Quipu (17 page)

Looked into hiring a mimeo to run off my own quipu. $5 a week. They must be joking. Have to try to get Wagner to do it for me.

I decided to spend a month Improving Myself. Learning to touch-type. Take driving lessons. Start at a gym. I got as far as seeing the proprietor of the local gym, who swore he could cure my asthma in three months with a program of squats (sic), which consists of just that, hundreds of times, with increasingly monstrous weights hung across one’s spindly shoulders or deltoids.

Ha.

$30 for three months, in advance. Build the body beautiful as well. He’d start me off with a general program that thoroughly (and no doubt excruciatingly) exercises every muscle in the bod, eventually concentrating on those parts in greatest need. (A hugely muscular penis?) Two factors deter me. One is that the gym, though conveniently situated, lacks a sunlamp. How jejune to bulge pastily. The second is that the gentleman who gave me this good oil is fat as Falstaff, with well-watered beer pot, a man gasping under his own weight.

By the way, the crippling asthma I got in Sydney persisted for a couple of days after I got back, then vanished. It seems I am doomed to dwell forever in gray grimy Melbourne. Or keep off sex.

keep warm, & love to yr cohabitators

Joseph

1970: family life

Rozelle

2 May

My dear Joseph

Life hums. I clatter nappies.

Moratorium street theater is losing impetus. I’m pessimistic about the whole thing. Still, one must not think but act, my policy henceforth.

I saw Polanski’s
Cul de Sac
: sick humor, drawing out sadistic vibes from oneself and the others in the audience. I always feel disturbed after that type of film. My sister.

Antony is silent since I wrote denouncing him. I’m crabby. I suppose I’ll have to venture there in a week or so for a grand confrontation, to be thrown out bodily, no doubt, in a stream of abuse.

Everyone here at Cockroach Follies enjoyed your stay and welcomes your return anytime. Lanie was astounded by your frivolity, having taken you previously for a grim monster of High Intelligence. You’ve cracked that social barrier at any rate.

She’s discovering the chains of liberation. Took a boy from work to dinner and to bed. Nice. He asked her to live with him. Horrors! Make an honest fella out of him.

I am incredibly sane.

How are the local ladies? Make a move, my boy. I am investigating electric blankets—one body is not sufficient these chilly nights.

The grass grows without cease. The bathroom window is still broken. The living room floor is subsiding. The stove is in A-1 condition after springing a gas leak which nauseated us all for two days.

thinking & Dreaming Sometimes

Caroline

P.S. Suppose life is a man carrying flowers in his head.

1975: but a good kwee-poo is a smoke

::The great Ray Finlay broke his dogmatic silence only for the express purpose of doubting my word. My word. ::b. wagner::

Congratulations on your timing, Brian. Impeccable as usual. On the very night that the nation totters into constitutional crisis, with our non-elected demi-monarch booting out our elected leader and instating a wealthy grazier more to his liking, what is the editor of HOT AIR telling us? Urging us to the barricades? As it happens, no. We find him at his mimeo cranking out [a] Mike Murphy’s incoherent mumbles about the rapturous time he had at the Canberra Convocation worshiping Leon Kamin from afar (why didn’t you just go up and talk to him, Mike? It’s only Governors-General that bite without warning), followed even more boringly by [b] the editor’s own piece of tripe. If we wished to waste our few spare moments on the works of E. Nesbitt, Brian, we’d trot off to the nursery and read the originals, which contain less heavy-handed tributes to the jackoff material you presumably studied so closely as a pimply youth.

::I could just recommend that you take a flying jump up your own botty, Ray, but I am a man of classy reserve. Instead, I am resolved to pay you back in the coin you so gratuitously besmirch. We shall come back later to your interesting suggestion that the coup against the Labor Government failed to attract my attention, you shitface.

::As it happens, more than one dazed and fascinated subscriber to HOT AIR has insisted on elucidation. To be brief, they clamor to learn what became of my beautiful if ill-tempered lover Asquith Lancaster and my curious hatchling, the palaeomorph Kwee-poo. For all these faithful readers, I add this postscript to my tale—

::I surveyed the Kwee-poo from a safe distance. “So much for orthodox science,” I muttered, remembering with new respect that Scientologist who tried to join our number after having his IQ raised and his thetan cleared. This incendiary creature was like no beast whose bones graced the world’s museums. It strutted and crowed about my penthouse, thoroughly at home, emitting at irregular intervals fat little puffs of bluish flame.

::I confess that I was at a loss to know precisely what to do. I edged about the room making friendly noises and keeping one eye prudently cocked on the fire extinguisher. Eventually I blundered into the couch and collapsed heavily, brooding regretfully on Asquith’s abrupt departure. The Kwee-poo snuffled in amicable fashion about my suede-slippered feet. I cautiously drew my legs up under my chin. For a moment the Kwee-poo searched inquisitively before sitting on its haunches with its snout between its claws, watching me with bright-eyed interest.

::Naturally, I laughed. I smote my knee with delight, and laughed again.

::The Kwee-poo bounded back several feet, smouldering a small area of carpet, and began to cry.

::I was shocked. An unwonted and unwanted sense of solicitude for the small beast crept into my breast. I tried to stifle it. Why was the wretched animal howling, anyway? God knows. Well, why do babies cry? Because they are hungry, or because their nappies are wet. I looked carefully. This Kwee-poo had no nappy. Ergo, it was hungry.

::Tentatively, I stroked its horrid head. The unhappy howling did not abate. I stood up, fetched a Ming bowl from its stand. Into the venerable vessel (though perhaps no more venerable than this shelled creature) I emptied the contents of the newly opened decanter of scotch. I stepped back a discreet distance and adopted an attitude of scientific dispassion.

::The Kwee-poo ceased its sniveling and edged forward. A bright purple tongue slipped out and lapped. The entire snout disappeared into the whiskey. There was a violent guzzling. The whiskey disappeared into the snout.

:: “And such a young Kwee-poo,” I thought, disapproving on principle.

::The effect was delayed but worth waiting up for. Supine for several minutes, the creature abruptly bounded backwards into the air. There is not a great deal of airspace even in a luxurious penthouse. Wings snapped and caught. The animal soared, cleared the chandelier, sailed to ground in a nose skid that brought it grinding along the carpet to my feet. Blindly, it tucked in its wings and claws and went to sleep.

::The following morning I rose early and telephoned my butcher. He sent up ten pounds of excellent minced steak. It was the least I could do for a Kwee-poo with a hangover.

::Of course, Asquith maintained her grudge. She considered it obvious that the Kwee-poo disliked her and that it was her duty to reciprocate. To me, nothing was obvious but my continued enchantment with her beauty and her spirit.

::Two weeks later, suave in cobalt silk nightshirt, monogrammed in silver thread, I stretched on my couch and sipped the evening’s first ante-meridian nightcap. Asquith was outrageously attractive in a soufflé of a garment that revealed only her face and her mobile hands. She sat at a bedroom mirror brushing her hair. Rather brash jazz, of a kind I detested but suffered on Asquith’s account, tooted from concealed speakers and blended with the Samurai sword to lend the penthouse a neo-colonial air. The Kwee-poo purred at my feet, and I scratched its cold nose with a negligent toe.

::Humming softly to the music, Asquith came into the room and turned down the lights. She went to the windows and opened one wide. A cool breeze came up from the street and played around my bare feet. I joined Asquith at the window.

::Hundreds of feet below, the city was a scattered hoard of jewels. So ugly close to hand, the river cast cold light up between the dark geometry of office blocks and the more organic outlines of old Victorian buildings. I placed my arm gently around Asquith’s shoulders and we gazed on the world that was ours. We went softly to the couch in the darkness and Asquith slid downward, her lips soft but waking with hunger that—

:: “God Almighty Christ shit!” I had not heard her shrew voice before. “This bloody reptile!” She swung her delicately molded leg with public-school trained accuracy and agility at the Kwee-poo dozing curled on the couch.

::The beast hurtled into the air with an angry squawk. With a thunderous noise it wheeled, clawing at Asquith’s face. In two weeks it had grown substantially. Undaunted in her fury, Asquith raised a cushion and beat blindly at the Kwee-poo’s head. I tried to intervene, but she was propelled by pent-up hatred.

:: “Filthy—” she cried, “misshapen—,” swinging the cushion, “monstrous—,” collecting the Kwee-poo’s snout, “beastly b-b-beast.” She burst into self-pitying tears as the cushion came apart in her hands, spraying the room with kapok.

::I snapped the lights up and tried to pacify the Kwee-poo. It gave me a look combining misery and contempt and fled through the open window.

:: “Oh my God,” I cried. I leaned out the window. I couldn’t see a thing. Leaping back into the room, I flipped off the lights to the accompaniment of fresh gales of angry grief, and went to the window again. It took some seconds for my sight to adjust. I was horrified to find the Kwee-poo pointed head downward, departing vertically along the face of the building. Even as I watched it gave a thin derisory squawk and vanished into an open window.

::I turned back into the room, frantic. Asquith blundered toward me, make-up smeared over her face, seeking comfort and support. I was not in the mood. “Why did you have to do that?” I shouted. “Now the poor thing’s gone. It’s probably lost for good.”

::Tears forgotten, eyes wide and jaw slack, Asquith stood for a moment staring at me, her arms akimbo.

:: “Poor
thing
?” Her voice rose. “What about me? Don’t I have any feeling at all? Is that it? And you actually expect me to marry you?”

::She had a very good point. I went once more to the window and looked into the darkness. Far below, the Kwee-poo’s head protruded from a window. It was gazing upward with a reproachful, hopeful look. I gave a cry. Asquith ceased her denunciations for the moment.

:: “Thank God,” I said. “Asquith, I think it’s coming back.”

::She crossed the room with tremendous speed for someone burdened with a fire extinguisher. Before I understood what she was doing, she leaned out the window and held the device upside down, freeing its noxious foaming chemical retardants. Froth boiled into the blackness, falling like acid to blind the hapless Kwee-poo. I realized in that ghastly, fateful instant, an instant that lingered it seemed for an hour, an instant that clutched my heart with a frozen hand, that a choice lay before me, a decision of the most profound import: that I must choose between the most beautiful woman I had ever met, all my worldly possessions (for a Kwee-poo is a hungry, remorseless beast), my very peace of mind…and a single scaly horrible orphan monster.

::And you know what I did, Ray, for we all have made this choice one way or another.

::What I did, Ray, in my boring, E. Nesbitt fashion, what I did was lean back, take a firm balancing grip on the back of the couch, and with all my karate-trained strength boot Asquith Lancaster through the window.

::I watched for a moment as she plunged toward the ground. My Kwee-poo turned its head to follow her passage, then raised its eyes and climbed straight back up to the penthouse. I got down the Ming vase and opened the decanter and we settled in to our companionable drinking.

::And that’s how it was, Ray. Consider yourself warned.::b. wagner::

1975: tying the knot

Unsatisfied and tense, Marjory presses her hands to her breasts for comfort. His back to her, Brian lies on the alien sheets, curved into himself, naked in the air-conditioned warmth of the Raymond B. Cattell Hall of Residence. At this moment, across the courtyard and through the trees, her husband is moderating a panel before one or two hundred people in the A. D. Hope building’s Reading Room, principal venue for this astonishing event, this historic anomaly, the first international Point Two Six Convocation held in Australia: one of the few, in all truth, to leave its imperial American and British homelands. None of this gives her an abiding sense of security. Ray’s careful logical being is as subject to random interruption as anyone’s. If he trudges over here now, seeking a handkerchief or a celebrated quipu to cite, they will be in major explicit crisis with no notice.

Her body aches with the deception done upon it. You bastard, Brian, she thinks. You selfish pig.

It is not even as if she likes him particularly.

He rolls over and his wry pale eyes catch her gaze, and he grins apologetically and puts his arms around her, and she recalls with a visceral shock the words, the truthful unguarded words that he’d once quoted to her from the dean of Australian quipu writers. Will he remember them now? Will they express her own ambiguity to him, penetrate his barriers of buffoonery and bigotry and egotism?

“Why Do You Publish Quipus?” she quotes, straining her neck away from his nuzzling face.

He looks up at her, really looks at her for a single moment.

“Yes, I know Marj.”

Because I’m lonely.

Marjory shivers, darts her hands down and tweaks his balls, sits up quickly as he jumps in surprise and releases his own hold. She crosses to the tiny apartment’s shower (good thing Ray had first grab at a tutor’s unit, rather than one of the shared-facility student one-roomers), turns the jet on full, stands in hot steamy clouds under the sluicing spray. A highly effective ventilator removes the steam with dispatch, clearing moisture from the mirror.