The Solid Mandala (41 page)

Mrs Poulter almost was. She had to stand the custard on the ground. She could feel her own cries stuck in lumps in her stiffened throat. And the other dog, Runt, crouching on the floor. Swallowing down. Runt swallowed and glared growled at Mrs Poulter out of his almost blind eyes.

All of them almost blind by now. Waldo Brown stiff with blindness. Mrs Poulter blind with loathing. She had known for days almost, and wouldn't admit, only there are some things you can smell — Waldo dead.

Or worse than dead.

His throat open on the gristly apple. Torn by the throat.

Then their Scruffy sitting on the bed, he hadn't even noticed her, lowered his head, pulling at that other part of Waldo Brown, she wouldn't have hardly dared look if it hadn't stopped being real, as Scruffy pulled, pulled at the old soft perished rubber.

Mrs Poulter trod on the edge of her custard dish. She could not scream. The sounds were knotted up inside her.

And when she turned, beginning to run, she wasn't so much moving, as moved along the brick path by moments, over the clumps of grass, her legs in half-frozen motion. Running. Tumbling inside her soaking clothes.

At the gate she did cry out: “
Urrrrhhhh!
” only there was nobody to hear.

Mrs Poulter continued running. She did not believe she had seen what she had seen, but again, believed. She would not believe. That is, she believed in everything now under the bruised and bursting sky. Not to say
heaven
.

For the clouds were building up, from beyond and over Sarsaparilla, for the armageddon of which Mrs Poulter had read and heard. She knew now. All the films, all the telly, all the black-and-white of the papers was turning real, as the great clouds, the great tanks, ground up groaning over Sarsaparilla. To lock together. Men burning in their steel prisons. Mrs Poulter went zigzagging over the ruts, along the road, along the banks, over the tussocks, to save those who need not die. But age had made her top-heavy. Hope was faint. She knew now. The flat faces of all those Chinese guerillas or Indonesians, it was the same thing, dragged out across the dreadful screen. All those Jews in ovens, that was long ago, but still burning, lying in heaps. Lone women bashed up in Mosman, Maroubra, Randwick, places you went only in your sleep. Little girls held to the ground. The bleeding wombs of almost all women.

Mrs Poulter lurched, but ran, her watermelon cardigan flickering, up Terminus Road, through the rainy green.

And He released His hands from the nails. And fell down, in a thwack of canvas, a cloud of dust.

It was not Arthur. Arthur would never ever of done that. He was not God. Arthur was a man.

Just this side of Duns' Mrs Poulter's heel came off.

So that she went racketting round the back, lurching worse, smashing the fuchsias, crushing a lobelia border, grabbing the back door-knob, which, although highly polished, was not all that secure.

Mrs Poulter stood rattling the knob. The door was locked, on account of it was bowling day, and Mrs Dun, she knew, was nervous on her own.

“Mrs Dun!” Mrs Poulter called in her highest voice.

She would never of dared call Mrs Dun Edna. What she would tell, she couldn't think. She was still living it all.

Then Mrs Dun came through the house to the glassed-in back veranda. She had not had time to put her teeth in. She looked to be suffering from neuralgia, though that, with Mrs Dun, was not the case. It was her normal look. With something added by the rattling of the knob.

Mrs Poulter, who longed to share her terror with someone, saw that her friend Mrs Dun was already far too terrified.

“What,” said Mrs Dun, “what is it?”

Her lips so pale behind the glass.

“I got to come in, Mrs Dun,” Mrs Poulter shouted, “then I'll tell.”

“No, you don't!” Mrs Dun croaked back. “I said: What is it?”

The flaps of her lips flew in on her empty gums.

Mrs Poulter realized she would never succeed in reaching Mrs Dun, but continued, for continuity's sake, rattling the old brass door-knob. Even if she broke it off. As Mrs Dun had broken their always fragile relationship.

“Mr Brown — Mr Waldo Brown is dead,” Mrs Poulter said in spite of all. “I can't tell exactly what 'as 'appened. Who done it. I don't know. But something funny. Something. Dead,” Mrs Poulter rattled.

“Ring the police,” Mrs Dun hissed, you could see the spray on the glass door. “That's what you do. Don't you know?”

“Yes,” Mrs Poulter said, while continuing to rattle the knob.

Then suddenly she felt quite exhausted.

She began to recede, like Mrs Dun, as through water, only it was
glass. Both backing. Mrs Poulter smiling, because she didn't know what else to do. To hear and feel the fuchsia sticks, so frail, snapping against her body. Cool at least the leaves were. And Mrs Dun backing through her always darkened house into the deepest darkness of it. Her lips clamped to her gums. Perhaps Mrs Dun would be too terrified to open even to Mr Dun, when he returned, carrying his bowling kit.

Mrs Poulter manoeuvred past the fuchsias. To ring the police. At least she could thank her friend for reminding her of the obvious, though even so, she was not so very grateful. For the moment her leg was hurting more than her thoughts. The rain didn't exactly wet, but warned, out of the purple-looking clouds. The light had deepened until it was sort of moss-coloured.

She began running again through the heavy landscape, through which she had meandered formerly with Arthur Brown. Now she whimpered for the sparkle of it, the long lost bird-shot silences.

Then she fell down. She lay amongst the cold mossy-coloured grass at the side of the road, extended, not so much injured by her fall, as bludgeoned by this moment at which the past united with the present, her own pains with those of others.

When she got up, her stocking down, her right knee grazed blue and bleeding, Arthur should have been standing beside her. As she ran on, he was that close to her thoughts, without putting out her hand she could feel the shape of his.

For a moment, on her own gate, she hung gasping like a stranger about to ask a favour of the house. Then she went in to the telephone.

“Yes,” she said. “Mr Waldo Brown. The dogs,” she could not say. “Mr Arthur Brown is not, he isn't anywhere about. Mr Arthur Brown didn't do it,” she said. “He couldn't of. Not Mr Arthur.”

Sergeant Foyle, a decent fellow, must understand.

When she had shuffled the phone together, she turned round and there He was, dressed as some old hobo. Which of course was how he always had been. Only you forgot.

“What have you done to yourself?” she asked, raising the kind of joky voice a person might expect. “You look as if you was dragged through a tunnel!”

“Yes,” said Arthur. “I had a shock.”

He sat down, and she went to him.

 

When he had run out of the room, out of the house, slamming doors, he had at first some intention of escaping a murder he had committed. So he ran down across the paddocks, into the thin remainders of scrub. An escaped cow he had chased as a boy flickered around him as he listened to the lunging and crashing of his own body. With a recurrence of houses, and people staring over fences, he had to walk, to appease the faces. While failing to appease Waldo's eyes. He began to suspect he might never escape the hatred of which his brother had died.

Waldo had always hated people, but always rather, well, as a joke. Waldo had done his block at Arthur, but always more or less as a brother. Till it was made plain as a bedstead that the life, the sleep they had shared, must have been jingling brassily all those years with the hatred which only finally killed.

Arthur walked chafing his killer hands, big blurry lips blubbing through the streets for what he had caused.

“Who is this crazy old bugger going or gone off his rocker?” people were asking one another.

Without ever addressing Arthur, at most an animal, at least a thing.

This was possibly why he had been moved to take the bus, the train: to lose his name, if not the hateful load of his body. Streets are full of guesses which rarely develop into questions. Certainly in the days when the city had been celebrating with relief and joy the ends of wars, people had plastered themselves all over him, boozily expecting to discover a new style of love. No one, fortunately, was over-anxious to investigate grief or terror. So now he went unmolested. Provided it was dark enough, he was free to enter where he liked, to prepare himself for putrefaction. Several dark corners dedicated to garbage might easily have assimilated his bundle of old torn clothes and older aching flesh. Collections thrice weekly removed the possibility of a too obtrusive stench.

Arthur Brown did in fact enter a narrow printer's lane, and got
down alongside the cold-smelling bricks, in the corner in which drunks, evidently, came to piss.

He began to hear a pair of these, streaming and calling to each other as they stood buttressing the wall.

“Is it Friday ter-morrer?” one of them asked.

“At this time a night,” the other replied, “you couldn't christen it any bloody day at all.”

“We done our best!” laughed the first, belching, and shaking the drops off his end.

Then he fell to tripping and cursing.

“God sod the bastard!” he shouted.

“What's up, Leslie?”

“A body.”

“A dead body, Leslie?”

“Wouldn't be surprised.”

They walked away, leaning and laughing, and buttoning their flies.

But Arthur, who had known at most times, even after his attack, even after Waldo had walked him and walked him and, yes, walked him, knew again that he was not intended to die. Though an immensity of darkness in the printer's lane almost overwhelmed him. He would have liked to be a little boy, staring at the sky through hydrangea leaves. But couldn't manage it. All his family gone, he was threatened with permanent manhood. Or protected by his permanency. The sound of dogs gnawing at rib-bones, the faces of women exploring his face or weighing his words, eased him gently towards the future.

Snivelling for this considerable prospect he pulled out the ribbon of grey lint, which was what his handkerchiefs always became. And heard the sound of a glass marble, leaping, out of his control, away. At once he began the search which ended nowhere but in filth and darkness.

Only when reduced to nothing he remembered that one mandala must be left, and rummaged through the other contents of his pockets. The first and sleaziest ray of light from the entrance to the lane showed him the whorled marble lying in the hollow of his hand. The knotted mandala was the one he had lost.

Nursing his survivor he lumbered farther, moved by no specific desire, napping on his feet by moments, till the morning, it seemed, was noisily clattering amongst the leaves of the Moreton Bay figs, feathering the water, breaking and entering on all sides, only stopping short at the depths in early-opened eyes.

How many days Arthur Brown walked his guilt he didn't think to calculate; time was all of a piece, and meat pies, and snatches of sleep on the slats of benches. He began to feel his age at last. If he continued experiencing guilt while the sorrow drained out of it, it was because he knew Waldo would have been ashamed of sorrow. Waldo had always been ashamed. Himself, never, but the cause of shame in other people.

Catching sight of that interminable face in shrivelled kid, as he did now, in what wasn't even a fun-fair mirror, he was sorry about it. For being the cause of everybody's shame. If he could only have revealed himself glistening in a sphere of glass.

At one stage in his limping progress, he squared his shoulders, he put on the cloak of an air, and swirled inside the Public Library, squelching over the polished rubber, trailing his identity round the room in which he had begun the struggle to find it. If he no longer felt moved to take down a book, it was because in the end knowledge had come to him, not through words, but by lightning.

They
, however, were not much struck. They came and told him he must leave. He was distracting the readers. In any case, everyone he had known was gone, or dead. Only the incident at the table, between himself and Waldo and the Karamazovs, lived by virtue of
his
imperishability. He prepared to leave, though, as he had been asked to. Now, as then, nobody arrested him.

That was something they were saving up.

In the meantime he strewed the streets with peanut shells. He stole a book called
How to Relax the New Way
, not because he wanted to read it, but to try out the criminal tendency so recently acquired. Only very occasionally now he derived comfort from remembering: I am Waldo's dill brother of whom nothing is expected.

Then, on a street corner, he found himself standing crying, for
what, he had forgotten. Unless because it was getting dark too soon.

That night he took the bus out to Dulcie's place, hoping he might find he had been invited.

The house on the edge of the park increased in possibilities at night. Darkness, by dissolving its ironwork, its gingerbread columns, its cement shell, had made it more truly a castle, the electric stars screwed into silhouetted battlements. All the shutters had been thrown open, as if the secret of the precincts might be shared, if only then, and only from a distance. Although the gate squealed piercingly as Arthur worked himself inside, it was easy enough to clamber up the yielding lawns without giving himself away. But cold. He farted once. The nerves twittered inside him as the sound of voices singing swelled the already gigantic house. Manoeuvring through the outer wall of shrubs, avoiding the webs of light both hung and spread to catch any such intruder, he succeeded in reaching a window, and in clinging to a rope of creepers.

There he hung a while. As the singers withdrew their breath the upright candle-flames made the room look vast and black. The Saportas were preparing to dine, amongst their children and their children's children. Several shabbier relatives, unexpectedly younger than their hosts, were assisting at the ceremony. Only her beauty still aglow inside her revealed Dulcie in the old woman of fuzzy sideburns and locked joints, caged by her own back. Leonard Saporta's skin was draped in greyish-yellow folds, though age had not lessened his conviction when he spoke.