The Solid Mandala (10 page)

Waldo, though he did not want to, could not help looking at his father, at the sweat shining on the yellow edge of his celluloid collar.

“There's a bit of advice, Waldo,” he was saying, “I'd like to give any boy. You can't be too careful of those lavatory seats. I mean, the public lavatories. You can develop, well, a technique of balance. And avoid a lot of trouble. That way.”

When he had sweated it out George Brown turned again to
Teach yourself Norwegian
. Waldo could recognize by then the shapes of the repeated phrases:
Hun hoppet i sjøen …
¹
Han merest det og reddet henne …
²
Jeg har span penger for a kiøpe en gave til min søster …
³
Because Dad had frightened, then embarrassed him, which was worse, he grew angry. He began to relate the solemn idiocy of the recited words to the unrelenting motion of the train. He would have liked to shout: A pox on old lavatory seats! Or worse — the scribbled words he had seen on walls. He sat looking sideways at his father.
Min
bloody
søster
! He sat there muttering: I fucked my auntie Friday night.

In the varnished box in which they were sitting George Brown shifted on the parched leather, while holding down the pages of the book the draught was agitating.
Hun hoppet i sjøen … Han merket det …
It looked as though the only way was to memorize.

While Waldo, it seemed, was all memory and brutal knowledge. Tell me, Dad, he was tempted to make a challenge of it — tell me something I don't
know
.

The raucous train gave to the unuttered words the cracked accents of insolence. The more scornfully Waldo rocked the more the obscene upholstery swelled, in contours of bulbous women, and opulent crutches of purple men. One serge gorilla, tufted with orange hair, passed his gold-and-ruby ring under a corsetted bum in Shadbolt Lane. No man is all that attractive, she said, that there isn't a copy or two of him about. The man called her his copy-cat, and both laughed to bust their guts, to split the narrow stairs up which they were feeling their way.

Night thoughts, struggling from under the cestrum, floated on the surface bloated and gloating. The cestrum was at its scentiest at night, filling, and swelling, and throbbing, and spilling, while all the time rooted at a distance in its bed. Its branches creaked, though, enough for Arthur to breathe your dreams.

Sitting in the train Waldo suddenly looked straight into his father's face. The train sniggered smuttily. Waldo might have leant back to continue enjoying the escape he had made, if his clothes tightening hadn't constrained him, together with the fear that freedom might be the equivalent of isolation. So that in the end he would have liked to touch his father's goodness, but could only be touched by it. His narrow body began not exactly to shiver, it was the train, running them over the outskirts of Barranugli, past the seeding docks and rusty tins, the tethered goats, and in their back yards, women whose pale skins still showed traces of night and mutton fat.

Dad was stuffing his book into his pocket — Dad alone must have kept the pocket editions going — and they were getting out at Barranugli. Amongst the other arrivals at the station Waldo usually saw to it that they drew apart gradually, to avoid what, for both of them, would have been the embarrassment of saying good-bye.

If George Brown threw away
Teach Yourself Norwegian
it was not because he no longer needed it. He could never rely on himself to sit in the train without a book. He began
Thus Spake Zarathustra
, and shortly after, went over to
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table
, which he had picked up, he was proud to tell, the one for ninepence, the other for sixpence, second-hand.

As far as Waldo was concerned the journey to Barranugli repeated itself for more than years. Towards the end, not by choice, he was growing his first moustache. The truth was: they wouldn't give him the money for a razor to shave it off.

“Arr, why?” he shouted at them angrily, in the house which had grown too small for him.

His father put on his gravest expression, and said in his most prudent voice: “Men who start shaving too early always regret it. Besides,” he said, “at your age most young fellows get a lot of enjoyment out of cultivating a moustache. Moustaches are in fashion, I would have thought.”

Waldo looked at his father. It was bad enough to be a twin without having to identify himself in other ways.

Mother, who was mending, had to try to smooth things over.

“You wouldn't want to turn into one of those blue men,” she said, “who are all shadow by five o'clock.”

“I'm not that colour,” Waldo said. “I'm not a dago.”

“That is not a word,” said Dad, “I ever want to hear in my house.”

And Mother's fingers started trembling. Later on, when she was ill, and fanciful, and old, Anne Brown, born a Quantrell, said to her sons absently: “It was for his principles, I suppose. And kindness. Poor George, he was too kind. It left him too often open to attack. And I, yes, I grew tough, I think. It often happens that the wives of kind men grow tough and stringy protecting them.”

For the present, a victim of their unconcern, Waldo could do nothing about himself. He could not afford a razor, so he cherished his resentment in unfrequented corners, his pulses raging, nursing his threadbare elbows. (His school things had to “do”.)

Arthur said: “Don't worry, Waldo. Lots of people like a moustache. Let me feel.”

He might have done it, if Waldo hadn't shouldered him off. The great lump. Arthur's fingers smelled of aniseed and honey.

Waldo shouted: “You stink!”

Nothing was said by anyone else because so much had been said already.

“I think Dulcie,” said Arthur, “will probably grow a moustache. I like Dulcie.”

“Who?” Waldo shouted worse.

“That girl.”

“You know nothing about
any
girl!”

Nor did Waldo. Nor did he want to. He hated almost everyone, but above all, his family. They knew too much and not enough about one another.

But they were proud of Waldo. While remaining weak at Maths, he carried off prizes for other subjects. He had
Idylls of the King
, and
Travels with a Donkey
, and Tacitus in 2 vols. He even read them. He was always reading books, but because Dad was the reader in the family he did most of it furtively.

Most of what he did he did secretly, as though making a secret of his acts gave them a special importance. It was only too bad that more people were not in the secret, for in the circumstances he could only appear important to himself. And Arthur. Arthur hardly commented when Waldo read beside a shielded lamp half the night, or in the dunny, or copied extracts into notebooks, but it was natural for Arthur to accept a twin brother's secret life. Perhaps Arthur even had a secret life of his own, but necessarily of such simplicity you did not stop to think about, let alone enter it.

On one occasion Arthur paused in some involved, though unimportant, activity as Waldo was sitting with a sheet of paper, his hand held to protect it, like a wall.

Arthur felt the need to ask: “What are you doing, Waldo?”

When he had considered long enough, Waldo answered: “I am writing.”

“What about?” Arthur asked.

“I don't know,” Waldo answered, truthfully.

But Arthur was never deterred by vagueness of any description, or absence of trust.

“I hope it will be good,” he said, and smiled.

To satisfy his curiosity, the expression implied, was less important than his brother's self-fulfilment.

Waldo's throat could have wobbled for some repeated hurt he had to suffer. If he had not been so importantly occupied he might have felt mortified as well. As it was, he accepted the wounds inflicted on him by circumstances — or his own nature. He accepted Arthur his twin brother, who was, as they put it, a shingle short.

So the lives of the brothers fused by consent at some points. Arthur's harsh blaze of hair would soften in certain lights, drenching his expression in that secrecy of innocence. Partly his white skin helped, though more than partly, his simplicity. It explained why Arthur would suddenly take leave of his face.

Whenever it happened Waldo could only allow himself to feel irritated as opposed to annoyed.

“Get along, then!” he used to say. “I've got to concentrate.”

As Arthur continued hanging round.

“All right” — he could be so reasonable — “I
am
rather clumsy, aren't I? I do barge around and knock things over. But sometimes those things are standing in my way.”

Waldo frowned, and stared at the paper. When Arthur went out of the room he wouldn't have any excuse left.

“I'll go, then,” Arthur promised sweetly. “I hope you think of something interesting.”

Other people continued to reduce Waldo's intentions and make them appear foolishly capricious, if not downright idiotic. They did not grasp the extent of his need to express some
thing
. Otherwise how could he truly say: I exist. The prospect of remaining a nonentity like the school teachers or his parents made him sweat behind the knees.

Perhaps it was through his, you could not say
wilfully
abnormal, behaviour that other people in the end got wind of his secret intentions. His mother, for instance. She herself would put on a kind of milky smile, and walk softly, as though he were sick or something. Then in his presence she began to make mention of “Waldo's writing”, but so discreetly that for a long time no caller dared infringe on her discretion.

Finally Mother foolishly said: “One day, Waldo, you must tell me about your Writing.”

It was too much.

If no comment was made by Dad, the reader in the family, who sat there in painful attitudes, pushing his bad leg in yet some other direction, re-reading
Religio Medici, Sesame and Lilies
, and then
Essays in the Study of Folk-Songs
by the Countess Martinengo-Cesaresco, which the other day he had picked up cheap — if Dad seemed unaware behind his eyebrows and his sucked moustache that anything unusual was going on, it was because their father, Waldo was suddenly convinced, had failed to be a writer.

To the end of his life Waldo cultivated his gift for distinguishing failures. With the exception of Johnny Haynes, about whom he couldn't make up his mind, he was particularly sensitive to those failures who had been dumped in the long grass at what was called Sarsaparilla. Sars-per-illa! Had a history in the early days, they told you. Then, apparently, history drew in her horns. There was Allwrights' store, and the post-office stuck in the side of Mrs Purves's house. There were the cow cockies and market gardeners. There were the homes of the aged, the eccentric, the labourers, the rich, though the last hardly counted, existing only spasmodically on kept lawns, amongst their shrubs, in varnished dogcarts, or, in Mrs Musto's case, behind the wind-screen of a motor car. It was really the grass that had control at Sarsaparilla, deep and steaming masses of it, lolling yellow and enervated by the end of summer. As for the roads, with the exception of the highway, they almost all petered out, first in dust, then in paddock, with dollops of brown cow manure — or grey spinners — and the brittle spires of seeded thistles.

When his thoughts grew too much for him, too blurred, or too entangled, his mind a choked labyrinth without a saving thread, Waldo Brown would stalk along the country roads, exchanging his own blurred world for that other, dusty, external, but no more actual one, in which he continued hoping to discover a distinct form, some object he hadn't noticed before, while Arthur kicking up the dust behind — it was impossible to escape Arthur unless Arthur himself chose to escape — conducted his monologue, if not
dialogue with dust or sun, peewee or green-sprouted cow-turd. Like injustice, the dust always recurred to daze, unless from a sudden mushroom of it, Mrs Musto's chariot unwound, honking by her orders to warn pedestrians of her coming.

Stubbens, her chauffeur, did not like honking.

“But if you've got one,” she used to insist.

Everything was geared to Mrs Musto's orders.

“You boys care for a lift?” she would call when she had pulled Stubbens up. “By ghost, isn't it hot, eh? Hot enough to burn the parson's nose!”

Because she was so rich — Fairy Flour — it was accepted that Mrs Musto should speak so authentically. Her chauffeur Stubbens never turned a hair.

When you had wrenched the door open — Stubbens didn't open doors for boys — and climbed pulling Arthur, somehow, up, it was coolly awful to sit beside Mrs Musto in her motor overwhelmed by her appurtenances: the green veil, which did not prevent her adding to her freckles, the too collapsible parasol, the alpaca cape, prayer-book, and smelling-salts, on longer journeys, it was said — though Waldo had never travelled far enough in Mrs Musto's company — cold plum pudding and a bottle of port-wine.

When they were seated Mrs Musto would give her usual command: “Wind 'er up, Stubbens” — and to the objects of her kindness, as Stubbens wound and wound: “Hold yer ribs, boys, or he'll crack a couple for yer!”

She loved perpetual motion, and clergymen, and presents — to give rather than receive, though one so rich as Mrs Musto naturally received a lot. She loved to eat rich food, surrounded by those who condescended to call her their friend, after which she would drop off in the middle of a sentence to revive burping in the middle of another. Music was her grandest passion, which did not prevent her snoring through it, but she could always be relied upon to applaud generously at the end. And sometimes she would organize tennis parties for those she referred to as the “youngsters”. Youngsters, Mrs Musto used to say, are my investment against old age.