Cold Light (33 page)

‘Old army mate runs the place. Read Claude Bragdon?’

She didn’t answer.

He drew in the beer circles, which the bottom of his glass had made on the table, and said, ‘See this symbol – the vesica; the vulva.’ He was referring to the almond shape he had created. He looked at her as he said the word.

‘It doesn’t mean that. It means bladder, if I remember correctly.’

He made another symbol with the moisture left by the beer glass on the table. ‘And this symbol means “The Messenger is Near”.’ He laughed to himself.

He was talking nonsense.

‘You do not believe all this.’

‘To thwart it, you have to understand it. You have to find out who in Interior is plotting this way.’

That, at least, made some sense.

‘I have copies of
Archaeologica
in my room. And some charts you should see.’

He gestured up the stairs.

‘In no way am I going to your room, Scraper.’

He drew again in the moisture of the beer on the glass-topped table. ‘These circles, see them? “The Enemy Desires Peace”.’ Again, he laughed and watched her, reaching over and grasping her hand.

‘Spare me, Scraper,’ she said derisively, and pulled her hand away.

‘You know that the basic pagan cross of Canberra – I told you about crosses in your office that day – is made by connecting five mountains. It’s the principle of the Five Sacred Mountains in Chinese geomancy.’ His fingernails, she noticed, were too long and were brown and furrowed. Everything about him was repugnant.

She kept her hat and gloves on her lap as a way of saying that she was unrelaxed and the visit short. She sipped her Scotch.

He leered at her. ‘Edi, you must avoid the Abyss of Self-Conceit.’ Again, he laughed to himself. ‘Come up to the room and I’ll show you diagrams and maps. Ten minutes is all I ask.’

‘Where did you get these maps and so on? And don’t call me Edi.’

‘On special loan.’

From where? She couldn’t be bothered to ask.

‘I’ve been researching after I saw those plans in your office. Ten minutes. You will be fascinated – the centre is everywhere, the circumference nowhere.’

‘Oh, shut up.’

To her embarrassed surprise, he looked around and then put his hand on his crotch, and said, ‘What about this grave mound? And where is the supplicant who is to sit upon it?’

‘You’re being coarse.’ He took his hand away. She coldly examined his deformed face, noting the scarring, the indentations made by shrapnel or whatever happened when he was blown up. For the first time, she saw the knotted tissue of his scars, the topography of his ugliness.

His grim, mesmerising voice went on and on. ‘The Griffins – ah, how curious is their name – I see two stony creatures with wings looking down from the corners of buildings. They believed all human thought and actions could be vitalised by the manipulation of what, at first glance, is the mundane – avenues, streets and lanes and circles and so on – but which they saw as containing the forces of higher nature. As well, they believed in the power of angle, length, height and number, when employed in symbolic arrangement.’

She half-listened to this. She could follow the sense of what he was saying.

‘Ancient man started civilisation with known physical facts – the tree, the mountain, the cave. And then ancient man began to use these ordinary known facts to explain the unknown. Created an unknown order of the cosmos. Thus, “known facts”, such as the tree, were transformed by ancient man into the “imagined” – a tree was transformed into the “tree of life”, a fact that had no validity but in the imagination of the human. These imagined facts of the “tree of life” and the “tree of wisdom”, in turn, provided the foundation for complete cosmological schemes. Explanations of being.’

While maintaining her resistance to him, Edith found this mildly interesting.

Scraper said that he was for natural cities, which just grew.

‘That’s fanciful nonsense,’ Edith said. ‘I hear it all the time – about human planning being an abomination before the lord. Silly talk about the higgledy-piggledy European cities and villages. They idealise the filthy and smoggy industrial cities of England. It’s really a secret theological attitude – that it’s better for some “invisible hand” to put everything together for us. What’s wrong with humans sitting down and thinking through how to build a city? Anyhow, even in the higgledy-piggledy village, people had to decide how close to build to each other; where to make a street and how wide it should be; where to put the church; how to dispose of sewage; how to avoid blocking each other’s sunlight.’

She didn’t know why she bothered arguing with his crazy mind, but she wondered if in all this verbiage there was evidence that there was some plot. The world was full of plotting men. She was surrounded by plots. As ever. The way the house had been given to them. A plot.
Ah, the house
.

She looked at Scraper, now barely listening to the burblings from his twisted mouth. Was he, too, a plot?

He said, ‘We forget that roads, however ordinary, link places of great activity, of buying and selling, inventing and making and studying. The road has no energy. It is a pipe, as is the street. Only the place where the road
goes
has energy. And energy will flow to the more powerful of these forkings and interchanges – the cities, these vertexes, the market place, the forum. Much of what I say is outlined in issues of the
Archaeologica
and the books up in my room. Come on, Edi. Once you were among the brightest – the relentless sceptic.’

It was good to be reminded that, when young, she had been valiant in some way and considered one of the intelligent elite. She had never been sure how she had been viewed by her classmates.

She continued to study him. It was not only his importunate nature, it was his intense, self-serving mind, which combined with his mutilated ugliness to radiate – what? War. He radiated war and vengefulness.

How she allowed herself to go to his room was inexplicable. When she found herself there in his worn hotel room, staring at the brown linoleum floor, the weak, bare, electric light, the dull canvas blind pulled down on the single window, she felt she had been drugged. The room, which was littered with charts, maps and books wide open, was like being inside Scraper’s demented mind.

She knew that the Department of Interior actually owned the Kurrajong. What a strange beast the Department was, in all its sprawling rooms and activities. The very activities of life went on its rooms, including this room, this drab room of demented ideas.

He was pouring into a water glass yet another Scotch – she did not see what label – from a bottle he had in the room. He scrabbled among his maps and diagrams, now a hand on her back, now touching her shoulder, now creeping around to touch her breasts, which she pushed away, his crippled hands always wandering to her body like some large flying insect.

‘I will go straight out the door if you keep on with this touching.’

He sat her on the worn sofa and sat beside her, spreading out other maps of Canberra and diagrams over their knees. A map of Stonehenge. Circles, triangles, intersecting lines. His voice droned on and on. She held her glass out for another Scotch, alarmed that she had already drunk the first. Trying to kill the incessant irritation of all this. Anaesthetising herself. He struggled up and poured another Scotch.

‘The omphalos or centre – phallus – of the universe has been recreated by the Griffins. They have made Capital Hill the phallus of the Australian universe. Radiating out are the minor capitals – those avenues named after the states. There is probably a solar year line in there somewhere if you measured the angles.’ He again repeated the sex words, saying ‘phallus, vulva’, watching her like a naughty boy.

He said that the temples, which would eventually serve the capital omphalos, were the library – temple of knowledge; the high court – temple of justice; the temple of science; the temple of art. All these temples would surround the temple of law-making – the parliament. The museum of the nation would house the sacred relics of the national experience. ‘The war memorial is already there, housing plunder from our overseas conquests and the metaphorical bones of our dead warriors with its Processional Way.’

He kept hitting the city plan with his crippled hand.

‘They think that their plan contains within it a higher stage of human spiritual development, which will suppress the maladies of the modern civilisation.’

She probably thought the same.

He giggled. ‘The good thing about the plan is that the religious churches are pushed out of the sanctified triangle and will be replaced by the secular temples.’

While one of his crippled hands worried her torso near her breasts, the other pointed out the placement of the churches. ‘Ah, but see the closest temple to the sacrosanct capital triangle?’ He jabbed at the plan. ‘See what it is?’

‘It seems that it’s the Masonic temple,’ she said, reluctantly, quietly surprised.

He was gleeful at this evidence. ‘See, see, the Church of England’s cathedral site is much further away. See!’

His hand was back on her leg under the maps.

She pushed it away, but at the same time she had become interested in all this siting; how siting of buildings – planning – invited godlike play.

He went on in his cracked drone, ‘They have replaced the word “sacred” with secular words. Diana’s sacred grove is the botanic gardens – but, as with Diana’s grove, it should be mirrored in the calms and deep of the Lago de Nemi. If the lakes are made here in Canberra that would be the echo. We have a fortified entrance with the military encampment on the east of the city – very Roman. But where, we may ask, is the sacrificial site?’

Although he seemed very absorbed by all the plans and diagrams, she suspected that he had, perhaps, lost his mind. And still his hands kept straying onto her breasts and her legs, as if independent of his mind and mouth.

In the middle of all this he blurted out, ‘Even the street- walkers will not take me. I frighten them.’ She heard it as if it came from another room. It was not self-pity. It was perhaps used for persuasion. It could have been basic frustration.

Again, as if drugged, she realised, passively, that he was undoing her blouse, exposing her slip straps and the top of her brassiere. His hungry, misshapen hands were playing with her nipples through the silk of the slip and brassiere, which, contrary to her state of mind and wishes, had become erect and responsive. Her lingerie was exposed and she had done nothing to stop it happening.

She was caught in the torpor of the strange words that had tumbled from him, and the diagrams and the dimness of the room, and the Scotch. She was aware that he had unbuttoned himself and had his erect penis in his bony hand. He was stimulating himself, bringing himself to ejaculation.

She wanted to, but did not stop him playing with her breasts as he milked his penis. She felt herself becoming wet and was annoyed with her body for responding in any way to what was happening. That her body was behaving in this lewd way confused her.

He kept asking her to ‘sit on the phallus, my grave mound’, which she ignored, although again, with a cold horror, she did feel drawn to doing just that. But didn’t.

Thankfully, his climax came very quickly. He grunted, eyes closed. She hoped that none of his semen had reached her. She struggled up from her leaden collapse there on the sofa, to go to the handbasin in the room and wash her hands, even though she had not had any contact with him or his body.

Oh God. Damn, damn, damn.

Eyes closed, his hand still on his penis, in a sated voice he said, ‘Vulva. Phallus.’

She did not speak to him but buttoned the top of her dress, gathered her things and left the room in a silent rage at herself for having allowed all this to happen. Again. As it had happened those years back. Or something like it.

On the stairs, she was dizzy from having drunk too much Scotch too quickly. Why had she drunk so much Scotch so quickly?

She asked the receptionist to call a taxicab, and as she stood there in the lobby, she kept looking up the stairs anxiously to see if he was coming down to further harass and enmesh her. She felt as a whore might feel, except that a whore would have simply done her work, been paid and put it all out of her head. What she had done was not her work and she had not been paid. She felt no virtue, no sense of it being an act of kindness to a damaged man. She might have felt that way back when it had happened the first time, but not this time. This time, there was not a shred of virtue in the act.

She was deeply relieved that she wasn’t back with Dr Vittoz and that she would not have to tell him; relieved that there was no one in the world who would ever know or whom she was required to tell. Not even dear Ambrose.

No one need ever know about this. What it revealed about her, she was unsure. Certainly, an enfeebled will, a salacious compliance.

The bushy sunset of the evening was falling on Canberra and on her evening, which was in ruins. Her mind was addled with words such as omphalos, vesica, orifice, vulva, phallus.

But then, in the taxicab, a realisation came to her. The sexual thing didn’t matter a damn.
Did not matter a damn
. The distress, the vague recriminations, which were circling her, melted away. If this was the attitude of the whore, so be it. She turned and looked at the bushy sunset of the evening falling on Canberra, and, for the first time since being in Canberra, savoured it.

What had happened simply did not matter.

She was a woman of some maturity now, she was not a puritan, and the sex thing with Scraper
just didn’t matter
. To think otherwise about her so-called pride would surely be a falling into the Abyss of Self-Conceit.

It did not matter a damn.

And nor did any of Scraper’s rambling theories. All architecture and planning contained symbolism and could have stories laid onto it. She would not be telling anyone about the geomantic theories, though, without a doubt, she had been into the room of a geomancer.

She pondered the power of physical ugliness, which was said to have been used so well by Mirabeau in the French revolution. Perhaps Churchill was also ugly.