Slow Man Read online

  ‘I don’t want a prosthesis, now or ever. The subject is closed. Please don’t talk about it.’

  Marijana leaves the room. Ljuba continues to stare at him with the great black-eyed stare that he finds more and more eerie. ‘Hi, Ljuba,’ he says. ‘Ljubica.’ The endearment sounds foreign in his mouth, presumptuous. The child makes no reply.

  Marijana returns with the big washing-bowl. ‘Private time for Mr Rayment,’ she says. ‘Go make picture for Mama.’ She shepherds the child out, closes the door. She has taken off her sandals; her feet, he notices for the first time, are broad and flat; her toenails are painted a surprising dark red, almost purple, the colour of an angry bruise.

  ‘You need help?’ she says.

  He shakes his head, slips his trousers off. ‘Lie down,’ she says. She spreads a discreet towel over his middle, lifts the stump onto her lap, deftly unwinds the bandage, gives the naked thing an approving pat. ‘No prosthese, eh? You think your leg grow again, Mr Rayment? Only baby think like that – you cut it off, it grow again.’

  ‘Marijana, please stop. We have had this conversation before. I don’t want to talk – ’

  ‘OK, OK, no more talk on prosthese. You stay at home, your lady friends come visit, better that way.’ She runs her thumb along the scar. ‘Cheaper. No pain? No itch?’

  He shakes his head.

  ‘Good,’ she says; and begins to soap the stump.

  His bad humour is evaporating like the morning mist. Anything, he thinks to himself: I would give anything for . . . He thinks the thought with such fervour that it is impossible it does not communicate itself to Marijana. But Marijana’s face is impassive. Adored, he thinks to himself. I adore this woman! Despite all! And also: She has me in the palm of her hand!

  She finishes washing the stump, pats it dry, begins the first massage. After the first massage, the stretch exercises. After the stretch exercises, the second and concluding massage.

  Let this go on for ever!

  She must be used to it, all nurses must be used to it: men under their care growing physically excited. That must be why she is always so quick, so businesslike, why she declines to meet his eye. Presumably that is how they are taught to deal with male excitement. It will sometimes happen that . . . It is important to understand that . . . Such motions are involuntary and are an embarrassment as much to the patient as to the nurse . . . It is best to . . . Lively moments in an otherwise boring lecture.

  Before the Fall, said Augustine, all motions of the body were under the direction of the soul, which partakes of God’s essence. Therefore if today we find ourselves at the mercy of whimsical motions of bodily parts, that is a consequence of a fallen nature, fallen away from God. But was the blessed Augustine right? Are the motions of his own bodily parts merely whimsical? It all feels one to him, one movement: the swelling of the soul, the swelling of the heart, the swelling of desire. He cannot imagine loving God more than he loves Marijana at this moment.

  Marijana is not dressed in her blue uniform, which means that she does not regard today as a working day, or at least did not regard it as such when she left home. Instead she is wearing an olive-green dress with a black sash and a brief slit up the left side that reveals a knee and a flash of thigh. Her bare brown arms, her smooth brown legs: Anything! he thinks again. I would give anything! And somehow this anything! and his approval of the olive-green outfit, which he finds irresistibly fetching, are no different from his love of God, who, if he does not exist, at least fills what would otherwise be a vast, all-devouring hole.

  ‘Now on left side.’ She rearranges the towel to keep him decent. ‘So: press against me.’

  She presses the stump backward; he is supposed to press forward countervailingly. Briefly they hold the position, the two of them: she gripping the curtailed thigh with both hands, leaning her weight against him, he gripping the edge of the bed and resisting. How far! he thinks. How near and yet how far! Breast to breast they might as well be, pushing their fallen selves into each other. If Wayne were to hear about this, what would he say! But for Wayne Blight he would never have met Marijana Jokić; but for Wayne Blight he would not have known this pressure, this love, this urgency. Felix, felix. Felix lapsus. Everything is for the best, after all.

  ‘OK, now relax,’ says Marijana. ‘Good. Now on front side.’

  She hitches up her dress and straddles him. On the radio, which sent him to sleep in the first place and which has not been switched off, a man is talking about the Korean car industry. Figures are up, figures are down. Marijana’s hands slip under his shirt, her thumbs find a knot of pain high in the buttock and begin to caress it away. Thank you, God, he thinks. And thank God the Costello woman is not here to observe and comment.

  ‘Što to radiš, mama?’

  He opens his eyes with a start. From an arm’s length away Ljuba is staring straight at him. There is no mistaking the severity of that gaze. Here he is, old and ugly and hairy and half naked and no doubt to her angelic nostrils smelly, wrestling with her mother, the two of them trapped in a posture that does not even have the repulsive majesty of intercourse.

  For a moment, when the child spoke, he could feel Marijana freeze. Now she picks up the rhythm of the massage again. ‘Mr Rayment has pain,’ she says. ‘Mama is nurse, remember?’

  ‘That will be enough for today, Marijana,’ he says, hastening to cover himself. ‘Thank you.’

  Marijana clambers off the bed, slips on her sandals, takes Ljuba by the hand. ‘Don’t suck thumb,’ she says. ‘Is ugly. OK, Mr Rayment. Maybe pain go away now.’

  Twenty-five

  It is Saturday. Marijana has closeted herself in the study with Drago; the two are having what sounds very much like a row. Her voice, rapid and insistent, rises every now and again above her son’s, beating it down.

  Ljuba is on the stairway, hopping up and down the stairs, making a clatter.

  ‘Ljuba!’ he calls. ‘Come and have some yoghurt!’ The child ignores him.

  Marijana emerges from the study. ‘Is OK I leave Ljuba here? She stay with Drago. No trouble. I come back later and fetch her.’

  He had been hoping to receive from Marijana a little more of what he pays her to provide, perhaps even another session of body-care; but evidently that will not be forthcoming. Twice a month, like clockwork, a little mechanism at the bank switches money from the Rayment account to the Jokić account. In return for his money, in return for the home from home that he provides for Drago, he receives – what? A shopping service, more and more irregular; infrequent ministrations of a health-professional kind. A not unadvantageous bargain, from Marijana’s point of view. But then, as the Costello woman keeps telling him, if he wants to be a father he had better find out about fatherhood as it really is, fatherhood of the non-mystical kind.

  Marijana has barely gone off when there are voices from the stairwell and Ljuba reappears with the Costello woman and Drago’s friend Shaun in tow, Shaun clad today in a slack T-shirt and shorts down to his calves.

  ‘Hello, Paul,’ says the Costello woman. ‘I hope you don’t mind us breezing in. Ljuba darling, tell Drago that Shaun is here.’

  He and she are alone for a moment, the two seniors.

  ‘Not quite in Drago’s class, is he, our friend Shaun,’ says Costello. ‘But that is how gods and angels seem to be: they choose the most distressingly ordinary mortals to consort with.’

  He is silent.

  ‘There is a story I keep meaning to tell, that I think will amuse you,’ she continues. ‘It comes from the distant past, from the time of my youth. One of the boys on our street was very much like Drago. Same dark eyes, same long eyelashes, same not quite human good looks. I was smitten with him. I must have been fourteen at the time, he a little older. I still used to pray in those days. “God,” I would say, “let him bestow on me just one of his smiles and I will be yours forever.”’

 
‘And?’

  ‘God paid no attention. Nor did the boy. My maiden longings were never requited. So, alas, I never became a child of God. The last I heard of Mr Eyelashes, he was married and had moved to the Gold Coast, where he was making a killing in real estate.’

  ‘So is it all a lie then: Whom the gods love die young?’

  ‘I fear so. I fear the gods no longer have time for us, whether to love us on the one hand or to punish us on the other. They have troubles enough in their own gated community.’

  ‘No time even for Drago Jokić? Is that the moral of your story?’

  ‘No time even for Drago Jokić. Drago is on his own.’

  ‘Like the rest of us.’

  ‘Like the rest of us. He can relax. No spectacular doom hangs over his head. He can be sailor or soldier or tinker or tailor, as he chooses. He can even go into real estate.’

  It is the first exchange that he and the Costello woman have had that he would call cordial, even amiable. For once they are on the same side: two old folk ganging up on youth.

  Might that be the real explanation for why the woman has descended on him out of nowhere: not to write him into a book but to induct him into the company of the aged? Might the whole Jokić affair, with his ill-considered and to this point fruitless passion for Mrs Jokić at its centre, be nothing in the end but a complicated rite of passage through which Elizabeth Costello has been sent to guide him? He had thought Wayne Blight was the angel assigned to his case; but perhaps they all work together, she and Wayne and Drago.

  Drago pokes his head around the door. ‘Can Shaun and me look at your cameras, Mr Rayment?’

  ‘Yes. But take care, and put them back in their cases when you have finished.’

  ‘Drago is interested in photography?’ murmurs Elizabeth Costello.

  ‘In cameras. He has never seen anything like mine. He knows only the new, electronic kind. A Hasselblad is like a sailing-ship to him, or a trireme. An antiquity. He also spends hours going through my photographs, the nineteenth-century ones. I thought it odd at first, but perhaps it is not so odd after all. He must be feeling his way into what it is like to have an Australian past, an Australian descent, Australian forebears of the mystical variety. Instead of being just a refugee kid with a joke name.’

  ‘That is what he tells you?’

  ‘No, he would not dream of telling me. But I can guess. I can sympathise. I am not unfamiliar with the immigrant experience.’

  ‘Yes, of course. I keep forgetting. Such a proper Anglo-Adelaidean gentleman that I forget you are not English at all. Mr Rayment, rhyming with payment.’

  ‘Rhyming with vraiment. I had three doses of the immigrant experience, not just one, so it imprinted itself quite deeply. First when I was uprooted as a child and brought to Australia; then when I declared my independence and returned to France; then when I gave up on France and came back to Australia. Is this where I belong? I asked with each move. Is this my true home?’

  ‘You went back to France – I forgot about that. One day you must tell me more about that period of your life. But what is the answer to your question? Is this your true home?’ She waves a hand in a gesture that encompasses not just the room in which they are sitting but also the city and, beyond that, the hills and mountains and deserts of the continent.

  He shrugs. ‘I have always found it a very English concept, home. Hearth and home, say the English. To them, home is the place where the fire burns in the hearth, where you come to warm yourself. The one place where you will not be left out in the cold. No, I am not warm here.’ He waves a hand in a gesture that imitates hers, parodies it. ‘I seem to be cold wherever I go. Is that not what you said of me: You cold man?’

  The woman is silent.

  ‘Among the French, as you know, there is no home. Among the French to be at home is to be among ourselves, among our kind. I am not at home in France. Transparently not. I am not the we of anyone.’

  It is the closest he has come, with the Costello woman, to lamenting his lot, and it sickens him faintly. I am not the we of anyone: how does she manage to extort such words from him? A hint dropped here, a suggestion dropped there, and he follows like a lamb.

  ‘And Marijana? Are you not desirous of joining the we of Marijana and Drago? And Ljuba? And Blanka, on whom you have yet to lay an eye?’

  ‘That is another question,’ he snaps. And will not be drawn further.

  Noon passes, and Marijana does not show up. Drago has strapped a doll to his little sister’s back with rubber bands; she trots from room to room, her arms stretched out, making a droning noise like an aeroplane. Shaun has brought along some kind of electronic game. The two boys sit in front of the television screen, which emits low whoops and buzzes.

  ‘You know, we don’t have to put up with this,’ says Elizabeth Costello. ‘They don’t need to be babysat, these young folk. We could make a quiet exit, go back to the park. We could sit in the shade and listen to the birds. We could look on it as our weekend excursion, our little adventure.’

  He is prepared to accept a helping hand from Marijana, who is after all a paid nurse, but not from a woman older than himself. He sends Costello to wait in the entranceway while he negotiates the stairs on his crutches.

  On the way down he is passed by one of the neighbours, a slim, bespectacled girl from Singapore who with her two sisters, quiet as mice, occupies the flat above his. He nods to her; the greeting is not returned. In all their time on Coniston Terrace the girls have never acknowledged his existence. Each unto herself: that must be what they are taught in their island state. Self-reliance.

  He and Costello find an empty bench. A dog trots up: it gives him a quick, jaunty once-over, then moves on to her. Always embarrassing when a dog pushes its snout into a woman’s crotch. Is it reminding itself of sex, dog sex, or is it just savouring the novel, complex smells? He has always thought of Elizabeth as an asexual being, but perhaps a dog, putting its trust in its nose, will know better.

  Elizabeth bears the investigation well, letting the dog have its way with her, then pushing it away good-humouredly.

  ‘So,’ she says. ‘You were telling me.’

  ‘I was telling you what?’

  ‘You were telling me the story of your life. Telling me about France. I was married to a Frenchman once. Didn’t I tell you? My first marriage. Unforgettable times. He walked out on me, in the end, for another woman. Left me with a child on my hands. I was, according to him, too mutable. Vipère, was another of the terms he applied to me, which in England is an adder rather than a viper. Sale vipère, those were his words. He never knew where he was with me. Great ones for order, the French. Great ones for knowing where they are with you. But enough of that. We were talking about you.’

  ‘I thought you thought the French were great ones for passion. Passion, not order.’

  She turns a reflective eye on him. ‘Passion and order, Paul. Both, not one or the other. But proceed with the story of your love affair with France.’

  ‘It is not a long story. At school I was good at science. Not outstandingly good, I was not outstanding at anything, just good. So when I went to university I signed up for science. Science seemed a good bet in those days. It seemed to promise safety, and that was what my mother wanted above all for my sister and me: that we find some safe niche for ourselves in this foreign land where the man whom she had followed, God knows why, was retreating more and more into himself, where we had no family to fall back on, where she floundered in the language and could not get a grip on local ways of doing things. My sister went into teaching, which was one way of being safe, and I went into science.

  ‘But then my mother passed on, and there no longer seemed much point to putting on a white coat and peering into a test tube. So I dropped out of university and bought a ticket to Europe. I stayed with my grandmother in Toulouse and found a job in a photo lab. That was ho
w my career in photography began. But don’t you know all this? I thought you knew everything about me.’

  ‘It is news to me, Paul, I promise you. You came to me with no history attached. A man with one leg and an unfortunate passion for his nurse, that was all. Your prior life was virgin territory.’

  ‘I stayed with my grandmother and made overtures, as far as I could, to my mother’s family, because in the France we came from, peasant France, family is everything. My cousins might be car mechanics and shop assistants and station foremen, but at heart they were still peasants, only one generation away from black bread and cow manure. I am talking about the 1960s, of course, a bygone age. It is different nowadays. All changed.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I was not successful. I was not, shall we say, embraced. I had missed too much of what should have been my formation: not just a proper French schooling but a French youth, including youthful friendships, which can be as intense as love, and longer-lasting. My cousins and the people I met through them, people of my age, were already settled into their lives. Even before they left school they knew what métier they were going to follow, what boy or girl they were going to marry, where they were going to live. They could not work out what I was doing there, this gangly fellow with the funny accent and the puzzled look; and I could not tell them because I did not know either. I was always the odd one out, the stranger in the corner at family gatherings. Among themselves they called me l’Anglais. It came as a shock, the first time I heard it, since I had no ties to England, had never even been there. But Australia was beyond their ken. In their eyes Australians were simply Englishmen, mackintoshes and boiled cabbage and all, transplanted to the end of the earth, scratching a living among the kangourous.

  ‘I had a friend, Roger, who did deliveries for the studio where I worked. On Saturday afternoons he and I would pack our saddlebags and head off on our bicycles to Saint-Girons or Tarascon; or deeper into the Pyrenees as far as Oust or Aulus-les-Bains. We ate in cafés, spent nights in the open, rode all day, came back late on Sundays exhausted and full of life. We never had much to say to each other, he and I, yet now he seems to me the best friend I ever had, the best copain.