Slow Man Read online

  It is the first time he has put the Costello woman on the spot. He feels a surge of mean triumph.

  Mrs Costello shakes her head. ‘I do not believe I can interfere,’ she says. ‘In addition there are certain practical difficulties, which I prefer not to go into.’

  ‘Such as?’ he says.

  ‘Which I prefer not to go into,’ she repeats.

  ‘I don’t see any practical difficulties at all,’ he says. ‘I write a cheque to you and you write a cheque to the school. Nothing could be simpler. If you will not do that, if you refuse to, as you put it, interfere, then just go away. Go away and leave us alone.’

  He hopes that his tartness will fluster her. But she is not flustered at all. ‘Leave you alone?’ she says softly, so softly that he can barely hear. ‘If I left you alone’ – her eyes flicker to Marijana – ‘if I left you both alone, what would become of you?’

  Marijana gets up, blows her nose again, stows the tissue in her sleeve. ‘We must go,’ she says decisively.

  ‘Help me up, Marijana,’ he says. ‘Please.’

  On the landing, out of earshot of the Costello woman, she faces him. ‘Elizabeth – she is good friend?’

  ‘Good? No, I don’t think so. Not a good friend, not a close friend. I had never laid eyes on her until quite recently. Not a friend at all, in fact. Elizabeth is a professional writer. She writes novels, romances. At present she is hunting around for characters to put in a book she is planning. She seems to be pinning her hopes on me. On you too, at a remove. But I do not fit. That is why she is pestering me. Trying to make me fit.’

  She is trying to take over my life. That is what he would like to say. But it seems unfair to be making an appeal to Marijana in her present state. Save me.

  Marijana gives him a faint smile. Though the tears are gone, her eyes are still red, her nose puffy. The bright light from the skylight shows her up cruelly, her skin coarse without make-up, her teeth discoloured. Who is this woman, he thinks, to whom I yearn to give myself? A mystery, all a mystery. He takes her hand. ‘I will stand by you,’ he says. ‘I will help you, I promise. I will help Drago.’

  ‘Mama!’ whines the child.

  Marijana extracts her hand. ‘We must go,’ she says, and is gone.

  Seventeen

  ‘I am having visitors,’ he announces to the Costello woman. ‘It won’t be your kind of evening, I’m afraid. You may want to make other arrangements.’

  ‘Of course. I’m glad to see you getting back into the social whirl. Let me think . . . What shall I do? Maybe I will go to the cinema. Is there anything worth seeing, do you know?’

  ‘I am not making myself clear. When I say make other arrangements, I mean make arrangements to stay somewhere else.’

  ‘Oh! And where else should I stay, do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know. It is not my business to say where you go from here. Back to where you came from, perhaps.’

  There is a silence. ‘So,’ she says. ‘At least you are blunt.’ And then: ‘Do you remember, Paul, the story of Sinbad and the old man?’

  He does not reply.

  ‘By the bank of a swollen stream,’ she says, ‘Sinbad comes upon an old man. “I am old and weak,” says the old man. “Carry me to the other side and Allah will bless you.” Being a good-hearted fellow, Sinbad lifts the old man onto his shoulders and wades across the stream. But when they reach the other side, the old man refuses to climb down. Indeed, he tightens his legs around Sinbad’s neck until Sinbad feels himself choking. “Now you are my slave,” says the old man, “who must do my bidding in all things.”’

  He remembers the story. It was in a book called Légendes dorées, Golden Legends, in his book-chest in Lourdes. Vividly he remembers the illustration: the skinny old man naked but for a loincloth, his wiry legs hooked around the hero’s neck while the hero strides through the waist-deep torrent. What has happened to the book? What has happened to the book-chest and the other remnants of a French childhood that crossed the oceans with them to the new country? If he went back to the Dutchman’s house in Ballarat, would he find them in the cellar, Sinbad and the fox and the crow and Jeanne d’Arc and the rest of his story-companions, closed up in cardboard boxes, patiently waiting for their little master to return and rescue them; or did the Dutchman cast them out long ago, after he became a widower?

  ‘Yes, I remember,’ he says. ‘Am I to understand that I am Sinbad in the story and you the old man? In that case you face a certain difficulty. You have no means of – how shall I put this delicately – no means of getting onto my shoulders. And I am not going to help you up.’

  Costello smiles a secretive smile. ‘Perhaps I am already there,’ she says, ‘and you do not know it.’

  ‘No, you are not, Mrs Costello. I am not under your control, not in any sense of the word, and I am going to prove it. I request you to kindly return my key – a key you took without my permission – and leave my flat and not come back.’

  ‘That’s a hard word to be speaking to an old woman, Mr Rayment. Are you sure you mean it?’

  ‘This is not a comedy, Mrs Costello. I am asking you to leave.’

  She sighs. ‘Very well then. But I’m sure I don’t know what will become of me, with the rain pelting down and the dark coming fast and all.’

  There is no rain, no dark. It is a pleasant afternoon, warm and still, the kind of afternoon that ought to make one glad to be alive.

  ‘Here,’ she says: ‘your key.’ With exaggerated care she sets down the latchkey on the coffee table. ‘I will need a brief grace to collect my belongings and put on my face. Then I will be off, and you will be alone again. I am sure you are looking forward to that.’

  Impatiently he turns away. In a few minutes she is back.

  ‘Goodbye.’ She transfers a plastic shopping bag from right hand to left, offers him the right hand. ‘I am leaving a small suitcase. I will send for it in a day or two, when I have found alternative quarters.’

  ‘I would prefer it if you took your suitcase with you.’

  ‘That is not possible.’

  ‘It is possible, and I would prefer it if you did so.’

  No more words pass between them. From the front door he watches her descend the stairs lingeringly, step by step, bearing the suitcase. If he were a gentleman he would offer to help, bad leg or no. But in this case he is not a gentleman. He just wants her out of his life.

  Eighteen

  It is true: he is indeed looking forward to being alone. In fact he hungers for solitude. But no sooner has Elizabeth Costello taken her leave than Drago Jokić, with a bulging rucksack on his shoulder, is at the door.

  ‘Hi,’ Drago greets him. ‘How’s the pushbike?’

  ‘I have not done anything about the pushbike, I’m afraid. I have had other matters to attend to. What can I do for you? Would you like to come in?’

  Drago comes in, drops the rucksack on the floor. The self-assured air is no longer so marked; he seems, in fact, embarrassed.

  ‘Have you come about Wellington College?’ he asks. ‘Do you want to talk about that?’

  The boy nods.

  ‘Well, fire away. What is the problem?’

  ‘My mum says you will pay my fees.’

  ‘That’s right. I will guarantee the fees for two years. You can think of it as a loan if you prefer, a long-term loan. It is not important to me how you think of it.’

  ‘Mum told me how much it adds up to. I didn’t know it was that much.’

  ‘I have no use for the money, Drago. If we did not spend it on your education it would just sit in the bank doing nothing.’

  ‘Yes,’ says the boy doggedly, ‘but why me?’

  Why me? – a question on everyone’s lips, it seems. He could fob Drago off with some polite form of words, but no, the boy has come in person to inquire, so he will give him an answer
, the true answer or part of the true answer.

  ‘In the time your mother has worked here I have developed a soft spot for her, Drago. She has made a huge difference to my life. She does not have an easy time of it, we both know that. I want to help where I can.’

  Now the evasive air is gone. The boy is looking him straight in the eye, challenging him: Is that all you can say? Is that as far as you will go? And his answer? Yes, that is as far as I will go, for the present.

  ‘My dad won’t allow it,’ says Drago.

  ‘So I hear. To your dad it is probably a matter of pride. I can understand that. But you should remind him there is no shame in taking a loan from a friend. Because that is how I would like to be thought of: as a friend.’

  Drago is shaking his head. ‘It’s not that. They had a fight about it, my mum and my dad.’ His lip begins to quiver. Sixteen years old: still a child. ‘They had a fight last night,’ he goes on softly. ‘Mum has walked out. She has gone to stay with Aunt Lidie.’

  ‘And where is that? Where is Aunt Lidie?’

  ‘Just down the road, in Elizabeth. Elizabeth North.’

  ‘Drago,’ he says, ‘let us be frank with each other. You would not have come here today, I know, if you had not had troubling thoughts about your mother and myself. So let me set your mind at rest. There is nothing dishonourable going on between your mother and me. There is nothing dishonourable in my feelings for her. I honour her as much as any woman on earth.’

  Nothing dishonourable. What a funny old form of words! Are they not just a fig-leaf to cover something a great deal coarser, something unsayable: I haven’t been fucking your mother? If fucking is what it is all about, if fucking is what sends Miroslav Jokić into a jealous rage and brings his son to the edge of tears, why is he making speeches about honour? I haven’t been fucking your mother, I haven’t even solicited her: go and tell that to your father. Yet if he does not plan to solicit Marijana, if he does not aspire to fuck her, what in God’s name does he plan or aspire to do, in words that make sense to a youth born in the 1980s?

  ‘I am sorry to be a source of trouble between your parents. It is the last thing I want. Your father has quite the wrong idea about me. If he met me in person he would know better.’

  ‘He hit her,’ says Drago, and now control is starting to go – control over his voice, control over his tears, perhaps control over the motions of his heart. ‘I hate him. He hit my sister too.’

  ‘He hit Blanka?’

  ‘No, my little sister. Blanka sides with him. She says Mum has affairs. She says Mum is having an affair with you.’

  Mum has affairs. The Costello woman called her a faithful spouse. He should not waste his time trying his luck with Marijana Jokić, she said, because Marijana Jokić is a faithful spouse. Who is right, the spiteful daughter or the crazy old woman? And what an appalling picture! Miroslav, no doubt a great bear of a man, enraged and drunk, laying into Marijana with his fists, laying into his porcelain-featured daughter too, while the son stands by seething! Balkan passions! How on earth did he get involved with a Balkan, a Balkan mechanic and his mechanical duck!

  ‘Your mother and I are not having an affair,’ he repeats doggedly. ‘She would not dream of it, I would not dream of it.’ What a lie! I dream of it daily. ‘If you don’t believe me, that is the end of it, I am not going to try to persuade you. What are your plans now, your immediate plans? Will you be staying at home or with your mother?’

  Drago shakes his head. ‘I’m not going back. I’ll crash at a mate’s.’ He gives the rucksack a kick. ‘I brought my things.’

  From the look of the rucksack he has brought a great many things.

  ‘You can sleep here if you like. There is a spare bed in my study.’

  ‘I don’t know. I told my mate I would stay with him. Can I tell you later? Can I leave my bag here?’

  ‘Please yourself.’

  He stays up past midnight waiting for Drago. But it is not until the next day that Drago comes back. ‘I’ve got a friend with me downstairs,’ he announces on the entryphone. ‘Can she come up?’

  A friend, a girlfriend: so that is where he spent the night! ‘Yes, come up.’ But when he opens the door he nearly cries out with exasperation. By the side of a grubby, weary-looking Drago stands Elizabeth Costello. Will he never be rid of the woman?

  He and she eye each other warily, like feuding dogs. ‘Drago and I bumped into each other on Victoria Square,’ she says. ‘That’s where he was spending the night. In the company of some new mates. Who were inducting him into the fruits of the Barossa.’

  ‘I thought you said you were staying with a friend,’ he says to Drago.

  ‘It didn’t work out. I’m OK.’

  I’m OK. The boy is clearly not OK. He seems sunk in dejection, which a bout of drinking cannot have helped.

  ‘Have you spoken to your mother?’

  The boy nods.

  ‘And?’

  ‘I phoned her. I told her I’m not coming back.’

  ‘I’m not asking about you, I’m asking about her. How is she?’

  ‘She’s OK.’

  ‘Take a shower, Drago. Go on. Clean yourself up. Have a nap. Then go home. Make peace with your father. I’m sure he is sorry for what he did.’

  ‘He’s not sorry. He’s never sorry.’

  ‘May I put in a word?’ says Elizabeth Costello. ‘Drago’s father is unlikely to be sorry as long as he is convinced he is in the right. That, at least, is how I see it. As for Marijana, whatever she may tell her son on the phone, she is certainly not OK. If she has taken refuge with her sister-in-law, that is only because she has nowhere else to go. Her sister-in-law is not sympathetic to her.’

  ‘This is Lidie? Lidie is Jokić’s sister?’

  ‘Lidija Karadžić. Miroslav’s sister, Drago’s aunt. Lidie and Marijana do not get on, have never got on. In Lidie’s opinion, what is being dished out to Marijana is no more than she deserves. “Where there is smoke there is fire,” says Lidie. A Croatian proverb.’

  ‘How on earth can you know these things? How do you know what Lidie says?’

  The Costello woman brushes the question aside. ‘To Lidie it does not matter whether in truth Marijana is having an extramarital affair. What matters is that stories are being whispered in the rather narrow circle of the Croatian community. Pay heed, Paul, don’t curl your lip with disdain. Gossip, public opinion, fama as the Romans called it, makes the world go round – gossip, not truth. You tell us you are in truth not having an affair with Drago’s mother because you and she have not in truth (excuse me, Drago) had sexual intercourse. But what counts as sexual intercourse nowadays? And how do we weigh a quick deed in a dark corner as against months of fevered longing? When love is the subject, how can an outside observer ever be sure of the truth of what has gone on? What we can be a great deal more sure of is that whispers of an affair between Marijana Jokić and one of her clients have been released into the air, who knows by whom. And the air is common, the air is what we breathe and live by; the more loudly the rumour is denied, the more it is in the air.

  ‘You don’t like me, Mr Rayment, you want to be rid of me, you make that quite plain. And I myself am not exactly rejoicing, I assure you, to find myself back in this hideous flat. The sooner you settle on a course of action vis-à-vis Drago’s mother, or vis-à-vis the lady in black who called on you the other day, or even vis-à-vis Mrs McCord, whom you never mention in my hearing, but most likely vis-à-vis Drago’s mother, since she seems to be the light of your life – the sooner you settle on a course of action and commit yourself to it, the sooner you and I, to our mutual relief, will be able to part. What that course of action should consist in I cannot advise, that must come from you. If I knew what came next there would be no need for me to be here, I could go back to my own life, which is a great deal more comfortable, I assure you, and more satisfying
, than what I have to put up with here. But until you choose to act I must wait upon you. You are, as the saying has it, your own man.’

  He shakes his head. ‘I don’t understand your meaning. You make no sense at all.’

  ‘Of course you understand. And anyway, one does not need to understand before one takes action, not unless one is excessively philosophic. Let me remind you, there is such a thing as acting on impulse, and I would certainly urge it on you if I were only permitted. You say you are in love with Mrs Jokić, or at least when Drago is not around that is what you say. Well, do something with your love. And, by the way, a little more frankness in front of Drago would not hurt – would it, Drago?’

  Drago gives a crooked smile.

  ‘Part of a growing boy’s education. Better than sending him off to that pretentious college in Canberra. Give him a glimpse of the wilder shores of love. Let him see how one navigates the passions, how one steers by the stars – the Great and Little Bear, the Archer, and so forth. The Southern Cross. He must have passions of his own by now, he is old enough for passions. You do have passions, don’t you, Drago?’

  Drago is silent, but the smile does not leave his lips. Something is on the go between the woman and the boy. But what?

  ‘Let me ask you, Drago: What would you do if you were in Mr Rayment’s shoes, if you were Mr Rayment?’

  ‘What would I do?’

  ‘Yes. Imagine: you are sixty years old and suddenly one morning you wake up head over heels in love with a woman who is not only younger than you by a quarter of a century but also married, happily married, more or less. What would you do?’

  Slowly Drago shakes his head. ‘That’s not a fair question. If I’m sixteen, how do I know what it is like to be sixty? It’s different if you’re sixty – then you can remember. But . . . It’s Mr Rayment we are talking about, right? How can I be Mr Rayment if I can’t get inside him?’