The Point (42 page)
Jerome finds her, finally, under a pile of debris, inside a little narrow place where iron struts have fallen into a tangled nest. She is not burnt, but she is not conscious, and who can tell how crushed she is.
You’re not supposed to move people, says Clovis, but I have to get her out. She’s not safe.
Yes, says Jerome, and they pull at rubble, the heat of the flames searing their faces, until they can reach her. A shard of metal has pierced her jumper and buried itself in the ground, they can’t free her. Clovis gets out his folding knife and its sharp blade slits through the fabric. Her skin has been gashed but at least her flesh is not pinned down by the shard. Clovis picks up Gwyneth and walks across the grass with her. His feet stagger a bit. The slight body is inert in his arms. He looks at her face, so peaceful, the beautiful domed eyelids serene, and then raises his eyes to the heavens. There is something terribly familiar about himself standing here holding the lifeless body of a dear child, as though all his life he has had this image of himself in his mind, and has been waiting for it to come about.
Police, fire and ambulance arrive. The firemen first. They see a bearded wild figure holding a bundled girl in his arms, and another man staring at a twisted shape of metal, burning. While vast clouds of smoke billow up into the dark sky. In a landscape littered with flung objects, shards and pots and fragments and arcs of metal, small domestic objects and great mysterious ruins.
Shit, says the fireman. Anybody inside?
Yes, says Jerome.
I was all right after the explosion of the restaurant. Of course I wasn’t, the fact that I could even think I was a sign that I wasn’t. There was a little bit of me that still functioned, that talked, and went about, ate a bit, even laughed, but most of me was an inert mass, not heavy, not exactly a weight to drag around, more like a ghost, a vapour, encumbering but inert. This was shock, evidently, and would not last. And indeed when that vaporous mass became flesh and blood again, it knew how to suffer. But for a while this small busy functioning part of me, though it felt breathless and heavy-hearted and as though it lived on a fragile edge that might crumble at any moment, did seem quite normal in its functioning. The diminished me seemed all there ought to be.
Clovis went with Gwyneth in the ambulance. I told the police what had happened as far as I had seen it. The firemen had people pecking over the debris, ascertaining the seat of the fire, the cause of the explosion, using if not necessarily believing my account.
I went to see Gwyneth in the hospital. She was lying in a bed behind curtains, asleep, her face bluer and more bruised in colour even than usual. Clovis was there, with quite a spruce air. He looked different, not in his dress, that was familiar, jeans, tee-shirt, jumper, trainers. He’d always appeared quite clean to me. Then I realised, he was wearing glasses. I have seen as far as I could with my naked eyes, he said. It is time to look sharply at things again.
He looked at Gwyneth, his smile so serene it was almost foolish. She’s okay, he said. Concussion, quite severe, and a broken arm, ribs cracked and all sorts of bruises and lacerations, but she’s all right.
As though her body is a shell that is battered and broken, but the essential life inside unharmed.
A doctor came noisily in, as they do, with a nurse. Gwyneth woke up. Clovis and I offered to go, but she wanted us to stay. Clovis had told them he was her father, he said I did not want any nonsense of them sending me away because I was not related. The doctor wanted us to leave, I could see, but Gwyneth would not let us, she held our hands in her cold bony fingers, and we stayed.
Did you know, said the doctor, were you aware, that you are pregnant?
Pregnant! Gwyneth’s eyes opened wide, and sparkled, her cheeks flushed.
This is an annunciation, I thought. My eyes filled with tears.
Pregnant. Gwyneth could hardly breathe the word. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anybody so full of joy. But how can I be? she murmured. I haven’t had any periods for months and months.
No periods doesn’t mean not fertile. That is a mistake many women make. Especially when they are on methadone. He shook his head sombrely. Never assume no periods means you won’t get pregnant. But you seem pleased, said the doctor, giving a little crooked smile as he left.
Gwyneth still looked dazzled. Clovis on the other hand appeared doubtful. I did not at that time know the story of the rape. When he told me, later, as we were leaving the hospital, I understood his caution. You do wonder about the genes, I said. But I suppose they are healthy, well-fed, no diseases. Just cruel hearts. And maybe Gwyneth’s loving one will make up for it.
Still, said Clovis, six fathers to choose from, it’s not good.
A baby, said Gwyneth, now. I am going to call him Clovis, she said.
An excellent name, said Clovis. He blushed. I have to say, it isn’t mine.
What do you mean?
I’m really called Gordon. I thought, new life, new name.
Gwyneth burst out laughing. I’m not Gwyneth, she said.
No! said Clovis, all mock shock.
Did you guess?
A bit, he said. The way you shied like a nervous pony every time anybody asked about it.
I’m really Sharneea. She pronounced the ‘ee’ with exaggerated emphasis.
Ah.
But you’re Clovis, I said, and Gwyneth agreed, and so are you Gwyneth, and let’s have no doubt.
And the baby will be called Clovis, and I shall be godfather.
What if he’s a girl, I asked.
They were silent. What about … Flora?
Excellent idea, I said calmly.
Elinor came in to visit, her eyes running with tears whenever she thought of Flora, and said she was thrilled about the baby, though privately she wondered how on earth Gwyneth would cope. A nurse came in to talk about methadone.
Do you know, said Elinor, that methadone was developed by the Nazis in the 1930s, as a synthetic substitute for opium derivatives, and the basic substance was named adolphine, after Adolf Hitler? Isn’t that amazing? That’s where the
adone
comes from. She beamed at us all. Elinor with a new word was like a vain little girl in a new dress, turning and pirouetting and shaking it out.
I think you’ll find that’s a fallacy, said the nurse. A nice story made up after the event. It’s called dolphine, really, from
dolour
, pain, and
fin
, putting an end to it.
Really? said Elinor. Really? Is that true? Oh my god. We’ve got Hitler in the dictionary.
Maybe you can put
apoc
. after it, I said, rather cruelly, I admit.
What’s that, asked Gwyneth.
Apocryphal. Nice story, probably not true.
Elinor was upset, and had to go. Of course the nurse might be wrong, she said, but I have to check.
I kept in touch pretty solidly with Clovis, or rather, he kept in touch with me. We both needed support in our drastically changed circumstances. He watched anxiously over my loss of Flora. We both found comfort in visiting Gwyneth. Joe was also a regular visitor. Clovis told me he was so very proud of her, and the idea of the baby. He would look after them, he said, they will be safe with me. Clovis telling me this said, I do not think he will be a man to shake a baby until its brain comes lose and it dies. Or hit it when it cries to make it be quiet. Or throw it across the room because it is disturbing his drinking. You can never be sure, of course. But he seems to be kind, and to love her.
Yes, I said, Flora thought Joe was a good boy.
So did Martin and Kate. They offered him a job in the restaurant they were going to set up. They hadn’t planned to do it quite yet, but, well, fate seemed to have taken a hand.
Indeed.
What are you going to call the restaurant, asked Clovis.
We thought of Kate and Martin. Martin made that rocking gesture with the flat of his hand that indicates doubt. Kate Martin, or Kate Martin’s. More hand-rocking. We wondered about The Lantern. A nice image to put on things.
If they rebuild The Point, I asked, for there was talk about this, the small gem of original Marion Mahony Griffin should not be lost, should be recreated, replicated, so the newspapers said, ending their account of the tragedy with calls for undoing it, If they should rebuild The Point, would you be interested in taking it on?
Out of our league, said Kate. A modest shopfront in a not-too–distant suburb, if we’re lucky.
Bruno was interested in going in with them. But he’s really an actor, said Martin, and I’m not sure we can afford that. One of the apprentices will come, though.
Can I be a waitress, asked Gwyneth.
She had a lot of visitors. It was as though people who’d had associations with The Point saw her as in some way a farewell to it, as if her after all moderately miraculous survival of its destruction made her somehow its last surviving emblem. Laurel came, to say that she was going away. She was selling her house in Canberra, now there was neither job nor child to keep her here. She was going to live in Wagga, she’d get a nice place there with the money from the Canberra one, and go to university. I am going to start a new life, she said. What studying, I asked, and she blushed and said, Well, viticulture.
New lives. New lives. As I am living a new life. But not better, worse. Clovis and Gwyneth. Gordon and Sharneea. Maybe I should change my name. But I am Jerome, he is me. I can’t escape him, and I don’t want to. I am still writing myself down. I don’t want to think of finishing, and how I shall be bereft.
I think I said I was ruined. I am an old man, suddenly become. I was still in my fifties, young and energetic, the lover of Flora, desiring a child and me in health and vigour to bring him up. Now I am into my sixties and old and tired and worn and forgetful. Ruined.
This is how it happened.
There were ways in which I quite hoped that Oscar was my hacker for then that criminal interference in my business would certainly stop. At the same time I wanted it not to be him, that the bright beautiful boy conjured up by his friends at his funeral was the true image after all. I did find my hacker, but not before I was raided by the police. They were looking for pornography, child pornography. And they found it, thousands of images. On my computers. They obliged me to look at a bit of it. It made me sick. Those pictures are with me still. They taint my mind. They occur in moments of weakness and despair, they taint me and taunt me. I had not believed that such … such … horrors, perversities, such deformations of the beauty of desire … could exist. In insomniac hours they play themselves before me, and grotesquely they transmigrate into my nightmares. I wish I could deny them, forget them, but whatever I forget it is not they.
Ah, Leonie, sweet-scented natural cat. Sit on my pages and let me bury my face in your fur. You purr like an engine.
For she purrs
with thankfulness when God tells her she is a good cat
. Maybe if we humans could purr we would be happier. Certainly if we could be so simply happy we would be happier.
I denied all knowledge of the pornography of course. Doesn’t everyone? Wouldn’t you? The police refused to believe my denials. Doesn’t everyone, wouldn’t you?
But I did find my hacker. And my pornographer. Clement. I was right when I thought that my virus protection was good. I could be broken into because it was an inside job. How ironical that I had set its perpetrator to solve the crime.
I see how; I don’t quite understand why. It went back to Clay Brent wanting me to work for him, and to the sibling competitiveness of Clement and George. George was involved in Brent’s child sex and pornography rackets, for the money of course, though I think his tastes lay there. There was certainly a great deal of money to be had. Clement was jealous of that. He didn’t want his brother becoming vastly richer than him, and he also wanted to prove that he was equally skilled in the manipulation of their natural territory the computer. George there’s no doubt was excessively clever – as well as much more educated. His was the erudition of the Faustus games. Of St Jerome and the blood of the pelican. That thesis whose name I can’t remember, that was how he knew such arcane matters. He played Clement as a fly fisherman does a trout, skimming the water with his jewelled glittering morsel, tantalising, seducing, until finally Clement rose to the temptation. All the cities of the world before him, and his brother taunting.
To do Clement credit, I don’t think he meant to betray me, at the beginning. He began working for Brent through George. Brent set up sequences of those bizarre pornography networks that trap people into hitting on them. Innocent web surfers looking up, say, children and behavioural psychology, or bedtime stories for five–year-olds, or whatever innocuous subject you like, suddenly find themselves railroaded into child pornography and the harder they try to get out the deeper they are drawn into its labyrinthine passages. The back key is disabled, they’re trapped. They get quite hysterical as every move they make brings up yet more filthy images. The porno site of course doesn’t register their unwillingness, only that there are a great many hits, so it can be sold off for a lot of money. So it goes.