Gazing up at the red figure with a piece of moon at its back, Tom felt his old foreboding flicker. He had just remembered that the skipping girl was double-sided. From the pinnacle of a metal frame, she stared along the street in two-faced vigil. Her eeriness was immanent. Nelly’s image-making merely drew on that quality and intensified it.
A Prime Cut
declared the real estate board adorned with the picture of a bull in front of a disused warehouse.
You are
everywhere
said the vertical scrawl on a telephone pole beside it. Across the road, a multi-storey shopping centre was rising from a hole in the earth. With its empty window-sockets and fragmentary stairs, it might have been archaeological; a ruin from the future.
T
HE TREMOR
usually settled after breakfast, but that morning Iris’s hands went on shaking. She jabbed and jabbed at the remote. It took both hands to raise it to chest level and aim it at the set, which made finding the right button awkward.
Iris sat before grainy footage of heads bobbing in water, her mind taking its own direction. An incident from her department store years swam up to meet her. She had been on her way to Hosiery one lunch hour when she heard her name. A stranger stood in her path, a tremulous form in a checked cap and navy jacket. ‘Iris!’ he said again. ‘I say, it
is
Iris, isn’t it?’ He peered at her; she saw a brick-red pear packed with teeth. ‘Frank Saunders.’ Iris smiled in propitiation, certain he was one of Audrey’s perverts. He said, ‘We met in India. I was in the Hussars with Larry Fitch.’
What struck Iris was the corrugated column rising from his collar. The image was overlaid by another, a muscled neck with a little scar at the base. Her hand went to the stranded gilt at her throat.
Saunders was saying, ‘I say, Iris, you do look tremendously well.’
He swayed closer. Stale sweat and fresh beer muddled the fragrant department store air. An officer who gave off an odour of caramel took Iris in his arms; behind his shoulder she glimpsed a presence, sandy hair, a Fair Isle pullover. It was as if a sideboard or a standard lamp should come to life and address her. ‘Do you remember . . .?’ began Saunders, and Iris said, ‘No.’ She said, ‘My name is Mrs Arthur Loxley. I don’t know you from Adam.’ In her wake, he called, ‘I say, I say . . .’
Iris shook in her chair, and loud farts rolled from her. She was blocked up, again. Once she could have turned to milk of magnesia. Lately, however, even a half-dose mitigated relief with disaster.
When you could no longer manage the lavatory: that was when they put you in a home.
She had reached the age where choice is synonymous with fear. Iris was afraid, in this matter, of an alliance between Tom and Audrey; an ancient animal mistrust of the strong and the young.
She feared soiling herself. She feared the consequences, impressed on her at an early age, of irregularity. Sebastian de Souza had locked himself in the lavatory every morning at twenty-five minutes past seven and remained there until he had extruded a well-formed stool. His wife and child followed him in turn. Thankfully there was a good strong flush, although the slit-windowed cabinet remained pregnant with odours. The implications of the ritual far exceeded hygiene. To fail the daily rendezvous was to fall short of a moral standard. Diarrhoea was heathenish; constipation warned of wilfulness. If the flesh was disobedient, the spirit was base. Bodies that lacked discipline required control.
Iris’s son said, ‘Stop worrying, Ma.’ He said it often, with varying degrees of irritation. But Iris’s thoughts leaped and raced, skittish with fear.
She worried about Tommy: her clever son without wife or child, his life an accumulation of unwritten pages. She feared he would meet a modern, untimely death: a plane dropping from the clouds, a madman at a service station swivelling a gun. She feared the loneliness that was accruing for his old age.
As a toddler, he had learned to use his china pot only to reject it. The household entered a phase during which a telltale reek would lead Iris to a little mound deposited behind an armchair or under a table. Once a glistening serpent lay coiled inside one of her shoes. The child was visibly excited by these incidents, gleeful even while scolded.
Iris’s father detected depravity and counselled thrashing. ‘Children are animals. The two things they understand are food and pain.’ It was clear that Tommy knew what was required of him; yet he refused to conform. Iris’s anxiety mounted. Arthur advised her to let the boy be, saying he would outgrow the problem. It was no more than his wife expected. That from the sensible English multitude she had managed to acquire a specimen devoid of sense had long been all too plain to her.
With time and observation, she saw that her son’s offence had the aspect of a game. If anyone other than Iris happened upon his faeces, the child’s pleasure was mixed with agitation. But when the discovery fell to her, he chuckled and whooped. Eventually she understood. She had schooled him herself in the use of his pot, praising him as he strained to please her. The habit acquired, she had left him alone; now, when he moved his bowels a servant bore away the aromatic receptacle and returned it scoured. And so the child’s ingenuity had contrived a means of continuing to make her the present of his stools.
The foundation of a pattern was laid. The mother fretted; the son provided for her. What neither grasped was that worry, too, might be a form of giving. As Iris aged, her anxieties multiplied to encompass the trivial and the sublime, rational eventuality and wild hypothesis, lost keys, toothache, ATMs, road accidents, seizures, what people would think, the years that had elapsed since her last confession, running out of sugar. To voice anxiety was to risk her son’s disapproval. At the same time, he might allay apprehension: find her key, go to the ATM in her place, assure her that the brakes wouldn’t fail. Her worrying empowered him. That was part of its value to her.
There was also this: worry, eating away at the present, made room for the future. ‘For God’s sake, Ma: it’ll never happen.’ Thus Tom, missing the point. Because worrying was a way of looking forward to something. That it might be a calamity was irrelevant. Fear was Iris’s mechanism for allotting herself time. It was a crafty manoeuvre. She was old and ill and poor. Fear was her best hope.
After Saunders, Iris shunned Hosiery, forgoing her staff discount to buy her tights in a rival establishment. She told no one what had happened. But one morning, years after the encounter, she found herself speaking of it to her son.
Tom pressed for details. At once Iris ended the conversation: ‘What’s the use?’ It was her standard response whenever he asked about the years before her marriage.
Fragments of knowledge—photographs, dates, conversations half heard when he was young—formed a patchwork in Tom’s mind. His mother, a beautiful girl, had married late. The strange word
jilted
had snared his attention in childhood. Now he assumed that Iris had run into the suitor who had once betrayed her. He had lately met the woman he would marry; was himself in love. It rendered him susceptible to romantic explanation.
He looked at the lipstick escaping in fine red threads from his mother’s mouth; the skin below her chin hung pleated. His own flesh was replete; satiny with consummation. He thought, Nobody touches her. He thought, No wonder she doesn’t want to dwell on the past.
How we imagine another person reveals the limits of our understanding. Tom was then not yet thirty. He could not have guessed that, surrounded by artificial limbs encased in nylon, Iris’s first thought on seeing Saunders had been, Who’s that old man? It was not the past she had recoiled from in their encounter but the future.
Fear had this advantage too: it could sidle up to the future side on, by wiles. There was no need to look what was waiting in the face.
T
HE WEEKS
in 1965 when Indian tanks rolled to within three miles of Lahore had left no impression on the child Tom’s mind. Six years passed in relative peace; then, with Indian troops already moving to support bloodied Dacca, Pakistan declared war on its sibling.
It so happened that Tom had recently read the diary of Anne Frank. With the formalisation of hostilities, he sensed a meeting of life and literature. He was a child built by books and his excitement was boundless.
He couldn’t quite settle on his part in the conflict: would he shelter Hindus when Pakistan invaded? To this end, he searched the house for secret places, paying particular attention to cupboards. There was the equally thrilling possibility that he himself would be forced into hiding. He reviewed the Muslim boys he knew: he counted no special friends among them, but trusted that in time the rules of plot would reveal one. What was certain, in any case, was that his role would be heroic. He passed agreeable hours trailing a stick in the dirt, his lips moving soundlessly, imagining the raids he would conduct under cover of night. Sometimes he swung his arms and counted his strides, shouting out numbers as if they were blasphemies. A spindly twig or leaf might enrage him by appearing defenceless, and he would strike it to the ground. His dreams of pursuit and daring were broken into now and then by fear; but like the delicious shiver provoked by a tale of ghosts, it was merely his body’s involuntary tribute to art.
This happy state lasted a scant fortnight. Then the war was over, and in the midst of national jubilation, Tom tasted the melancholy of those who wake from visions. His reflection in the mirror appeared to have shrunk. For a glorious interval, he had been larger than life. It was his first, dim perception of the power of narrative: war, like love, raising its accomplices to the status of figures in a known story.
Tom knew that a lucky country was one where history happened to other people. For thirty years after his marginal involvement in its adventure, he had found a place in which to take cover from its reach.
On the September night when he stood in a bar with Nelly watching towers sink to their knees, the fear he felt was an acute version of a child’s alarm as the seeker in a hiding game draws near. He had always known it was only a matter of time before it happened. Living in Australia was like being a student at a party that went on and on; he didn’t want it to end, but couldn’t suppress the knowledge that exams were approaching.
Tom Loxley wished what anyone might: that a pleasant life should go on being pleasant. He wished for continuity. He wished for the orderly progression of events. He wished, that is to say, for an end to history. It was incompatible with modern life. It raged over benighted continents and there it should have stayed, ripping up sites already littered with its debris. What was unnerving was the juxtaposition of that ancient face with Power-Point and water coolers. Its eruption in nylon-carpeted cubicles where people were sneaking a look at stuff on eBay.
It was as if the events of that year had set out to demonstrate that history could not be confined to historical places. In the same spring as the towers fell, boats making their way to Australia foundered on the treachery of currents and destiny.
People looking for sanctuary drowned. They might have been found; they might have been saved. But what prevailed was the protection of a line drawn in the water.
Night after night, images of the refugees appeared. Tom saw death flicker in the furtive glow of TV and knew the guilty rage of those who have crossed to safety. Time toppled like a wave. He was a falling thing, spiralling down to wait forever in a room as blue as an ocean. He felt the convergence of public and private dread.
Buried deep in Australian memories was the knowledge that strangers had once sailed to these shores and destroyed what they found. How could that nightmare be remembered? How could it be unselfishly forgotten? A trauma that had never been laid to rest, it went on disturbing a nation’s dreams. In the rejection of the latest newcomers, Tom glimpsed the past convulsing like a faulty film. It was a confession coded as a denial. It was as if a fiend had paused in its ravaging to cover its face and howl.
The images he saw on TV brought him out in goose bumps: fear writing its name on his flesh. And since the frightened are often frightening, the pictures on his screen made him grimace and distorted his face.
Bodies flashed up constantly in those weeks: broken, burned, fished lifeless from the sea. He thrust at them with his remote, willing them to disappear. But it was as if the images were imprinted on his retina. They affected everything he saw. In ordinary streets the air turned red with callistemons. Tiny corpses appeared on pavements, nestlings as naked and strange as Martians.
A roller-blader sped past Tom, fleeing as if from catastrophe; the white stare of the baby strapped to his back followed like a curse. A lunatic in flawless linen strode up and down a supermarket aisle, gesticulating, shouting, ‘What do you mean by a small pumpkin?’ Then Tom noticed the wire running into her pocket from her ear.
A municipal hard-rubbish collection produced surreal assemblages on footpaths. Tom’s route to a protest about the war in Afghanistan took him through dystopic chambers furnished with soiled carpet squares and disembowelled futons. He passed an orange divan stripped of cushions; collapsed hoovers, torn flyscreens, a backless TV. A bicycle wheel leaned against a birdcage. Rusty barbecues might have strayed from a torturer’s repertoire. There were contraptions for improving muscle tone, computer keyboards fanned in a magazine rack, plastic flowerpots packed with grey earth. It was like leafing through snapshots of a civilisation’s unconscious.
Spring came apart under a weight of rain, death-laden spring. Fear put out live shoots in Tom. Instantly identifiable as foreign matter, he feared being labelled waste. He feared expulsion from the body of the nation.
I
N THE
hills, the mild city day was cold and wild. The rain arrived soon after Tom and Nelly, herding them back to the house, putting an end to their search.
Nelly’s pink hat lay on a chair, misty beads tangling its fine fibres. She built up the fire while Tom set about preparing a meal. Rain slashed leaves, clawed at the walls. The paddocks darkened under their leaking roof.