Jacko (19 page)

—You're a brave chap then, said Norris in his huge, aspirated voice. But I suppose it helps one's mental attitude.

—It does, Mr Chambers. To see friends.

—Oh bugger this Mr Chambers stuff, Francis. Call me Norris, please!

Marie had left the pool and picked a long-stemmed carnation from a flowerbed near Francis's chair. She dived into the pool again, holding it above the water in one hand.

—Look! called Marie. Esther Williams.

She put the stem of the flower between her teeth, and swam backstroke up the pool. Francis's laughter could be heard, and Norris's. And Bickham looked down on them and began to chuckle and applaud.

It took Marie about four strokes to travel the length of the pool. Her arms looked as strong as a robust girl's.

Chloe had put down her Dom Perignon for a can of Carlton Draught, the beer whose white cans you found strewn all over the landscape of the Northern Territory.
Outback confetti
they called it.

With her free hand, she pulled me aside.

—You jokers get together a lot, you and Bickham and Evans and the Chambers eh?

—No. This is a red letter day.

—But I mean, what goes on eh? Do you get together and decide what's best for the poor bloody country. All you socialist buggers! Because Bickham's a great man, and okay he's short of breath, but he's also a socialist bastard …

—Chloe, I don't know what you're getting at.

—You never invite any cattlemen or women, that's for bloody certain.

—You're invited, Chloe.

—Yeah. But that's a bloody accident eh.

I could by now guess what was gnawing at her. After all, she had shown in Centennial Park that in her world picture, all things were planned and nothing was contingent, even the folly and treachery of children. And so also city liberals like the Chambers and the Evans and the Mulcahys met over Sunday lunch, and orchestrated dismal outcomes and government intrusions for cattlemen and their families far, far in the interior. Nothing happened by accident. Everything was specific intent.

So it had been more than literary inquisitiveness which made her anxious to check with Bickham and discover whether he had framed a law in
The Mother as Aphrodite
. For some reason, in her mind, her children and the people at the Mulcahys' lunch had the power to hammer out effectual statutes.

Such was the perceived might of the Chambers, those two big-boned people, splashing about in the Mulcahys' pool, making it look pint-sized.

When Oscar Mulcahy had his famous roast potatoes to a nicety, he came and asked me if Maureen and I would go down to the pool with him to help Francis up and into the house.

—I hope the bloody Chambers haven't splashed the poor bugger too much, he told me.

The Chambers had left the water and were towelling their great bearlike shoulders and talking with wan Francis. Oscar Mulcahy called to Francis that it was lunch-time, and Francis set his flute of champagne down on the concrete of the pool. Then, elbows on the plastic mounting of the chair arms, he tried to lever himself up. He seemed to lack adequate strength for it. I got on one side and Oscar on the other, but it was Maureen, a nurse in her earlier years, who was able to heave him efficiently upright while the Chambers watched, compassion on their big faces. I could see Hefty and Chloe watching from the verandah, Hefty caressing Chloe like a sister.

We helped him up the steps onto the verandah, where he got his shirt on, manoeuvring his bony elbows. Then we walked on either side of him to the door which led to the Mulcahys' long dinner table. Because of its massive cliff-side window, the room seemed to hang above the pristine blue sea. The Evans, the Chambers, Maureen and Bickham and. Khalil stood back solemnly from the table and watched us steer Francis to it. We were a procession rendered holy by the young man's skeletal valour. At last we got Francis seated at the head of the table. Light as a wafer, he sank down with a sigh.

—There you are,
mon ami
, Chambers said in his hooting intonation. He laid a tentative hand on Francis's shoulder, massive enough, you would have thought, to put a strain on Francis Emptor's stick-like framework. Chambers himself must have got the same impression and took it away again after a second.

We began the meal with Balmain bugs, and – orchestrated by Oscar – the males (why is it always so?) told their best stories in turn for Francis's sake. Chambers told one about UNESCO and a relic. When he had been Australian Ambassador to UNESCO, living in Paris a block from the Eiffel Tower in Rue Jean Rey, he had been appalled by how, for weeks on end, the French press attacked UNESCO; all at a time when the United States was abandoning the organization, allegedly because of its cost, in reality because it sometimes opposed American policy.

—So, said Chambers in the cavernous, aspirated voice with which he had once dominated debate in the House of Representatives. So each day in
France Soir
there was the accusation that UNESCO was wilfully impotent and that its officers lived off caviare and Moët – all at the price of the world's poor and of those who lay in darkness. When I would get home in the evenings, I wouldn't be able to face the paper until I had a solid Scotch, so used was I to abysmal UNESCO-bashing.

—You can read French, can you Norris? asked Mulcahy, winking at the rest of us. And, though it seemed to pain him, Francis Emptor managed a laugh, knowing Norris fancied himself as a Francophone.

Chambers persisted.

—I was so accustomed to the nightly trauma that I leave you to imagine my pleasure when I shook the paper out and found that one particular night the institution which had come in for attack was not UNESCO but the Church. It seemed that in a parish church in the Umbrian Hills there existed a shred of tissue – suitably displayed in a reliquary – which purported to be the foreskin of Jesus, the prepuce of the Saviour. The relic was, it seems, a centre of local pilgrimage and devotion. It had developed that not only had the Vatican refused to recognize this curious cult, but some blackguard had stolen the thing. Thus I had the pleasure of sending a cable to Foreign Affairs in Canberra, and informing my Minister that at last we'd been driven off the front page by a foreskin!

Laughter. People looking secretly to Francis to gauge the impact of the story on him.

In turn, lanky Evans and his wife told of a bungled drama prize giving they had attended in London a little after Evans had his first play bought by a West End theatre. Evans was full of the excitement of bringing his raw new voice to the dwindling but still estimable centre of empire. Their cab driver said to them, Come over here for a bit of culture, have we?

And then, at the reception, one of the Dames of the British theatre beat her way across the floor to say, I always wanted to know, why do you Australians (which, as Evans told us, the super-Brits always pronounced
Awe-strel-yines
) need an Oprah Hice?

Renate – it turned out – was a better social storyteller than her husband. He was fair enough at it but lacked the waspishness for it in ordinary life. And yet all the characters said scathing things in his plays. He was an example of the way art liberated people to be their
Other
. But Oscar's dining table wasn't art, so the anecdote depended on Renate for some of its better connecting lines.

Mulcahy told us how a massive Italian tenor in the Vienna Opera House, gesturing with a sword in
Rigoletto
had it fly from his hand into the orchestra pit, where it caused a wound among the string section. With scarcely a glimpse in the direction in which his sword had vanished, he had continued with the aria, but at its close he had stepped forward, laid a hand on his stomach, bent down over the orchestra and said,
Scusi!

Francis Emptor touchingly spent more hilarity on that one than seemed medically wise.

Asked to follow, I told the story of a CIA man I'd met in Sichuan, and the trouble he had with pit toilets. Funny how at a feast, lavatorial jokes always work.

The democracy of this tale-telling had, at least in my mind, reduced Bickham to an ordinary citizen at the table. He seemed to be having an ordinary, not an Olympian, day out, and he confirmed it by telling, with an almost hectic relish, how he had met and become friends with Chloe.

—A cowgirl with whom I have learned to discuss my work, as I never have with any other woman. Especially not with any academic.

Chloe radiated a flush of good blood and a kind of watchful contentment. And she, who could have told us stories to curl our hair, told none.

Francis ate a fragment of one of Mulcahy's magnificent spuds, one or two shreds of the beef, and a third of a forkful of peas. He chewed slowly, then after swallowing his fragments of food, took minute sips of his Cabernet Sauvignon. He refused the dessert and the cheese. Chloe watched him all the while, I noticed.

We were still eating dessert and Oscar Mulcahy had opened a second bottle of Château d'Yquem when Francis said, Would you all excuse me for a second?

Most of us half-stood. We looked at each other wondering what gallantry the moment required of us.

—Please, he said, putting out a hand to stop us.

He made hard progress out of the dining room and across the living room and disappeared into the back of the house.

Bickham said in a hushed, uncharacteristic voice, You should take great comfort, Chloe, from the fact that he has so much fight in him.

Francis was gone some time and we half forgot him. I was sitting at the wrong end of the table to see his return, but I heard his light, painful tread on the polished jarrah floor of the living room. I heard too the noise of a minor fall, as if a jacket had been taken off and dropped on a chair, and saw on the faces of those who
were
placed to see – including Hefty and Oscar and Khalil – a sudden appalled look. In the next instant we all heard something sharper, an awful thud, somehow metallic, somehow to do with glass, and Chloe and Hefty screamed together, at this pitch of distress indistinguishable from each other.

Everyone rose from the table and rushed into the living room. Francis had fallen against the glass corner of Hefty's enormous coffee table. The glass had cut his forehead deeply. Blood had sprayed a coffee table book of Hefty's on Magritte, and began to clot in the fibres of a Berber rug.

Former Prime Minister Chambers had a bad back, and of course, Bickham had emphysema, and this and horror caused those two men to pause. No-nonsense Maureen was already on her knees, trying to ease the fallen, bleeding boy onto his back.

With her own child gushing blood, Chloe seemed too stricken to apply the fireman's carry which had saved Bickham's life. Khalil, Oscar and I rushed in and helped turn Francis over and flinched at the damage he'd done to his eyebrow and forehead. We lifted him, Maureen telling us to be sure to support his spine, and carried him into Hefty's bedroom. Blood poured down his face onto the light blue pillow, but Hefty did not complain and went to get a towel to mop it up. While she was gone, Francis opened his eyes.

—Did Chambers see it? he asked us.

Oscar and I blinked at each other, not knowing what he meant.

—Did Norris see it? Did Norris?

—I did,
comrade
, said Norris, massively frowning.

—Course he did darling, Chloe assured Francis.

—It's delirium, Bickham pronounced.

12

It was during my last bright Australian December, the year before I went to New York, that I got a further urgent call from Chloe. The damage to Francis's brow had long since healed, but his health had declined further. So I was pleased to hear Chloe sounding excited. Her son Jacko, she said, was coming home from America to see his brother, Francis. He only had a week. Could my wife and I come around to Francis's terrace house in Woollahra for drinks with Jacko?

I asked her if Bickham and Khalil would be there, but she said in a chastizing voice that I must know that Tuesday and Thursday were her days at Bickham's. That was the usual limit of what Bickham and Chloe saw of each other.

But even then, before I had my New York acquaintanceship with Jacko, I relished the idea that patrician Bickham might need to meet up with that video stockman, Jacko Emptor.

Maureen and I were surprised by the Chloe who answered the door of Francis's terrace house. In caring for Francis and Bickham, and in bearing the pre-loss of both men, she had taken on a suburban pallor and had achieved a thinness which had come to her too late in life and left her not slim but pouchy.

The shock of seeing this reduced Chloe was followed by that of meeting Francis. At the Mulcahys' he had seemed as pared down as a human could be, but, crouched in one corner of a large easy chair in the living room, he had achieved a new and terrible incorporeality. The bookshelf behind him featured a complete set of Bickham's works. With that as his background, Francis squinted out at the sub-tropical colour of his little December garden. He was done with the world of lushness. His hair, thin at the back of his scalp, had nearly disappeared from the front. His nose and cheekbones were sharp as gems behind the dry flesh. The acceptance in his eyes was of a kind I wasn't used to seeing in Western faces. I had seen it however in the faces of Ethiopian women and children from minorities not usually favoured by the aid funnelled through the Ethiopian Government of Mengistu. And the way the teeth thrust forward, prognathous, but without expecting any nourishment! He had exactly reproduced it.

Maureen and I looked at each other, as if to work out the best way to commiserate with Francis over his condition.

He wore a crisp white shirt, in which – as in the chair – he seemed lost. White slacks, too, and his bony, pale feet lay bare on the Berber carpet like claims for mercy.

From the hallway big Jacko Emptor appeared and came towards me grimacing and with his hand out. It seemed as large as a small horse's head.