The Solid Mandala (15 page)

The preliminaries to dying, to what in the end is the simplest act of all, were so endlessly complicated.

“Mrs Allwright used to say,” said Arthur, “when she did her block at me, when she couldn't find the things she'd put away, or had given somebody the wrong change, she used to say: ‘I sometimes wish you'd
die
, Arthur Brown. Then Mr Allwright would come to his senses and realize how we've been wasting our time.'”

Arthur would assume the voices of those who were addressing him. So that now on the unmade pavement on the Barranugli
Road the mother with kiddy in stroller turned round to wonder whatever the old nut could be going on about. One old nut, or two? It was a shame to allow them their freedom. Somebody else always payed the price.

“But it was Mr Allwright who died,” Arthur continued. “Lacing up his boots. Mrs Allwright took up Christian Science. She'd do anything not to wake up and find she was dead.”

“You don't wake up,” Waldo reminded.

He wouldn't listen. Only it was not possible not to listen.

“Eh? “asked Arthur.

Though of course he had heard. Arthur always did hear, even with traffic whizzing or lurching along the Barranugli Road.

“Wonder if Mrs Allwright died. That's the worst of it when people leave the district. Sometimes their relatives forget, or don't know how to put the notice in the column. Or perhaps Mrs Allwright
didn't
die. By rights, by
logic —
wouldn't you say? — Christian Scientists don't.”

“Death, thank God” — Waldo caught himself, “comes to everyone.”

Or almost everyone.

He wouldn't listen. He began to count, to name the passing cars: the Chev the Renault the Holden two more three Holdens the Morris Minor the Bentley — that was Mr Hardwick who'd done a deal with the Council over Anglesey Estate only it couldn't be proved. Nobody would have known that Waldo Brown, so unmechanical, could name the cars. Perhaps even Arthur hadn't found out. It was Waldo's secret vice.

Arthur who found out everything caused his brother to turn round, to test his face. Arthur, as Waldo dreaded, knew, and was smiling.

“What is it?”

“I waved at the Holden,” Arthur smiled, “and the lady waved back.”

Oh well. Arthur was not infallible. So Waldo Brown decided to indulge his other secret vice. If Arthur died. It was not impossible — that dead weight on the left hand. Waldo Brown dragged quicker, if not to effect, to think. He would do how was it he
would
blow everything
the first editions of Thomas Hardy the whole Everyman Library quite a curiosity nowadays Mother's spoons with crests on them the emerald ring the Hon Cousin Molly Thourault left in fact one big bonfire the land the developers were after if Anglesey Estate then why not Browns' place Terminus Road see an alderman no alderman was so dishonest you couldn't teach him a point or two approach a minister if necessary the Minister for Local Govt if only Mrs Musto were alive and say it is imperative imperative was the word that W. Brown of honourable service should end in a blaze of last years.

They were so dry Waldo had to lick his lips. He hoped he wouldn't give himself a heart. His oilskin sounded slithery with speed.

If it was immoral, then he was immoral. Had been, he supposed, for many years. Perhaps always. The million times he had buried Arthur. But only now, or recently, had he perfected his itinerary of islands. He would visit islands first, because they symbolized, if only symbolized, what he craved. Of course he knew about the other things too, the bars and Americans. He would know how to sit in bars and drink, what was it, Pernod Fils, and stick his hand up under the raffia skirt of some lovely lousy brownskinned poster-girl complete with ukulele. And get the pox, and not do anything about it, what was the point at his age, in spite of all the modern drugs.

The Chev the Holden the Citroen quite neat the Holden two six seventeen Holdens one Fiat-2500 flash tripe-hounds. The traffic he was certain was sending his temperature up.

Of course, in spite of his intellectual tastes and creative gift, it was the hotels he was craving for. Always had been. He had started long ago writing for the brochures to have them waiting Poste Restante G.P.O. Tore them up after reading and threw them out of the train window before reaching Barranugli. The women would be waiting in the foyers of the posh luxury hotels held down by plush buttons but waiting in their shingled hair their long cigarette-holders gently balanced. Clara Bow — or was it Marilyn Monroe? And Mrs Clare Booth Luce and Mary Macarthy, he wouldn't overlook the intellectuals. To make conversation with
the more established intellectual women. Though women, even Dulcie would suddenly tire him, not so much Mary Macarthy, who was more what you would call a Force. Of course though it was the beds he was really looking forward to, the fine linen, or perhaps sometimes silk with monograms, to feel his long limbs had never aged, and now at last, without Arthur, able to lead a celibate life. Spiritually celibate.

Waldo blushed, and worked his adam's apple. Down. Over. Something.

One thing, he decided, he would never do. He wouldn't touch a penny of Arthur's savings, out of delicacy, because he had willed Arthur dead.

“There,” he said, looking round.

“What?”

“That's the worst hill done with. So you can stop moaning now.”

“I'm not moaning. I've settled down to enjoy a healthful walk.”

So faint normally it could have been a refraction from the memory of Arthur's carrot hair, the bluish tinge in Arthur's skin appeared just that much deeper than when they started out, that morning, on a purpose. Abnormally blue.

No, he would not touch a penny of Arthur's wretched account. He would make it over to that skinny Jew boy Arthur Saporta, with brown flannel patches round his eyes. Whatever Arthur Saporta meant. Beyond the fact that he had his mother Dulcie Feinstein's eyes.

If Arthur Brown died.

But it finally seemed improbable, on that morning or ever, which meant the alternative. Waldo scuttled at the thought. He was still young enough not to believe in his own death. He kicked the nearest of the blue dogs — Scruffy it was — on deliberate purpose.

“You always hated Scruffy!” Arthur moaned. “Because he was mine.”

Waldo could not feel he owned anything — certainly not Runt his dog — perhaps still his box of manuscripts clippings letters of appreciation — perhaps still Arthur also — if Waldo Brown Terminus Road Sarsaparilla no flowers please ever since the accident he
had kept it legibly written out and easy to find if he were inadvertently inadvertently was the word to die.

Paper flowers on the other hand didn't. So he must make sure of his boxful of papers. Sometimes going through the manuscripts the clippings the letters of appreciation he would feel them still warm with the reason which had brought them into existence. The thoughts. Even if he had not produced what you might call a substantial body of work the fragments and notebooks were still alive with private thought. The minds of others appropriating paring hacking rubbing with a sandpaper of lies impairing invariably ossified what had been tenuously personal. Was he vain to have lost faith in public sculpture? Unlike some. Take Goethe, Goethe must have worn a track through the carpet leaping at his notebooks to perpetuate he thought a Great Thought. The vanity was that men believed their thought remained theirs once turned over to the public. All those goggle-eyed women reverent for their own reverence trailing past a sculpture of poetry and epigrams, and earnest young people
fingering
IMPROVING ON
because it is ordained that great works of art should be exposed, becoming what they were never intended for: done-by-the-public sculpture.

So Waldo raced the traffic up the Barranugli Road.

“Hey, steady on!” Arthur called bumpily. “What are you up to? What's the point?”

As Waldo raced the traffic towards Sarsaparilla, unfortunately some of it was going in the wrong direction.

But he would arrive, and after they had struggled with that gate, and pushed the grass aside with their chests, because by now in places you might have said they were living under grass, he would go as straight as possible in, and collect the box from on top of the wardrobe, that old David Jones dress box in which Mother had kept the little broken fan and some important blue dress, only in the earlier style, with a pattern of rust where the hooks and eyes had eaten in. The D.J. box was, or had been, the ideal receptacle for papers of a private nature. He had even printed
PRIVATE
on it, not that it ever helped much. But now he would make it actually his, all those warm thrilled and still thrilling words falling from
their creator's hands into the pit at the bottom of the orchard into ash smouldering brittly palpitating with private thoughts. Because fire is the only privacy the thoughts of great men can expect. Allow them to be turned into sculpture and you are lost.

The wind helped him, and to a certain extent the onward traffic. Arthur was against him of course, as was the opposite stream. But they did arrive at last, on the ramparts of Sarsaparilla, erected laboriously brick by brick, to withstand some hostile thing, by those who had not yet died: the infallible ones with professions and offspring. It was pathetic to think about them. Perhaps like Goethe he was vain, but if small minds could be so obsessed by illusions of permanence, how much less convincing was his own illusion of death?

So Waldo slowed or was slowed down. It is ridiculous, he panted, to think I may pop off, today, or tomorrow, why, I am good for another twenty years, taking reasonable care, keeping off salt, animal fats, potatoes, and white bread.

“What's up?” Arthur asked. “Don't tell me you're running out of energy?”

Because Waldo was standing. Still.

“No,” he said, so slow. “I was looking at that rose.”

He was too, on another level.

“A good specimen of a rose. I like a rose, a white rose,” Arthur said.

It was not its beauty, its whiteness, its perfection, which interested Waldo, it was the solidity of it. Only apparent, however. If he had come closer and alone, he might have torn the rose to show he was that much stronger. Roseflesh on occasions had made him shiver. How much less exposed to destruction was the form of youth, even with time and memory working against it.

Waldo liked that. It made him look rather sly. Now they would go home, and while Arthur was occupied with some bungling business of his own, he would take down the private box, he would take out the current notebook.
Always taking, taking renews, give too much and the recipient expects all
. He liked that, he would write it down. For his
PRIVATE
pleasure. And the bit about
form of youth, time and memory
. In that way he would continue living.
In the notebooks. In his secret mind. In spite of Arthur. And Goethe.

 

Youth is the only permanent state of mind. There was no stage in his life when he hadn't felt young — he insisted — except sometimes as a little boy. If growing old is to become increasingly aware, as a little boy his premature awareness irritated his elders to the point of slapping. So there are, in fact, no compartments, unless in the world of vegetables.

Today I am thirty, he had calculated, looking at himself in the glass of the deal dressing-table he shared with Arthur, his brushes and bottles to the right, Arthur's to the left, as he insisted. His face trembled down one side as he tried to accept the incredible. Sometimes he wondered whether anybody realised there was still the little boy inside him, beside his other self, looking out. His eyes, like his mother's, were blue, though his were watered down. It always gave him some satisfaction to acknowledge blue eyes in the street, especially those of women. He made them conspirators. Or members of a select club. Though naturally he would never have informed them. (Brown eyes he blackballed automatically. Ugh!)

It was a penetrating voyage into the glass of the dressing-table (deal for the boys). According to mood, he might take his pince-nez off, blurring the image, allowing his imagination to play amongst the hydrangeas, or alternately he would clip the lenses firmly on, and refuse himself any avenues of escape from that intellectual ruthlessness he knew himself to possess. (He had once described the geography of his face in seven foolscap pages.) The optician's formula made his eyes appear paler, his chin less pronounced, his moustache patchier under the brilliantine, but hadn't the whole botched mess — he was prepared to face it — helped give birth to that proven sensibility?

On his thirtieth birthday he smiled at himself in reflection, for the strangeness of it. Then he shuffled the expanding arm-bands up his sleeves, put on his workday coat, and went into the kitchen where she was getting his breakfast for him.

“It's odd to think I'm thirty,” he said, forestalling the probable question of how he felt about it.

He stood looking down at the pair of eggs, their ruffles edged with a brown frizz.

“I think, dear, you were born thirty,” she said.

In her cool voice. Allowing him her cool kiss. She, if anybody, should have known.

His mother was wearing the old blue dressing-gown with the safety-pin which failed to disguise the financial truth or her operation. Since Dad died in 1922 she had been dependent on him. (Arthur contributed something.)

Some people would have considered his
— their
mother, dowdy. He could only think of her as timeless, actually so, because she was not taken in by his thirtieth birthday. She, too, realized there were no compartments. Thirty or seventeen.

At seventeen — on his seventeenth birthday as it turned out — he had presented himself at Sydney Municipal Library, to take up the position he got thanks to Fairy Flour. So it had been hinted. Only the malicious could have ignored the true state of affairs: a spotty youth wheeling trollies of books between the stacks. Neither light nor air played much part in the sinecure his patroness had bought him. Sometimes the cages were jammed so full, his fellow-suffering and cracking ribs caused him to wonder how easily a person might contract consumption and retire early on a pension. He read one or two works on the subject of that disease. Shoving them back according to numbers he got to hate the physical presence of books. Never lost his respect for them, of course. But could have hurt any book shoving it back. Occasionally he shoved one so far away from its recorded cell he hoped it would never be found again. The thick porous pages of some of the old public books, ravelled at the edges into lint, clotted with snot, smeary with spittle and nicotine, smelled of old men in greasy raincoats, in hats which their foreheads melted, but which soon set stiff and cold if left standing.