deserter was a convenient explanation. And the alternative. . . well, what was the alternative? A confusing, frustrating, clouded riddle.

From the first he had made no effort to assist her. He had not even instructed her how to plead, just shrugged when she asked him. The evidence had been overwhelming of course. Largely circumstantial, but still overwhelming. The only thing to be said on his behalf was that his victim wasn't much of a loss to society. A string of convictions for sex offences, and drug importations. . . all small time, but still. . . of course the law, quite rightly, didn't take the moral character of the victim into account. . . as Mr Justice Adler had said:

‘There are circumstances under which the law recognises that a victim may have contributed to his own
fate. But you have chosen to remain silent on this possibility, as you have on a good many other matters. In the absence of any evidence on motive the Court cannot speculate as to mitigating circumstances. Despite learned counsel's eloquent strivings on your behalf, my statutory duty is clear.' And he had donned the black cap.

Afterwards, at Simpson's request, and ignoring her usual rules, she had visited him in the cell under the courtroom, where he was being held until the crowds dispersed. To her own surprise, she had felt relaxed with him, as though they were suddenly old friends.

‘Won't you tell me a little more?' she had asked. He too seemed to have changed; for the first time she saw him smile.

‘John Simpson,' he said, and shrugged.

‘No you're not,' she answered. ‘Who are you really?'

‘It doesn't matter,' he said. ‘I just wanted to ask you one thing: are there grounds for an appeal?'

She hesitated, then looked at him levelly. ‘No,' she answered.

‘All right,' he said. ‘I expected that. But I wasn't sure about Australian law. Thank you for being straight with me.' He paused and then went on, ‘Ma'am, I do want to thank you for your efforts. I guess I've been a frustrating client, but that's the way it goes.' There had been a few more sentences in the same vein, before she made her excuses and left, but he had remained as controlled, as calm, as enigmatic as ever. Now she was unlikely to see him again; now there were only traces
left; the memory of his flat New England voice and the cries of the newsboys: ‘Mystery killer to hang! Mystery killer to hang!'

The sentence was carried out three weeks later: it was 1942 and there was no time for protracted legal affairs. He became a footnote in a dusty law book, quickly forgotten by a public which was becoming sated with headlines of spectacular catastrophes, triumphant victories, appalling disasters. Tiffany Guinness remembered him, but naturally enough her memories faded as the years went by.

JAMES SAT IN
his room. Mr Woodforde's machine was on the desk in front of him. He was scared of it, but he played with it as though it held no particular power. He switched it on and off a few times, watching the needle on the battery indicator rise slowly from zero to nine, and even slightly beyond nine. ‘What would happen if the battery went flat while you were away?' James wondered. He drew the machine closer to him, knowing from the burning feeling on his face that he was about to use it again. With sudden carelessness he keyed in random numbers: 45° 25' 15” 45° 25' 15” followed by a date and a time: 11.09. 1948, 1400 hours. Then, before he could have second thoughts, trying to ignore the sick feeling in his stomach, he pressed ‘Enter'.

Again came the terrible glimpse, again the disintegration,
with James having time only for one desperate thought: ‘I shouldn't have done this.' He was starting to think, ‘Why didn't I learn from the last time?' when the insides of his body seemed to fall away and water engulfed him. He was hit by a wave that stung him and drenched him and threw him over. A grim struggle followed, with James' body fighting a fight to which his mind had not adjusted. There was too much to cope with: the shock, the cold, the wet, the salt, the strength of the water. James had to separate each sensation and identify it before he could respond to it. He opened his eyes and found that he was floundering in grey water under a grey sky. Only the white flecks on the tops of the waves enabled him to separate air from water. He was tossed and rolled and knocked from trough to trough, while the cold took possession of his body as though it were a spirit.

Only one thing could save James, and it was the thing that had brought him here. Through it all some kind of desperate reflex had kept his hand gripped around the machine. His fingers were clamped to it with a power that nothing could release. He did not know it was there but he would have known had it not been. As he came flapping and gasping to the surface, for the third or possibly the fourth time, his fingers groped for the keys on the bottom of the panels. But he was rolled under the water again before he could find what he wanted. When he felt air again, nearly a minute later, he had no strength left to sob, or even to breathe. Somewhere deep inside him some instinct forced one frozen frightened
finger, taut like a talon, to scratch at the surface of the machine. It felt a key. It pressed, as he was engulfed by a huge grey wave. He was not feeling the cold of the water now, just its weight.

Then that giddying moment of horror emptied him of everything, even himself, until he was suddenly standing, staggering knock-kneed, at the back of an old wooden shed. He didn't care where he was until he had stopped being sick, and then for some minutes more after that. The first thing he noticed, to his relief, was that he was dry – the water had not travelled the years and kilometres with him. The second thing he noticed was that no-one was nearby and this was also a relief. And then finally, some minutes later, he started to wonder where he was. But a few steps, to the corner of the building, brought recognition. The old wooden shed was one of the car pool garages, a few hundred metres from Administration. James circled around the back of the Administration building and entered the square through the network of old laboratories. As he passed Lab 17 he gave a quick nervous sideways glance. He was scared of it now. He did not want to go in it or near it, did not want to think about what it looked like, or about any of the moments he had spent in there.

IN THE MACHINE
called his memory James went back, back to Mt Speakman. There had been three days of sleet that stung like wasp bites – cold hard unfriendly
little bullets – and fogs, and strong winds. By then they were all ready to go home. This is no fun,' James grumbled to his parents. ‘Don't worry, it'll clear up,' they said each morning.

The first day he had played Monopoly with his sister until nearly lunch time, when they had a gigantic squabble that, in relation to their earlier ones, was like Mayfair compared to Old Kent Road. She had run off in tears and he had gloomily packed the game away, getting no pleasure from his neatly stacked piles of money, nor his glittering array of hotels and houses. In the afternoon he had skied for an hour, but the weather was painful and bitter.

The second day they played cards in the morning and watched videos all afternoon until their heads ached. The third day James met up with friends from school, Peta and Rupert, and went off with them to their flat, leaving Ellie to do. . . what? He tried guiltily not to wonder too much about how she would spend her day. Their parents had gone to the Curlewis' place to play bridge.

But on the fourth day James awoke to the certainty that all the world was either blue or white. Through his window, from his bed, he could see nothing but blue, and when he sat up he found to his delight that the blue was limited only by the white. He sprang out of bed and got straight into his ski clothes before running into the kitchen for breakfast. There was a new mood in the apartment: a mood of lightness and silliness. People made silly jokes and other people laughed immoderately at them.

Ellie had her pink ski-suit on, which James privately thought looked revolting, but he told her she was looking good and she beamed. By nine o'clock he was tumbling out of the door, getting his boots and skis in a clatter of noise and excitement. Then, suddenly moved by a moment of compassion, which he knew he would later regret, he said to Ellie, ‘Come on, El, you want to ski with me?'

He was rewarded by the life that came into her face.

They skied all morning. Fresh powder snow had fallen overnight and they cut through it in laughing sweeping turns and delicate sharp manoeuvres. James was longing to go over to Snake Gully and do jumps with his friends but he swallowed his impatience. Most of the time he skied at Ellie's speed, only occasionally bursting into long rhapsodies of genuinely fast movement, then pulling up after a few minutes to wait for her.