The Point (24 page)
Elinor had been telling me about reading
La Nausée
. Clearly it puzzled her a little, at the same time as it fascinated her. The hero decides he has had no adventures. Things – what he calls
histoires
, apparently – have happened to him, events, incidents. But not adventures.
She lent me the book, she bought it, in English, after reading it in French when she was in Séverac. In that happy winter of grim events. Oh yes, they were grim, but I was happy. I’ve been thinking about this notion of no adventures. What Sartre – or his character – is actually saying is that for the most banal event to become an adventure it must be recounted – recount, you see, to tell again, to ascertain the value a second time. To give currency once more. We live surrounded by stories. This man in
La Nausée
says he wants to live his life as if he were relating it, but that you have to choose: to live, or to recount.
It’s to do with time, with somehow catching it. I have to think, as I relate my adventures, for adventures they were and I do not believe that is in my reshaping of them, for I want my narrative to be transparent, to note down events as they were, and I have to think myself back in that time, and sometimes it is an effort of the imagination that comes near to eluding me, for this person who sits in this room with its occasional bars of dusty sunlight, his cat perching on the paper batting the pen, this person is no longer the Jerome of the adventures of that winter, so perhaps it is right, the choice is made: he lived, I narrate. I sit in my study which is the only room I have with its view of the bare bagged wall and recount, relate, recall. Again, again, again.
It’s hot, hot. Our days are dogged by the dog star. Not human weather. Dog days. At night, says the weather report, the temperature drops to 17°. Possibly, but for what tiny moment? Between 5.18 and 5.19, perhaps, in the bleak white insomniac hours of the morning, the dying time, when our hold on life is at its slightest, and then after that second’s brief low the temperature begins its climb. Even early in the morning there is a slit of bushfire sun shining through the bent slat of the window blind; go into the room suddenly and its smouldering orange will make you think your house is burning. It’s apocalyptic.
No? Days of heat enervate, make you fanciful and gloomy. Make words like
apocalyptic
seem normal. Make that time of cold I am writing about seem like another place, another time, another life, that makes no sense in this one.
I have noticed that people who write about the past put in a lot of weather. Is it to try to set you back in that time, so you will have a sense of how it truly was, the blue frost on the grass, the indigo sky, the lake the colour of lead, the metallic heaviness of a cold and sunless winter? Though in truth the sun did shine quite often, and the sky would blaze bright blue, though the lake was at best pewter and not given to sparkling, only sometimes the grey water formed glittering sharp peaks under the baffling wind.
Or is this weather writing a postponement, a distraction of temperatures and elements, from the real business of the stories they find it so hard to tell?
Okay. Okay. Here it is. That night was cold – not decoration this, essential to the narrative – freezing cold, clear and frosty, exciting weather, inspiriting, still of course the winter, amazing how much can happen in a winter. I had dined at the restaurant but left, not too late. Flora was staying on, and would come to my house later. I wanted to do some work. Flora was so very clear about what she was doing, whereas for me it was grand and nebulous – hazy, as a cloud of stars is hazy. I had been thinking this out over my dinner, not bothering to hear the conversations in my whispering gallery. I had formulated the thought that Flora’s work is about doing, she wishes to achieve a perfect thing. She quoted somebody to me once, to the effect that even in what it offers best, nature gives nothing absolute, and she told me that what she was about was the search for that absolute. That nature cannot manage. That’s where her culinary art, her endeavour, took her. It’s a matter of simplifying to the point of perfection. And simplifying by doing, over and over again, until that point is reached.
Whereas my desire was for knowing, and that is a matter of infinite complication. But that is what computers do well. Finding ways of dealing with infinitude and complication. Not repeating, but developing. I was getting there, I was sure of that. Sure, and rejoicing in that fact.
There are words for these things. Greek words; it is not new this.
Hubris
. The arrogance, the insolence, to think to do what only gods can. Tragedy was the outcome, then. In our time we did not pay attention to those words, and tragedy is not something one stars oneself in, tragedy is for others.
Well, I was going home. Had had my evening chat with Laurel, and asked as I did not always about Oscar. She was pleased with him, he was working hard, spent hours at his computer, his final essays a breeze, he said. Her smile when she said these things touched my heart, its brave but rather doubtful hope. That smile always made me remember Oscar’s, that Daedalean curve to his lips, which smiled for itself, not others. Laurel brought my overcoat, she did not actually button me into it, but I felt tucked up by her against the outside world. Warm in my own cocoon. I put on my gloves and wound round my scarf. I intended to walk quietly but briskly, pondering my dinner and the work I was going to do, enjoying the anticipation of the moment of sitting down at my terminal. I was just slipping away when Terry Feldman called to me. He’d been with a party, but now was on his own. He paused outside the door of The Point and lit a big cigar, I’d noticed he always had one ready as he left. He was wrapped in a vast camel-coloured overcoat, with a belt around his stomach. Are you walking, he said. Can I come with you?
Imagine my saying no. I wanted to. He took my arm and drew me down towards the lake. There’s something rather sinister about water at night, he said, don’t you find? I rather enjoy it.
I suppose it was being a lobbyist that made Terry a one-man conversation. I was resentful at losing my quiet walk, and not inclined to talk much, but Terry didn’t need me. He provided the words and the animation. Every now and then he would stop and take my arm, our rather sausagey arms in their layers of wool, and pull me to him, turn me round to face him, his body as well as his voice talking to me, and not seeming to notice that I hardly responded. The scent of his cigar hung in the cold still air. I quite like the smell of cigars as classy as Terry’s, the rich vegetable perfume of them. I expect he would have drunk quite a lot of wine, but he was not drunk, he was coherent and intelligent and warm. At moments he would stop and lean on the parapet. He was looking over the edge and discoursing on the nature of river water and blackness and I was a little behind him, bored and irritated, wanting to think my own thoughts. He was standing – continuous past, notice, he was standing … and here it comes. The thump of suddenly running feet, whoops, yells, a weapon flailing the air. I think it hit Terry flat across his back and he fell against the wall. There was a crunching sound, and I heard him give an urgent coughing gasp, as though all the air had been knocked from his body. Our attackers, I didn’t know how many, there seemed a mass of bodies, heaved him over the edge. I heard his heavy splash. A voice shouted, I thought it said, Swim on, chocolate soldier.
Then I was hit, and fell, and understood no more. The rest of the story is as told to me. So it is doubly recounted.
I woke up in hospital. The blow from the bat – that was the weapon, a baseball bat, the infamous baseball bat – had caught me against the neck. I’d somehow hunched my shoulder against it, and it had not cracked my skull as it ought to have done. But I lost consciousness, and the muggers had hauled me half over the parapet when they were interrupted. Stinking poofters was apparently what they were shouting. Overboard with all bum bandits.
Laurel came to see me in hospital and she it was who filled in the details. And so I suppose this is triply recounted, since of course she wasn’t there, it was reported to her. Who’d done it – allegedly, I suppose the newspapers would have said. A gang of kids. Poofter bashing a hobby of theirs. She knew a bit about them because one of them was the brother of a friend of her son.
Those kids, they hang about on the grass slope behind the restaurant, she said. One of them’s called Chad, his brother Hamish is a friend of Oscar’s. I used to think, how pleasant. Boys with a bat off to have a game. And it turns out to be a weapon. They’re the ones who bashed the willow sculpture – I’m certain, even if the police can’t prove it. I knew that Chad was a pretty nasty piece of work, but somehow, seeing them there on the grass, romping like children, I did believe they were playing a game, with rules …
Where I was lying in bed I could see over the treetops of the remnant of forest that surrounds this place. All greeny grey, more grey than green. I know people say eucalypts have a myriad subtle colours in them, if you have eyes to see, but that day I did not. I lay stiffly propped in the high bed and the landscape was grey, under a grey sky full of lumpy clouds like heaps of damp ash.
Beside me was my dinner, I hadn’t even lifted the lid to look at it. You should eat something, said Laurel. She’d brought me some tiny pastries made by Kate. Maybe later, I said. It’ll be cold, she said.
A woman came in, wearing a low-cut black dress and a white lace apron, pushing a trolley loaded with frilly cakes and tall glasses with jellies in unlikely colours and bowls of chalky custard. A dessert trolley. The kind that after one glance doesn’t even deceive the eye. No, no dessert. A glass of wine? Maybe.
The just desserts, I said to Laurel. That green, the jelly. It’s the colour of poison.
Try Kate’s, she said. Madeleines. They’re real. Laurel was looking at me anxiously.
What is it with those kids, I said. They’re monsters. Have the police caught them?
Yes. They were driving round in a VW, one of those convertibles, you know? With the roof down, far too many, piled in. The police stopped them in Manuka, lucky there was a lot of traffic so they didn’t have to chase them. Imagine, a high-speed chase in that, all those kids stuffed in. She shuddered. The police found a baseball bat shoved under a seat. A couple of them were already in trouble, they got caught stealing cylinders of nitrous oxide from a yard in Queanbeyan and were already down for a good few hours of community service. Presumably they were on something that night.
Laurel’s voice when she told me this was flat, precise, without emotion, getting all the details in. Colourless as the grey forest outside, and just as camouflaged. She kept gazing at me with her anxious eyes. I didn’t ask after Oscar. Not in that context.
That is my part of the story. Terry died.
It would have been quick, they said. The water is so cold at that time of the year you freeze to death within minutes. But you probably drown first. As you hit the cold water you gasp, you suck in your breath and with it a lungful of water, and drown. The water wasn’t deep, we were meant for ducking not drowning, was one defence. Terry had hit his head, probably after he was tumbled over the parapet. And the heavy wool coat, encumbering, he didn’t have a chance. They’d heaved me half over when they were interrupted. Earlier I wrote, tragedy is for others, the grand, the noble, the flawed, characters in a story, an
histoire
. Not for us. But Terry was one of us; tragedy came to him. I saw it in the faces of his wife and children at the funeral. She did not go lobbying with him, but there in the huge dry grief in her eyes, I could see how she loved him.
Tragedy. Clumsy fate. The blind scissor women.
Oh yes. Don’t think I haven’t paid attention to that. Terry died, I didn’t. No desert involved. Accident. Luck. If those creatures had succeeded in shoving me over the edge I doubt I’d have made my own way out again. Sometimes when people nearly die in a situation where it seems certain they would have, they see an act of grace. I just see blind stupid luck.
It was the interruption that saved me. Even that not by any means inevitable. A solitary man, shouting at them. They could have taken no notice. Could have set upon him and chucked him over too. Especially as he turned out to be some sort of tramp. A homeless person. Laurel had seen him around. I’d never registered him, though she said he was about the place a lot. I think that is perhaps a habit of mine. Not noticing things.
The cockatoos are squawking. Ludicrous idiotic unnaturally ugly sound. Not like the mournful death caw of the crow. I am filled with an infinite boredom as I write this. The horror of it, the terror of it. The dreary dreadful process. That it should be so mindless, that comprehension could not be an option.
I think this is the beginning of the changing of everything. But there’s a lot more to tell, and I am finding the chore wearisome. I am not sure that I can bear it.
The sunlight has gone. Leonie has disappeared.
For she is good
to think on, if a man would express himself neatly.
Christopher again. The courtyard is darkening in the late twilight of summer. The air is a hot breath through the window.