Riders in the Chariot (72 page)

On and off he was bedevilled by that fear. He would go out into the streets. He bought food, and ate it, sometimes standing at a street corner, tearing at the carcase of one of the synthetic, delicatessen chickens, or picking distractedly at little grains of pink popcorn. While all the time men and women were lumbering past, pursuing their own, heavy lives.

Almost always he would leave his room when the light had gone. At night the streets of the model town were practically deserted, all its vices put away, only an emptiness remained, and a sputtering of neon. As he hurried along in his sandshoes, beneath the tubes of ectoplasm, the solitary blackfellow might have been escaping from some crime, the frenzy of which was still reflected in his eyeballs and the plate glass. It drove him past the courts of light, where the judges were about to take their places on the blazing furniture, and past the darkened caves, in which plastic fern lay wilting on grey marble slabs. So he would arrive at outer darkness, crunching the last few hundred yards along a strip of clinker, which could have been the residue of all those night thoughts that had ever tortured dark minds.

After such a night, and a delayed dawn, he got up to wrestle with the figure of the second woman, whose skeleton huddled, or curled, rather, at the foot of the tree. Once he might have attempted to portray a human desperation in the hands preparing to steady the feet of their dead Lord. But since he had ruffled the coat of darkness, his mind was shooting with little, illuminating sparks. Now he began to paint the madwoman of Xanadu, not as he had seen her in her covert of leaves beside the road, but as he knew her from their brief communion, when he had entered that brindled soul subtly and suddenly as light. So he painted her hands like the curled, hairy crooks of ferns. He painted the Second Mary curled, like a ring-tail possum, in a dreamtime womb of transparent skin, or at centre of a whorl of faintly perceptible wind. As he worked, his memory reenacted the trustful attitudes of many oblivious animals: drinking, scratching or biting at their own fur, abandoning themselves to grass and sun. But he painted the rather strange smile on the mouth of the fox-coloured woman from remembering a flower that had opened under his eyes with a rush, when he had not been expecting it. His vanity was flattered by his version of this Second Servant of their Lord. The risk of spoiling did not prevent him touching and touching, as he wrapped the bristled creature closer in the almost too skilful paint, or visual rendering of wind. There she was, harsh to the eye, but for all her snouted substance, illuminated by the light of instinct inside the transparent weft of whirling, procreative wind.

Dubbo added many other details to his painting, both for his own pleasure, and from the exigencies of composition. He painted flowers, a fierce regiment, the spears and swords of flowers, together with those cooler kinds which were good to lay against the burning skin. He painted the Godbold children, as he had sensed them, some upright with horror for the nightmare into which they had been introduced, others heaped, and dreaming of a different state. There were the workers, too, armed with their rights, together with doubts and oranges. There was the trampled blue of fallen jacaranda. There was the blue showing between the branches of the living tree, and on those same branches, a bird or two, of silent commentary.

The Christ, of course, was the tattered Jew from Sarsaparilla and Rosetree's factory. Who had, it was seen, experienced other lives, together with those diseases of body and mind to which men are subject. If Dubbo portrayed the Christ darker than convention would have approved, it was because he could not resist the impulse. Much was omitted, which, in its absence, conveyed. It could have been that the observer himself contributed the hieroglyphs of his own fears to the flat, almost skimped figure, with elliptical mouth, and divided canvas face, of the Jew-Christ.

Although the painter could not feel that he would ever add the last stroke, a moment came when he threw his brush into a corner of the room. He groped his way towards the bed, and got beneath the blanket as he was. There he remained, shut in a solid slab of sleep, except when he emerged for a little to walk along the river bank, beside the Reverend Timothy Calderon. But drew away from the rector, who continued mumbling of eels, and sins too slippery to hold. So that, in the end, the figures were waving at each other from a distance. They continued waving, to and back, separated, it seemed, by the great, transparent sinlessness of morning. Joyful parrots celebrated, and only that
Alfwheraryou
_ could not have borne their playful beaks, would have entered, and sat picking, inside his cage of ribs.

He woke then, with mixed fears and smiles. It was night, and he could not feel the grass, but worked his body deeper in the bed, to widen the hole if possible, for protection. Comfort did not come, and he lay there shivering and whinging, frightened to discover he had remained practically unchanged since boyhood. Only his visions had increased in size, and he had overcome a number of the technical problems connected with them.

The painting of his Deposition left Dubbo as flat as bore water. Water might have been trickling through his veins, if a brief haemorrhage experienced at this stage had not reminded him of the truth. He had very little desire for food, but continued to make himself eat, to be prepared for possible events. In the meantime, he would lie and suck his finger-joints. Or hold his elbows, tight. His strength was reduced by now, except when his imagination rose to meet some conjunction of light and colour in the window, in that always changing, but unfinished, abstraction of sky.

Then, on a yellow morning of returning summer, when the black lines between the floor-boards were pointing towards him, and the window-panes were temporarily unable to contain the blaze, he found himself again regretting that large drawing they had stolen from him while he was at Hannah's. Because he had grown physically incapable of hating, his capacity for wonder led him to embrace objects he had refused to contemplate until now. So he would examine the face of Humphrey Mortimer, for instance, with the same interest that he might have brought to bear on a flock of pastured maggots, or block of virgin lard. Everything, finally, was a source of wonder, not to say love. Most wonderful was the Jew's voice heard again above the sound of the cistern and the washroom tap: ... And I looked and behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire unfolding itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as the colour of amber, out of the midst of the fire....

The blackfellow rolled over on the bed, biting the back of his hand. The window was blinding him, with its four living creatures in the likeness of a man.

As he remembered the voice, so Dubbo was still able to see the drawing of "the Chariot-thing." He would have known how to draw it, detail by detail, inch by inch, for he never forgot those places where he had been. There was simply the question of physical strength. Whether he could still paint, he doubted.

All that night he was haunted by the wings of the Four Living Creatures. The tips of their wings stroked his eyelids. He would reach up and touch the feathers, to become acquainted with their texture. But he woke horribly from one sleep, in which he had found himself lying stretched under the skin of a dead man. There it had been, sagging slightly above the bed, to shelter, it would have seemed, only for the cold drip drip drip.

He lay awake through the false dawn. Then, at sunrise, he got up, and stood at the window, and some of that rekindled fire was distributed through his dead veins. His fingers were liberated, and he began to trace on the glass the lines, not of his lost drawing, but the actual vision as it was revealed.

About seven o'clock Dubbo made himself a pannikin of tea. He ate some stale bread, with butter that could have been rancid. But the food comforted him. He felt quite brisk, though brittle. And began at once to restate his conception of the Chariot. The drawing was perhaps too quickly done, but came away so easily, almost as a print, from his memory. There it was in front of him. He knew then that, whatever his condition, he would paint his picture of the Chariot as he had originally intended.

The next two days his movements took control of his body, although his mind hovered above, as it were--rather stern, beaky, ready to refuse collaboration in dishonesty. So the firmament was again created. First the foundations were laid in solid blue, very deep, on which he began to build the gold. The road ran obliquely, and cruel enough to deter any but sure-footed horses. The latter could have been rough brumbies, of a speckled grey, rather too coarse,
earthbound
_ might have been a legitimate comment, if their manes and tails had not streamed beyond possibility, and the skeins of cloud shed by their flanks appeared at any point to catch on the rocks of heavenly gold.

One curious fact emerged. From certain angles the canvas presented a reversal of the relationship between permanence and motion, as though the banks of a river were to begin to flow alongside its stationary waters. The effect pleased the painter, who had achieved more or less by accident what he had discovered years before while lying in the gutter. So he encouraged an illusion which was also a truth, and from which the timid might retreat simply by changing their position.

The days grew kind in which Dubbo painted his picture. They were of a fixed, yellow stillness. The creaking of cicadas was not so much a noise, as a thick, unbroken, yellow curtain, hung to protect his exposed senses. All other sound seemed to have been wound into a ball at the centre of the town, as he stood and transferred the effulgence of his spirit onto canvas, or, when overcome by weakness, sat on the edge of a scraping chair, leaning forward so as not to miss anything taking place in the world of his creation.

Where he cheated a little was over the form of the Chariot itself. Just as he had not dared completely realize the body of the Christ, here the Chariot was shyly offered. But its tentative nature became, if anything, its glory, causing it to blaze across the sky, or into the soul of the beholder.

The Four Living Creatures were a different proposition, of course. He could not shirk those. So, set to work painfully to carve their semblance out of the solid paint. One figure might have been done in marble, massive, white, inviolable. A second was conceived in wire, with a star inside the cage, and a crown of barbed wire. The wind was ruffling the harsh, fox-coloured coat of the third, flattening the pig's snout, while the human eye reflected all that was ever likely to happen. The fourth was constructed of bleeding twigs and spattered leaves, but the head could have been a whirling spectrum. As they sat facing one another in the chariot-sociable, the souls of his Four Living Creatures were illuminating their bodies, in various colours. Their hands, which he painted open, had surrendered their sufferings, but not yet received beatitude. So they were carried on, along the oblique trajectory, towards the top left corner. And the painter signed his name, in the bottom right, in neat red, as Mrs Pask had taught him: A. DUBBO With a line underneath.

It was again evening when he had finished. The light was pouring into his room, and might have blinded, if the will to see had continued in him. He sat down stiffly on the bed. The sharp pain poured in crimson tones into the limited space of room, and overflowed. It poured and overflowed his hands. These were gilded, he was forced to observe, with his own gold.

Mrs Noonan was a stranger in her own house, which had belonged, in fact, to her mother-in-law, which caused her to go softly in her rag hat, and coast along the walls in anticipation of strictures, smiling. She had no friends, but two acquaintances, a carrier and his wife, whom she could seldom bear to disturb. But drank a great deal of tea on her own. And loved her hens. And set store by the presence of a lodger, a decent sort of man, whom she did not see.

And was puzzled at last, on running a duster along the landing wainscot, to detect an unorthodox smell coming from under the door of the room that she let. It was so peculiar, not to say nasty, she did at last venture to call, "
Eh, mis-ter
_?"

And to knock once or twice.

To rattle the knob of the locked door, though diffidently, because she could never bring herself to consider the rented room any longer part of Mother's house, let alone her own.

"Mister! Mister!" She rattled, and smiled, cocking an ear. "Anything wrong? It is me--Mrs Noonan.

"It is Mrs Noonan," she repeated, but fainter.

Perhaps that was to reassure herself, but she was not really convinced by the sound of her own name, and went away wondering whether she dare disturb her acquaintances, the carrier and his wife. On deciding not, she put on a better hat, and some shoes, and went to a house several blocks away, where she had noticed from a brass plate that a doctor had set up.

The young doctor, who was reading a detective story, and scratching himself through his flies, was bored on being disturbed, but also relieved to be asked for advice, since an unpleasantness at the butcher's over credit.

"What sort of smell?" the doctor asked.

Mrs Noonan flickered her eyelids.

"I dunno, Doctor," she said, and smiled. "A sort of peculiar smell like."

She breathed more freely when he fetched his bag, and felt important as they walked along the street, not quite abreast, but near enough to signify that they were temporarily connected. It was still hot, and they trod with difficulty through the pavement of heavy yellow sunlight, which had assisted Dubbo in the painting of his picture.

"Had he been depressed?" the doctor asked.

"Ah, no," she answered. "Not that you could say. Quiet, though. He was always quiet."

"Sick?"

"Well." She hesitated. Then, when she had considered, she burst out in amazement, "Yes! Sick! I reckon that dark feller was real sick. And that is what it could be. He could of died!"

Her own voice abandoned her to a terrible loneliness in the middle of the street, because the doctor was above a human being. They went on, and she tried to think of her hens, now that that decent blackfellow was gone.