I
NTO
T
OM’S WAKING THOUGHTS
came fear, those he loved in the world withdrawing from him one by one. The future had the shape of a corridor, empty of everything but time.
He thought of his mother surrounded by shit. Was excrement part of the world or part of the body? It blurred the distinction between inside and outside. Among the things it offended against was the human need for order.
There was a man Tom remembered from India, one of casteless thousands assigned to work with shit. When the sewer in a local tenement clogged, this man lowered himself into the overflowing cesspit, feeling for and removing the obstruction with his toes. He was the humblest of beings and he was charged with transgressive magic. If the Indian dread of contamination was at work, so was a wider taboo. The opposite of what is seen is obscene. The cess man embodied the return of the private and unsightly to public view.
Thus Tom’s musings rolled about his mother. Was unrestrained shitting the symptom of a deeper unravelling? Language defines humans; and, Faeces are like words, thought Tom sleepily, they both come out of bodies. It carried the irrational, illuminating force of an utterance heard in a dream.
His mind, slipping about, fastened on a terror at once sharper and more manageable. He was afraid his book would never be published. Its premises struck him as ridiculous, its conclusions absurd. He brought his knees to his chest and moaned. He had wasted years on work drained of movement and intelligence. A single sentence in James contained more brilliant breadth.
He moved in and out of sleep. Posner’s sombre mass was in the room; at cuff and collar, waxen flesh gleamed. What had prompted his visit? Tom cupped his groin, a morning reflex. The blind moved and a rectangle of light shuddered on his wall. An ogre lurching and groaning down the street brought him wide awake, to the accompaniment of running footsteps and slammed bins. Someone shouted, ‘That was my
good
yellow T-shirt, dickhead.’
Now it seemed plain to Tom that Posner’s insinuations were a hook baited with slime.
There are so many aspects to
Nelly.
The prick’ll say anything to get me away from her, show me he’s on my side, thought Tom. It was for him, he decided, with a small luxurious shiver, that Posner had come.
But over breakfast he found himself gnawing at another scene. Some weeks earlier, he had arrived at the Preserve just as Rory was leaving with a friend. Consequently Tom entered the building unannounced.
The door to Nelly’s studio stood open; a light shone within. Tom followed the corridor, past the fictitious curtained door, to her threshold, and there he remained. What he saw in those few moments would leave its print forever, although it was in no sense shocking or even irregular. Nelly was sprawled on a curious seat she favoured, not long enough for a couch but wider than a chair: a
chaise courte
as it were, a distinctive, unyielding contrivance of lacy wood and hard velvet. Beside it loomed the monolith of Posner, his silver skull inclined towards Nelly. He might have been a doctor, listening in his dark jacket. He might have been a courtier attending the levée of a queen.
The tilt of Posner’s head hid his face. But a halogen lamp held Nelly in its beam, and the watcher in the doorway saw that she was scratching the side of her head; one hand casually frenzied in her hair, her expression calm with an underglaze of satisfaction. The next instant her aspect altered, as her eyes turned towards the door. And Posner turned also, and the tableau broke up and recomposed itself like a pattern viewed in a child’s optical toy.
Nevertheless, Tom was left with an impression. He had observed those two often enough, and in an assortment of contexts; had watched them argue, share a private quip, treat each other with unceremonious disdain. But the stillness of the scene in the studio lent it a force that animation obscured. It stripped sociability from Nelly and Posner’s bond, which showed old and iron. That was scarcely a revelation. Yet Tom retained a sense of having come upon something uncovered.
There was surprise in the faces they turned to him; also a hint of alarm. Replaying the episode, freezing each of its elements, Tom could see that his silent apparition might well have been disquieting. And, the first moment past, the occupants of the room showed no sign of discomfiture. Nelly greeted him with her usual ease. Posner gave vent to the piping salutations of a large white bat.
Yet Tom couldn’t excise the memory of their communion. It hadn’t escaped him—although he had missed the precise moment—that in his presence Nelly had ceased clawing at her scalp. Yet that simple, unhindered act had struck no discord in the scene with Posner. Turning the incident over, Tom kept reverting to Nelly’s expression. The ruminant, private pleasure it projected was suggestive equally of the easing of an irritation or the maturation of a design. Whenever he felt he was on the verge of decoding it, a shadow intruded on his vision: Posner bent in command or supplication over that self-sufficient face.
Tom gathered up what he needed for work, and went into the Monday morning street. Outside the blond-brick flats across the way, a straggle-locked wizard in velvet slippers and belted gown was keeping watch over a gathering of empty wheelie bins.
The previous evening, Sunday parking had obliged Tom to leave his car at the far end of the street. It stood beyond a row of thin white trees belled with silver nuts. Rain and the advent of summer had conspired to put on concertos sustained by the blue notes of hydrangeas. Behind low wooden fences, the native thrived beside the exotic, there was a scribble of rose in a fig tree, the tropics flourished about the Mediterranean. In these unassuming plots, a nation realised its grandest dream.
Tom thought, . . .
to look at things in bloom, / Fifty springs are
little room.
But more than Osman would be granted.
W
HEN SPRING
came, the city had loosened into blossom. On Tom and Nelly’s walks the wind might have been honed on a strop, but the scent of jasmine swelled from bluestone-paved lanes designed for the passage of nightsoil. The football clamour from the MCG was louder now, attendance and passion waxing as the Grand Final approached. Giant toddlers could be seen queuing outside the stadium: wrapped in shapeless, fleecy garments, attached to polystyrene feeding cups.
Tom told Nelly about the headline he had seen soon after arriving in Australia: ‘Pies Murder Lions’. For days it had caused him despair. He was a child at home in words. That too was to be taken from him in this place.
Enlightenment arrived with a conversation overheard while he hung about the locker room at recess, trying to appear solitary by choice. Magpies, Swans, Lions, Demons were not, after all, escapees from a fabulous bestiary but the names by which the city’s football teams were affectionately known. So began the incident’s passage into comedy, where it was now firmly lodged; the mocking of former terrors being one way in which we travesty our younger selves.
Nelly swooped at a gleam underfoot, then displayed the golden coin she had retrieved. It was astonishing how often she found money in the street, fifty cents, a five-dollar note, a twenty.
Once she picked up a small plastic fish. ‘Remember when these first appeared? Four, five years ago?’
Suddenly she had begun seeing them everywhere, Nelly said. The little fish were multitudinous. They lay in gutters, on footpaths, in car parks, on the beach, tiny fish with tapering faces. She had picked one up and unscrewed its red snout. Traces of dark liquid were visible in its scaled belly; its scent was briny. She wondered what purpose it might serve.
The riddle rolled in her mind, until at last she supposed that each fish had contained a single dose of newfangled fish-food. Nelly pictured an aquarium, and the bodies of fish darting to the thin, nutritive stream dispersing in their pond of glass.
It was a source of amazement to her, said Nelly, that so many of her fellow citizens had taken to keeping fish. She imagined people carrying home plastic bags of water and coloured fish, and pausing to feed the fish on the way; and inadvertently, because spellbound by iridescent life, letting the container of fish-food fall.
Then one day she bought takeaway sushi; opened the paper bag and found a plastic fish inside, filled with soy sauce. ‘I felt like a total idiot.’
But Tom was charmed by Nelly’s theory of sober men and women deflected from duty by the antics of fish. And there was the fact that she had noticed the discarded containers in the first place. She had a tremendous capacity for appreciating the world’s detail. Textures, colours, the casual disposition of forms were striking to Nelly, extra-ordinary. To spend time with her was to wander through a cabinet of curiosities. She remarked on a shoe jutting
like a snout
from a hollow high in a tree. Tom realised that the objects she hoarded were symptomatic of a more profound desire: to drag moments of perception from the grey ooze of oblivion.
When he was an old man, he would still remember a table-tennis ball he had seen in Nelly’s company, a sterile egg lying in the weedy rubbish under a nineteenth-century arch. He would remember a terrace opposite an elevated railway line where lighted carriages shot past bedroom windows like a ribbon of film. He would remember Nelly in her red jacket on a bridge, entranced by a city assembled in its river.
She owned a selection of glass slides intended for a magic lantern, five coloured views of European cities and one of Millet’s
Gleaners
. From time to time Nelly would bring out a slide and suspend it in front of a window, so that a diminutive Grand Canal or Brandenburg Gate was a luminous presence in the Preserve. When the sun was at the right slant a replica of the little cityscape would appear on the opposite wall, a light-painting that hovered there briefly, then vanished.
Tom asked why she didn’t keep one or another of the slides up permanently. ‘You could just rotate them.’
She told him about the Japanese practice of keeping a treasured object hidden away and only taking it out to look at now and then. ‘Because then it seems marvellous each time.’
T
HE SELECTION
committee was waiting in Kevin Dodd’s office when Tom arrived at work on Monday. He muttered an apology; nodded to Vernon, to their colleague Anthea Rendle.
A stranger sprang to his feet and advanced with a purposeful cry of ‘Tosh!’ Tom’s hand was seized; squeezed. ‘Tosh Lindgren. Human Resources. ‘
Great
to meet you.’
The centre parting in Tosh’s hair was a path in a cornfield. His cheeks had kept their boyhood roses above a corporate jaw.
‘Right: let’s progress this meeting.’ Professor Dodd coughed in the small, dry way he believed appropriate to his status. ‘A very satisfactory batch, I must say. There are applications here of the highest standard.’ He glanced around the room, hoping for dissent. ‘The highest standard,’ he repeated.
Kevin Dodd’s career, unburdened by intellectual distinction, had attracted sizeable research grants and the attention of vice-chancellors. No one could bring themselves to read anything he had written, which counted greatly in his favour. Members of the committee responsible for appointing him had assured each other that Dodd was not faddish. His rival for the Chair caused offence by being young, female and brilliant. The dean described Dodd as a numbers man; this was taken up and repeated as praise.
The professor was a study in beige: hair, skin, suit, socks. (‘His thoughts are leaking,’ explained Vernon.) Kevin Dodd believed sincerely, indeed passionately, in his own greatness. It followed that he had to be attracting exceptional talent to the department.
‘This fellow from Rotterdam, for instance. An original mind. Thinks outside the box.’
‘Oh, but originality . . .’ Vernon had taken off his spectacles and was twirling them. ‘Is that safe?’
‘Original in the best sense,’ said Dodd with a touch of asperity. ‘Nothing untoward.’
Tosh said, ‘Excuse me, Vernon. If I might make a suggestion?’
‘Go ahead, Tosh.’
‘It’s really easy to get sidetracked by subjective descriptors. Like original? That’s why at HR we advocate focus on the selection criteria. So that we’re thinking neutral instead of personal?’
‘I hear what you’re saying, Tosh. See, I’ve made a note: avoid personality, think HR.’
Anthea said, ‘Miriam Beyer’s the obvious choice. Gender studies, eighteenth-century and she gave a great paper on scandal fiction in Sydney last year. You remember, Vernon?’
‘I do. Teutonic. But ironic.’
‘Excuse me—’
Tom said hastily, ‘I’ve got Miriam down, too. And the Queensland guy—Sims.’
‘Sims? No way.’
‘You can’t put Sims in front of students, Thomas. Not even our students.’
‘Excuse—’
‘Not at all right for this department. In the last analysis, it’s about the right kind of person.’
‘What’s wrong with him? It’s a pretty convincing application.’
‘Like for a start he’s got this totally anachronistic great works fetish. You know, courses on . . .’ Anthea appeared to be groping after a dim recollection. ‘Things like Shakespeare,’ she said finally.
‘Think of a fog, Thomas. An industrious one.’
‘He chaired my paper on “The Limits of Poetry”. Claimed
I’d run out of time when I’d barely started.’ Dodd said, ‘He was quite impertinent about it. Definitely the wrong kind of person.’
There followed minutes of satisfying gossip about the applicant. (Vernon: ‘. . . of course Sims swears he was only tucking in his shirt.’)
‘Excuse me, Professor.’ For Tosh was not without heroism. ‘If a candidate meets the selection criteria, HR would definitely advocate interviewing him. Or her.’
Cheered by the prospect of snubbing an enemy, Dodd was no worse than avuncular. ‘At the end of the day, Tosh, it’s more than a matter of a level playing field. Or, to put it less poetically, we can’t let mere regulations constrain our—’
‘Originality?’
‘Freedom.
Academic
freedom,’ said Dodd, with meaningful emphasis. He leaned back in his chair, knees wide. (Vernon: ‘It’s the kind of crotch that follows you about the room.’) On the superior side of the chasm separating academic from administrative mind, professorial teeth came together with a hard little snap.