Slow Man Read online

  No doubt for an ageing cripple the future holds further mishaps, further falls, further humiliating calls for help. What he needs at this moment, however, is not that dismaying and depressing prospect but this soft, consoling, and eminently feminine presence. There, there, be calm, it is all over: that is what he wants to hear. Also: I will stay by your side while you sleep.

  So when Marijana rises and briskly dons her coat and picks up her keys, he has a quite childish sense of aggrievement. ‘Can’t you stay a while longer?’ he says. ‘Can’t you spend the night?’

  She sits down again on the bedside. ‘OK if I smoke?’ she says. ‘Just one time?’ She lights a cigarette, puffs, blows the smoke away from him. ‘We have talk, Mr Rayment, fix up things. What you want from me? You want I must do my job, come back, be nurse for you? Then you don’t say these things, like’ – she waves the cigarette – ‘you know what I mean.’

  ‘I must not speak of my feelings for you.’

  ‘You go through bad time, you lose your leg and all that, I understand. You have feelings, man’s feelings, I understand, is OK.’

  Though the pain seems to be dwindling, he cannot yet sit up. ‘Yes, I have feelings,’ he says, flat on his back.

  ‘You have feelings, you say things, is natural, is OK. But.’

  ‘Labile. That is the word you are hunting for. I am too labile for your taste. Too much at the mercy of the feelings you refer to. I speak my heart too openly. I say too much.’

  ‘Mercy. What is mercy of feelings?’

  ‘Never mind. I believe I understand you. I have an accident and am shaken to the core. My spirits rise, my spirits fall, they are no longer under my control. As a result I become attached to the first woman to cross my path, the first sympathetic woman. I fall, excuse the word, in love with her; I fall in love with her children too, in a different way. I, who have been childless, suddenly want children of my own. Hence the present friction between us, between you and me. And it can all be traced back to my brush with death on Magill Road. Magill Road shook me up so much that even today I let my feelings pour out without reckoning the consequences. Is that not what you are telling me?’

  She shrugs but does not contradict him. Instead, drawing in the smoke luxuriously, blowing it out, she lets him run on. For the first time he sees what sensual pleasure there can be in smoking.

  ‘Well, you are wrong, Marijana. It is not like that at all. I am not in a confused state. I may be labile, but being labile is not an aberration. We should all be more labile, all of us. That is my new, revised opinion. We should shake ourselves up more often. We should also brace ourselves and take a look in the mirror, even if we dislike what we will see there. I am not referring to the ravages of time. I am referring to the creature trapped behind the glass whose stare we are normally so careful to avoid. Behold this being who eats with me, spends nights with me, says “I” on my behalf! If you find me labile, Marijana, it is not just because I suffered a knock. It is because every now and then the stranger who says “I” breaks through the glass and speaks in me. Through me. Speaks tonight. Speaks now. Speaks love.’

  He halts. What a torrent of words! How unlike him! Marijana must be surprised. Is there indeed at this moment some stranger speaking through a mirror, taking over his voice (but which mirror?), or is the present outpouring just another bout of lability, the aftershock of the latest accident – the bump on the head, the strained back, the aching stump, the icy shower, and so forth – rising in his throat like bile, like vomit? In fact, might it simply be an effect of the pill Marijana gave him (what could the pill have been?), or even of the coffee? He should not have taken the coffee. He is not used to coffee in the evenings.

  Speaks love. He cannot be sure, he is not wearing his glasses, but a flush seems to be creeping up from Marijana’s throat. Marijana says she wants him to curb himself, but that is nonsense, she cannot really mean it. What woman would not want a torrent of love-words poured out on her every now and again, however questionable their origin? Marijana is blushing, and for the simple reason that she too is labile. And therefore? What comes next? And therefore it does indeed all cohere! Therefore behind the chaos of appearance a divine logic is indeed at work! Wayne Blight comes out of nowhere to smash his leg to a pulp, therefore months later he collapses in the shower, therefore this scene becomes possible: a man of sixty caught more or less rigid in bed, shivering intermittently, spouting philosophy to his nurse, spouting love. And the blood moves in her, responding!

  Exulting, he stretches out (Ignore the pain, who cares for pain!) and places his large and (he notices) rather unattractively livid hand over Marijana’s smaller, warmer hand with the tapering fingers that, according to his grandmother in Toulouse, signify a sensual temperament.

  For a moment Marijana lets her hand rest under his. Then she frees herself, stubs out the cigarette, rises, and begins to button her coat again.

  ‘Marijana,’ he says, ‘I make no demands, neither now nor in the future.’

  ‘Yes?’ She cocks her head, gives him a quizzical look. ‘No demand? You think I know nothing about men? Men is always demand. I want, I want, I want. Me, I want to do my job, that is my demand. My job in Australia is nurse.’

  She pauses. Never before has she addressed him with such force, such (it seems to him) fury.

  ‘You telephone, and is good you telephone, I don’t say you must not telephone. Emergency, you telephone, OK. But this’ – she waves a hand – ‘this shower business is not emergency, not medical emergency. You fall in bathroom, you call some friend. “I get scared, please come,” that is what you say.’ She takes out a fresh cigarette, changes her mind, puts it back in the pack. ‘Elizabeth,’ she says. ‘You call Elizabeth, or you call other lady friend, I don’t know your friends. “I get scared, please come hold my hand. No medical emergency, just please come hold my hand.”’

  ‘I was not just scared. I have injured myself. I cannot move. You can see that.’

  ‘Spasm. Is just spasm. I leave you pills for it. Back spasm is not emergency.’ She pauses. ‘Or else you want more, not just hold hand, you want, like you call it, the real thing, then maybe you join club for lonely hearts. If you got lonely heart.’

  She draws a breath, eyes him reflectively. ‘You think you know how it is to be nurse, Mr Rayment? Every day I nurse old ladies, old men, clean them, clean their dirt, I don’t need to say it, change sheets, change clothes. Always I am hearing Do this, do that, bring this, bring that, not feeling good, bring pills, bring glass of water, bring cup of tea, bring blanket, take off blanket, open window, close window, don’t like this, don’t like that. I come home tired in my bone, telephone rings, any time, mornings, nights: Is emergency, can you come . . .’

  Minutes ago she was blushing. Now he is the one who ought to blush. An emergency . . . can you come? Of course, in the language of the caring professions, this would not count as an emergency. One does not perish of cold in an air-conditioned flat on Coniston Terrace, North Adelaide. Even in the act of dialling the Jokić number he knew that. Yet he called anyhow. Come, save me! he called across the South Australian space.

  ‘You were the first I thought of,’ he says. ‘Your name came to me first. Your name, your face. Do you think that is of no account – being first?’

  She shrugs. There is silence between them. Of course it is a big word, an overbearing word to have hurled at one: first. But that is not the word that gives him pause. Your name. Your name came to me. You came to me. Words that rose in him without thought, came to him. Is this how it is when one is labile: words just come?

  ‘I always thought,’ he presses on, ‘that nursing was a vocation. I thought that was what set it apart, what justified the long hours and the poor pay and the ingratitude and the indignities too, such as those you mentioned: that you were following a calling. Well, when a nurse is called, a proper nurse, she doesn’t ask questions, she comes. Even if it
is not a real emergency. Even if it is just distress, human distress, what you call a scare.’ He has not lectured Marijana before, but perhaps the lecture is the mode in which, on this particular night, the truth will choose to reveal itself. ‘Even if it is just love.’

  Love: biggest of the big words. Nevertheless, let him sock her with it.

  She takes the blow well this time, hardly blinking. The buttons of her coat are all done now, from bottom to top.

  ‘Just love,’ he repeats with some bitterness.

  ‘Time to go,’ she says. ‘Long drive to Munno Para. See you.’

  With considerable effort he quells a new bout of shivers. ‘Not yet, Marijana,’ he says. ‘Five minutes. Three minutes. Please. Let’s have a drink together and simmer down and be ordinary. I don’t want to feel I can never call you again, for shame. Yes?’

  ‘OK. Three minutes. But no drink for me, I must drive, and no drink for you, alcohol and pills is not good.’

  Somewhat stiffly she resumes her seat. One of the three minutes passes.

  ‘What exactly does your husband know?’ he asks out of the blue.

  She gets up. ‘Now I go,’ she says.

  Distressed, remorseful, aching, uncomfortable, he lies awake all night. The pills that Marijana said she would leave are nowhere to be seen.

  Dawn comes. Needing to go to the toilet, he gingerly tries to crawl out of the bed. Halfway to the floor the pain strikes again, immobilising him.

  A sore back is not an emergency, says Marijana, whom he hired to save him from degradations of precisely this kind. Does being unable to control one’s bladder count as an emergency? No, clearly not. It is just part of life, part of growing old. Miserably he surrenders and urinates on the floor.

  That is the posture in which Drago – who ought to be at school but for reasons of his own seems not to be – finds him when he arrives to pick up his bag of stuff: half in bed, half out, his leg caught in the twisted bedclothes, stalled, frozen.

  If he no longer hides anything from Marijana, it is because he cannot be more abject before her than he has already been. With Drago it is a different story. Thus far he has done his best not to make a spectacle of himself before Drago. Now here he is, a helpless old man in urinous pyjamas trailing an obscene pink stump behind him from which the sodden bandages are slipping. If he were not so cold he would blush.

  And Drago does not waver! Does it run in the family, this matter-of-factness about the body? As Drago’s mother had helped him into bed, so now Drago helps him out; and when he tries to explain himself, to excuse his weakness, it is Drago who shushes him – ‘No worries, Mr Rayment, just relax and we’ll have you fixed up in a minute’ – and then strips the bed and turns the mattress and (somewhat clumsily, he is after all just a boy) spreads fresh sheets; it is Drago who finds a fresh pair of pyjamas and patiently, averting his eyes as decency requires, helps him on with them.

  ‘Thank you, son, good of you,’ he says at the end of it all. There is more he would like to say, for his heart is full, such as: Your mother has abandoned me; Mrs Costello, who jabbers on and on about care but takes care not to be around when care is needed, has abandoned me; everyone has abandoned me, even the son I never had; then you came, you! But he holds his peace.

  He has a passage of crying, old-man’s crying which does not count because it comes too easily, and which he hides behind his hands because it embarrasses both of them.

  Drago makes a phone call, comes back. ‘My mum says I should get you some pills for the pain. I’ve got the name here. She says she meant to leave you some but she forgot. I can go down to the pharmacy; but . . .’

  ‘There is money in my wallet, in my desk drawer.’

  ‘Thanks. You got a mop somewhere?’

  ‘Behind the kitchen door. But don’t . . .’

  ‘It’s nothing, Mr Rayment. It will take a minute.’

  The magic pills turn out to be nothing but Ibuprofen. ‘Mum says take one every four hours. And you should eat first. Shall I get you something from the kitchen?’

  ‘Get me an apple or a banana if there is one. Drago?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’ll be all right now. You don’t have to stay. Thanks for everything.’

  ‘That’s OK.’

  To complete the passage, Drago ought to say: That’s OK, you would do the same for me. And it is true! If some cataclysm were to befall Drago, if some reckless stranger were to crash into him on his motorcycle, he, Paul Rayment, would move heaven and earth, spend every penny he had, to save him. He would give the world a lesson in how to take care of a beloved child. He would be everything to him, father and mother. All day, all night he would watch at his bedside. If only!

  At the door Drago turns, waves, and flashes him one of the angelic smiles that must have the girls swooning. ‘See you!’

  Twenty-seven

  The injury to his back is indeed, as Marijana told him, no great thing. By mid-afternoon he is able to move about, if cautiously, able to dress himself, able to make himself a sandwich. Last night he thought he was at death’s door; today he is fine again, more or less. A dash of this, a dab of that, a smidgen of the other, mixed together and rolled into a pill in a factory in Bangkok, and the monster of pain is reduced to a mouse. Miraculous.

  So when Elizabeth Costello arrives he is able to provide the briefest, calmest, most matter-of-fact recital of events. ‘I slipped in the shower and twisted my back. I called Marijana, and she came and fixed me up, and now I’m fine again.’ No mention of treacherous Johann August, no mention of the shivering and the tears, no mention of the pyjamas in the wash basket. ‘Drago dropped by this morning to check up. A nice boy. Mature beyond his years.’

  ‘And you are fine, you say.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And your pictures? Your photograph collection?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Is your photograph collection fine too?’

  ‘I presume it is. Why should it not be?’

  ‘Perhaps you should take a look.’

  It is not that any of the prints are actually missing. Nothing is actually missing. But one of the Faucherys has the wrong feel to it and, as soon as he brings it out of its plastic sleeve into the light, the wrong look too. What he is holding in his hands is a copy, in tones of brown that mimic the original sepia, made by an electronic printer on half-glazed photographic paper. The cardboard mount is new and slightly thicker than the original. It is the added thickness that first gives the forgery away. Otherwise it is not a bad job. But for Costello’s prompting he might never have noticed it.

  ‘How did you know?’ he demands of her.

  ‘How did I know Drago and his friend were up to something? I didn’t know. I was merely suspicious.’ She holds up the copy. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if one of these diggers was great-grandfather Costello from Kerry. And look – look at this fellow.’ With a fingernail she taps a face in the second row. ‘Isn’t he the spitting image of Miroslav Jokić!’

  He snatches the photograph from her. Miroslav Jokić: it is indeed he, wearing a hat and open-necked shirt, sporting a moustache too, standing flank to flank with those stern-faced Cornish and Irish miners of a bygone age.

  It is the desecration that he feels most of all: the dead made fun of by a couple of cocky, irreverent youths. Presumably they did it using some kind of digital technique. He could never have achieved so convincing a montage in an old-fashioned darkroom.

  He turns on the Costello woman. ‘What has become of the original?’ he demands. ‘Do you know what has become of it?’ He hears his voice go out of control, but he does not care. He smites the copy to the ground. ‘The stupid, stupid boy! What has he done with the original?’

  Elizabeth Costello gives him a look of wide-eyed astonishment. ‘Don’t ask me, Paul,’ she says. ‘It was not I who welcomed Drago into my home and
gave him the run of my precious photograph collection. It was not I who plotted my way to the mother through the son.’

  ‘Then how did you know about this . . . this vandalism?’

  ‘I did not know. As I said before, I was merely suspicious.’

  ‘But what made you suspicious? What are you not telling me?’

  ‘Get a hold of yourself, Paul. Consider. Here we have Drago and his friend Shaun, two healthy Australian lads, and how do they spend their free time? Not racing their motorcycles. Not playing football. Not surfing. Not kissing the girls. No: instead they lock themselves up for hours on end in your study. Are they poring over smut? No: unless I am mistaken, you own singularly few dirty books. What then can it be that absorbs their attention but your photograph collection, a collection which according to you is so priceless that it must be donated to the nation?’

  ‘But I don’t see what motive they can have. Why should they go to all that trouble to fabricate’ – he puts the tip of his crutch on the copy and grinds it into the carpet – ‘a dummy?’

  ‘There I can’t help you. That is for you to work out. But bear in mind: these are lively young chaps in a dozy city that does not provide outlets for all the restlessness in their bones, all the buzz of schemes and desires in their heads. Time is accelerating all around us, Paul. Girls have babies at the age of ten. Boys – boys take half an hour to pick up a skill that took us half a lifetime. They pick it up and get bored with it and move on to something else. Perhaps Drago and his friend thought it would be amusing: the State Library, a mob of worthy old gents and ladies fanning themselves against the heat, some boring bigwig or other unveiling the Rayment Bequest, and – hello, hello! – who is this at the centre of the pièce de résistance of the collection but one of the Jokić clan from Croatia! A capital jape – that’s what Billy Bunter would have called it. Perhaps that is all it amounts to: an elaborate and rather tasteless jape that must have cost more than a little of their time and perhaps some expert guidance too.