She was speaking with her eyes shut, and the hairs at the nape of her neck glistened with the strain of narration and hanging on to the iron of the bed.
‘. . . the air so soft it used to get inside of yer clothes and make yer feel downright naked. I never feel such water as the sea milky pearly round yer ankles. Dadda would catch fish. We used to live off fish—and scones. And sweet pertaters. I was skinny then. I was frightened of most things. A crab comin’ at me sideways with its claws raised. Blood. I got me first blood at Brinkwater. It scared me out of me knickers, and Mother too ladylike to tell. Then I got used to being scared or you couldn’t keep it up or it felt too good lyun in the sun on the sand where it began to get firm watchun yer bubs grow you could sometimes you could see they’d grown since the night before. After the hair begun and I got over it I was proud it was so black it was shiny like most of the sea things seemed to be.’
Her voice had grown monotonous. She choked at times: the words must have tasted glutinous.
‘I would ’uv liked somethun ter happen I didn’t know what. I had some idea of some man I’d never met not young perhaps as old as Dadda but bigger I could see the dark hairs on his wrists wearun a big old green rather hairy overcoat come walkun up the sand with that sound yer feet makes in the sand. It was most often cold early. I’d be shiverun with cold or praps it was from waitun. Till we lay together inside of ’is coat. I never had much idea of what happened with this strange man. I think we put our mouths together and it was like we was drinkun each other the sound of the sea pourun over and into us. The rough sand and hairy coat. I can’t remember if we ever spoke. I remember the whites of ’is eyes were unusually white, and the white sky at the back of ’is head.’
She opened her eyes, and the words came clicking hiccuping out from between her bare lips.
‘This man I never met I hoped could ’uv taught me somethun I mightn’t ’uv otherwise understood. Not about sex. Well, about sex as well. I used to stick me fist in me mouth and bit it and rub me arms on the dry seaweed till they looked like they had a rash. Sometimes the birds flew so low I could feel the noise of their wings and got the idea my head might be split open and would swallow up one of those white birds then when the wound had closed I would see things as they’re supposed to be. Eh? D’you think I’m a nut? I’m not. There was a girl I knew her name was Eileen Gilchrist Sister Scolastica they called her after she’d been shaved. I often wonder if she found what she was lookun for when she went whoorun after those bally saints.’
Nance’s arm was so eaten by the iron flowers he tried to free it from its discipline of memory and the brutal bed; but she wouldn’t let him.
‘I learned about it but it was Dadda who taught me. It was the hooks he taught me with at first. As he dragged ’em out of their pink gills. “They don’t feel nothun,” he said, “not if you’re quick, fish is made for us to eat.” Course I loved fish. I was always hungry. I loved that fresh fish tastun of the sea after the rancid salt mutton at home. But the hook frightened me,’ she said, ‘
all ways.
Dadda said: “All you gotter do is not to think about it. If you start blubberun it’s no good you’re lost I’ll give yer a bloody good beltun.” I hated it. I hated the look of ’is dirty-lookun old man’s john. He wasn’t old I suppose, or not any older than the man in the green overcoat.’
She had begun to shiver: all the old ironwork was rattling.
‘’E had a scraggy neck. I used to watch ’im pickun the last bit of flesh from the fish’s backbones in the shack we rented from Mrs Peabody at Brinkwater. I thought you bloody old bastard you dirty bastard I’ll never ever like you any more but oh God I waited for ’um to do it to me again but ’e didn’t ’e might never ’uv done it ’e seemed to ’uv taken a great dislike to me. Mother was always lovun, but disappointed. She had a hare-lip they’d sewed up badly. She’d been a teacher and because the kids had tormented her she used to say: “I thank God Nancy you was born whole and will lead a happy life.”’
Nance suddenly got up and went racketing towards the table to fill her glass. She took a good swig of brandy. The silence made it as though she hadn’t told anything of what she had been telling. Then she seemed to remember.
‘For Chrissake!’ She tore the foil off a fresh bottle, and found an old cracked cup. Holding the cup waist high, she came to him where he had been left stranded on the bed.
‘Here,’ she said, not urgently. ‘Take it. You need a drink. It’s my life, but you had a share in it.’
So he accepted the cup, and drank, not with the sacramental reverence her voice of a moment before had seemed to invite, but by burning gulps. He sat guzzling the bad brandy. He wanted to participate in Nance’s life as he hadn’t before, although he had been her lover. He knew every possible movement of her ribs, every reflection of her skin. He had torn the hook out of her gills; he had disembowelled her while still alive; he had watched her no less cruel dissection by the knives of light. You couldn’t call an experience an experiment, but he had profited by whatever it was. His centrifugal rocks suggested something of her numb throbbing; but he hadn’t till now entered into her life as he had into her body. Now she had given him the last bubble the sea trails along the firm sand: he lay with the stranger, or Nance, or the stranger, inside the hairy overcoat; her old man’s dribbling dick threatened to club him.
In fact it was Nance who clubbed him. ‘That night in Rushcutters bloody Park when I got caught up with Duffield it was that old digger’s coat you was wearun I got a sight of it it had the green look of old pennies as I’d always imagined and nothun you did nor said would ’uv thrown me off though it wasn’t hairy like I’d always imagined the overcoat would be.’
He began to belch. ‘God, this brandy—it’s filth, Nance!’ he heard the educated part of him bleat. ‘It’s going to rot us.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it’s crook. But that isn’t what rots a person.’
She remembered and went back to the table, and resumed guzzling and slopping the brandy till she was sucked under again.
‘Not what I imagined,’ she said. ‘Nothun is ever what you expect. Some big thug who comes upstairs lookin for a stretch you wait for ’im to knock the wind out of yer or rip you up when ’e starts tellun you about ’is bloody pigeons you can’t coo enough to please the pigeon fancier it’s more often the little ones some little mingy watchmaker or book-keeper who snaps at yer nipples with ’is wobbly dentures or tries to hamstring yer with a penknife.’
‘You’re obsessed,’ he maintained, because by now he had got up and helped himself again, and his head was rolling, and recovering, and leaping, at the length of his neck.
‘Obsessed!’
The word looked magnificent.
‘Yes,’ she grumbled. ‘I’m obsessed. Like you’re obsessed—by what you like to think is the truth.’
She let out a long, uncontrollable burp.
‘Nuthin is ever what you expect. I never thought I would ’uv taken up with a so-called artist I was lookun for somethun else I would ’uv done better to ’uv got fixed up with some bloke who expects ’is chop at five-thirty ’is regular root Saturday because you’re married to ’im anyway he thinks you are you aren’t inside you are free but with an artist you’re never free he’s makun use of yer in the name of the Holy Mother of Truth. He thinks. The Truth!’
She spat it out on the floor.
‘When the only brand of truth ’e recognizes is ’is own it is inside ’im ’e reckons and as ’e digs inter poor fucker
you
’e hopes you’ll help ’im let it out.’
No less metallic than the brandy he was drinking, the lamp’s narrow dagger of light had found its mark.
‘By turnun yer into a shambles,’ she trumpeted.
‘A shambles all right!’ he lunged back.
‘Out of the shambles ’e paints what ’e calls ’is bloody work of art!’
Suddenly she grabbed the lamp, and the light, from being restricted and austere, blazed at the self-portrait which he was hoping she wouldn’t notice, or intended to ignore. She had only been saving it up, it appeared. She made it look devilish: furtive, ingrown, all that he had persuaded himself it wasn’t, and worse than anything else—bad, not morally, but aesthetically.
‘There,’ she said, holding her torch. ‘That’s Duffield. Not bad.
True.
Lovun ’imself.’
She returned the lamp comparatively soberly to the table; while he continued flickering and fluctuating inside. The brandy threatened to choke him, uncoiling down his throat like a rope of burning light. All his past was splintering; he had never been able to catch it in its true prismatic colours: the colours of truth—as he saw it. His only true achievement was his failure. The self-portrait, though toned down by the shadow to which it had been withdrawn, was sprouting jagged diagonal teeth, womanly gyrating breasts, the holes for titivation by lipstick and tongue and prick.
Of course this isn’t real; soon we shall soothe each other back into our actual bodies.
He heard himself, like the worst of captions at the flicks: ‘We still have each other, Nance.’
‘Like shit we have!’
She made it spatter brown across his forehead. And now he did begin to resent to accuse if not appreciate the situation. Anyway, took the tip. He was beginning running out along the short instinctive track over the same fallen leaves. A rock almost shocked him back but not. He ran. Or shambled on.
Flies die in the dunny at night on yellow squares of the
Truth
you wipe your arse on.
When he lumbered splurging back it was the sandshoes he was wearing she shouted: ‘What you have got!’ not a question: a proclamation.
‘What you told me.’
‘I told yer you should ’uv dug it deeper,’ she shrieked. ‘It wouldn’t ’uv stank. Not so many blowies. An’ no one would ’uv been tempted.’
‘You can’t dig through rock. Not humanly possible.’
He began very patiently and seriously to smear all that he repudiated in himself. He had thought he knew every inch of that painted board, till working over it now. With enlightened fingertips. As he worked, he bubbled at the mouth, wondering wondering what would be left.
Nance watched for a bit. Then she turned away. She got down, inside her dress, on the rusty bed. She was shrivelling. The lamp pointed at her old shammy-leather breasts.
‘Leave it!’ she moaned in the end. ‘For Chrissake leave ut!’
‘But I stink!’
He knew he smelled loathsome. By now they had both reached the depths.
In between, bursts of exquisite purity, of rubbed leaves, of sprinkled dew, made them writhe.
He comforted her rags of flesh, but it was no more than comfort. He kissed her hare-lip, her disgusting john. Once she rose above him, and he thought she said: ‘My darling darling you are what I have lost.’
Again, she was ticking off an inventory: the eyelids she suspected; the hair between her breasts; his slack, his slender, his humbled balls.
Then stopped.
‘That ring,’ she was mumbling and fumbling.
‘What about it?’
‘What’s it
for?
’
He couldn’t have explained to Nance it was for poor bloody Pa Duffield. ‘It’s just a ring. A family ring.’ She couldn’t have understood it was connected with the Adam’s apple of your incredible, but true, father.
‘But a
ring!
’
‘All right,’ he shouted back, ‘we know it’s a
ring
’; there was nothing he didn’t know without her harping on it.
It was his worst perversion: to have hung on to a ring, long after the money was spent, the five hundred they sold him for. Or pretension: worse than anything Harry and Alfreda Courtney had tried to put across, blazing with brilliantine and diamonds under the chandelier.
‘You’re right!’ He supposed it was one of his selves still shouting at this whore beside him. ‘What’s in a ring?’
He could tell Nance was frightened: he could hear, he could feel her, gibbering, blubbering, her fingers dithering, when all he wanted was to get up off the shuddering bed not to harm anybody but reach the door to fling the ring.
‘There!’ he croaked, after his moment of triumph.
‘Wadderyerdone?’ Seemed to need confirmation of what she had been watching.
‘Nothing to hurt anyone living.’ It was a lie of course: he could feel the wound deepening in himself. ‘I just wanted—’ he sighed it—‘what I should’ve done long—ago—got rid of the ring.’
He could hear the shock in Nance: it hissed between her teeth. ‘Throwun away a valuable ring yer grandad solid gold!’
As he fell down beside her but apart she began moaning for all the abominations ever committed by man or woman: sometimes she blamed herself, sometimes him.
Presently he fell asleep. When he woke he seemed to be alone in a dark room. A light, not of the sun, was moving faintly amongst the trees. At one stage he got as far as the door. Holding her smoking torch, Nance was stirring the fallen leaves with her foot. It looked feebly done, but if she had acted more forcefully she might have overbalanced. Then she got down, very methodically, on all fours, the better to look, but the lamp gave only the feeblest light: black smoke was pouring out of the slanted chimney.
He found his way back to the bed and slept several ages in hells. Or was it awake in life? In which Nance was slucking at some brandy. She was standing at a narrow, untrue table. But he couldn’t properly see Nance: the hair was hanging over her face. Of all those who came and went, none was more terrible than Maman.
Surely you don’t mean you can’t you didn’t forget to insure?
Her sapphires were incredulous.
After all we’ve paid for your education!
He was insured against none of the calamities. At least they had taught him not to cry, or only in deepest privacy.
The sun delivered him by waking him. Stupid bloody Nance must be at it still, by raw sunlight. She had brought back the lamp: it was standing on the table, blacked out. She had been at the brandy again, he noticed.