Slow Man Read online

  As for the little girl, she is a true beauty, with dark curls and a perfect skin and eyes that glint with what can only be intelligence. Side by side the two make a pretty picture. Get on well together too. While she is cooking, Marijana helps the child to bake cupcakes or gingerbread biscuits. From the kitchen comes the even murmur of their voices. Mother and daughter: the protocols of womanhood being passed on, generation to generation.

  Five

  Weeks pass; he settles into Marijana’s regimen of care. Each morning she takes him through his exercises, massages his wasted and wasting muscles; discreetly she helps him in what he cannot do without a helping hand, what he may never learn to do unaided. When he is in the mood to listen, she is ready to talk – about her work, her experience of Australia. When he withdraws, she seems content to be silent too.

  Whatever love he might once have had for his body is long gone. He has no interest in fixing it up, returning it to some ideal efficiency. The man he used to be is just a memory, and a memory fading fast. He still has a sense of being a soul with an undiminished soul-life; as for the rest of him, it is just a sack of blood and bones that he is forced to carry around.

  In such a state, it is tempting to let go of all modesty. But he resists the temptation. He does what he can to maintain the decencies, and Marijana backs him. When nakedness cannot be helped, he averts his eyes so that she will see he does not see her seeing him. What has to be done in private she does her best to ensure is done in private.

  In all of this he is trying to remain a man, albeit a diminished man; and it could not be clearer that Marijana understands and sympathises. Where did she acquire this delicacy, he wonders, a delicacy her predecessors so signally lacked? In Bielefeld, at nursing college? Perhaps; but his guess is that it comes from deeper wells. A decent woman, he thinks to himself, decent through and through. One of the better things that has happened to him, having Marijana Jokić come into his life.

  ‘Tell me if it hurts,’ she says as she bears down with her thumbs on the obscenely curtailed thigh muscles. But it never hurts; or if it does, the hurt is so much like pleasure that he cannot tell the difference. An intuitive, he thinks. By intuition pure and simple she seems to know how he feels, how his body will respond.

  A man and a woman on a warm afternoon behind locked doors. They might as well be performing a sex act. But it is nothing like that. It is just nursing, just care.

  A phrase from catechism class a half-century ago floats into his mind: There shall be no more man and woman, but . . . But what – what shall we be when we are beyond man and woman? Impossible for the mortal mind to conceive. One of the mysteries.

  The words are St Paul’s, he is sure of that – St Paul his namesake, his name-saint, explaining what the afterlife will be like, when all shall love all with a pure love, as God loves, only not as fiercely, as consumingly.

  He, alas, is no spirit being as yet, but a man of some kind, the kind that fails to perform what man is brought into the world to perform: seek out his other half, cleave to her, and bless her with his seed – seed which, in the allegory or perhaps the anagogy unfolded by Brother Aloysius, he forgets which is which, represents God’s word. A man not wholly a man, then: a half-man, an after-man, like an after-image; the ghost of a man looking back in regret on time not well used.

  His grandparents Rayment had six children. His parents had two. He has none. Six, two, one or none: all around him he sees the miserable sequence repeated. He used to think it made sense: in an overpopulated world, childlessness was surely a virtue, like peaceableness, like forbearance. Now, on the contrary, childlessness looks to him like madness, a herd madness, even a sin. What greater good can there be than more life, more souls? How will heaven be filled if the earth ceases to send its cargoes?

  When he arrives at the gate, St Paul (for other new souls it may be Peter but for him it will be Paul) will be waiting. ‘Bless me father for I have sinned,’ he will say. ‘And how have you sinned, my child?’ Then he will have no words to say, save to show his empty hands. ‘You sorry fellow,’ Paul will say, ‘you sorry, sorry fellow. Did you not understand why you were given life, the greatest gift of all?’ ‘When I was living I did not understand, father, but now I understand, now that it is too late; and believe me, father, I repent, I repent me, je me repens, and bitterly too.’ ‘Then pass,’ Paul will say, and stand aside: ‘in the house of your Father there is room for all, even for the stupid lonely sheep.’

  Marijana would have set him right, had he only met her in time, Marijana from Catholic Croatia. From the loins of two, Marijana and her spouse, there have issued three – three souls for heaven. A woman built for motherhood. Marijana would have helped him out of childlessness. Marijana could mother six, ten, twelve and still have love left over, mother-love. But too late now: how sad, how sorry!

  Six

  He came away from the hospital with a pair of forearm crutches and something they called a Zimmer frame, a four-footed aluminium stand for use around the flat. The equipment comes on loan, to be returned when no longer needed, that is to say, when he has graduated to higher forms of mobility or else passed on.

  There are other aids to be had (he gets to see the brochure), from a device that adds wheels and a safety brake to the quadrangular Zimmer frame, to a vehicle with a battery-powered motor and a steering bar and a retractable rain-hood, intended for advanced cripples. If he wants one of these fancier aids, however, he will have to buy it himself.

  Under Marijana’s ministrations, what she likes to call his leg is day by day losing its angry colour and swollen look. The crutches are becoming second nature, though he feels more secure leaning on the frame. When he is by himself he roams on his crutches from room to room, thinking of it as exercise when it is really only restlessness.

  He visits the hospital for weekly checkups. On one of these visits he shares the lift with an old woman, stooped, with a hawklike nose and a dark, Mediterranean skin. By the hand she holds a younger version of herself, small-boned, almost as dark, wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a pair of sunglasses huge enough to hide the upper half of her face. Pressed up against the younger woman, he has time, before they exit, to take in a lungful of rather overpowering gardenia perfume and to notice that, oddly, she is wearing her dress inside out, with the dry-cleaning instructions protruding like a bold little flag.

  An hour later, on his way out of the building, he remarks the couple again, having a hard time with the swing door. By the time he himself reaches the street he can see only the wide black hat bobbing in the crowd.

  Their image stays with him: the crone leading the hastily clad princess in an enchanted sleepwalk. Not quite young enough for the role of princess, perhaps, but attractive nonetheless: soft-fleshed, petite, big-bosomed, the kind of woman he imagines slumbering till noon and then breakfasting on bonbons served on a silver platter by a little slave-boy in a turban. What can she have done to her face that she needs to hide it?

  She is the first woman to provoke his sexual interest since the accident. He has a dream in which she is somehow present though she does not reveal herself. In utter silence a crack in the earth opens and races towards him. Two vast waves of dust rise in the air. He tries to run but his legs will not move. Help! he whispers. With black unseeing eyes the old woman, the crone, stares at him and through him. Over and over she mutters a word that he cannot quite catch, something like Toomderoom. The earth beneath his feet gives way, he plunges.

  Margaret McCord telephones. She is sorry she has not been in touch, she has been out of town. Can she take him to lunch, perhaps on Sunday? They could drive out to the Barossa Valley. Unfortunately her husband will not be able to join them: he is overseas.

  He would love to come, he replies, but alas, he finds long car rides a bit of a calvary.

  ‘Then shall I just drop by?’ she says.

  Years ago, after his divorce, he and Margaret had a brief flin
g. According to Margaret, whom he does not necessarily trust, her husband knows nothing of those intimacies.

  ‘Why not?’ he says. ‘Come on Sunday. Come to dinner. I have some excellent cannelloni that my house help has prepared.’

  They eat on the balcony, on a rather cool evening, amid the valedictory calls of birds, with citronella candles flickering on the table. There is a certain constraint: what once passed between them is by no means forgotten. Margaret does not mention the absent husband.

  He tells Margaret about his time under the rule of Sheena; he tells her about Mrs Putts the social worker, who prepared him for the afterlife in all respects save sex, a topic she found herself too modest to broach, or perhaps thought inappropriate to a man of his age.

  ‘And is it inappropriate?’ asks Margaret. ‘Candidly?’

  Candidly, he replies, he cannot yet tell. He is not incapacitated, if that is what she is asking. His spine is unharmed, as are the relevant nerve connections. The as yet unanswered question is whether he would be able to perform the motions required of the active member in a sexual couple. A second and related question is whether embarrassment and shame might not outweigh pleasure.

  ‘I would have thought,’ says Margaret, ‘that given the circumstances you might be excused from playing the role of active member. As for your second question, how will you ever know until you have tried? But why should you be embarrassed? It’s not as though you have leprosy. You are just an amputee. Amputees can be rather romantic. Think of all those war films: men coming home from the front with eye-patches or empty sleeves pinned across their chests or on crutches. Women swooned over them.’

  ‘Just an amputee,’ he says.

  ‘Yes. You were the victim of an accident, a crash. Nothing shameful in that, nothing blameworthy. After which you had a leg amputated. Part of a leg. Part of a stupid body-part. That’s all. You still have your health. You are still yourself. You are the same handsome, healthy man you always were.’ She gives him a smile.

  They could test it out in the bedroom right now, the two of them, test whether he is the same man he always was, test whether even with a body-part missing pleasure can outweigh its opposite. Margaret would not be averse, he is sure of that. But the moment passes and they do not grasp it, for which, looking back later, he is thankful. He does not care to become the object of any woman’s sexual charity, however good-natured. Nor does he care to expose to the gaze of an outsider, even if she is a friend from the old days, even if she does claim to find amputees romantic, this unlovely new body of his, that is to say, not only the hectically curtailed thigh but the flaccid muscles and the obscene little paunch that has ballooned on his abdomen. If he ever goes to bed with a woman again, he will make sure it is in the dark.

  ‘I have had a visitor,’ he tells Marijana the next day.

  ‘Yes?’ says Marijana.

  ‘There may be other visitors,’ he plunges on grimly. ‘I mean women.’

  ‘To live with you?’ says Marijana.

  To live with him? The thought has never crossed his mind. ‘Of course not,’ he says. ‘Just friends, women friends.’

  ‘That’s good,’ she says, and switches on the vacuum cleaner.

  Marijana, it would appear, could not care less whether he has women in the flat. What he gets up to in his own time is none of her business. And what could he get up to anyway?

  Unlike Margaret, Marijana has never seen him as he used to be. To her he is simply her latest client, a pale-skinned, slack-thewed old man on crutches. Even so, he feels shame before Marijana, and before her daughter too, as if the ruddy good health of the mother and the angelic clarity of the child were pronouncing a joint judgment on him. He finds himself avoiding the child’s gaze, hiding out in his armchair in a corner of the living-room as if the flat belonged to the two women and he were some pest, some rodent that had found its way in.

  Margaret’s visit sparks a series of day-dreams about women. All of the dreams are sexually coloured; in some he and the woman get as far as going to bed. In these dreams his new and altered body is not spoken of, is not even seen; all is well, all is as it was before. But the woman he is with is not Margaret. It is, most of the time, the woman he saw in the lift, the one with the dark glasses and the inside-out clothes. Your dress, he says to her: let me help you adjust it. She raises a hand to take off her glasses. All right, she says. Her voice is low, her eyes are dark pools into which he plunges.

  Seven

  On the job Marijana wears not a nurse’s cap but a head-scarf, like any good Balkan housewife. He approves of the scarf, as he approves of any token that she has not wholly cast off the old world in favour of the new.

  Aside from assorted war criminals and the tall tennis player with the big serve whose name escapes him (Ilja? Ilić? Roman Ilić?), Croats are an unknown quantity to him. Yugoslavs are another matter. He must have crossed paths with dozens of Yugoslavs in the days when there were still Yugoslavs; but of course it never occurred to him to ask what variety of Yugoslav they were.

  Where does Marijana fit into the Yugoslav picture, Marijana and the husband who assembles cars? What were they fleeing when they fled the old country? Or was it simply the case that, growing sick and tired of strife, they packed their goods and crossed the border in quest of a better, more peaceable life? And if a better, more peaceable life is not to be found in Australia, where is it to be found?

  Marijana is telling him about her son, whose name is Drago but who is known to his mates as Jag. For his just-passed sixteenth birthday, her husband bought Drago a motorcycle. A big mistake, in Marijana’s opinion. Now Drago stays out every evening, neglecting his homework, missing meals. He and his friends hang out on the back roads, racing each other, practising skids and God knows what else. She is afraid he is going to break a limb, or worse.

  ‘Your son is a young man,’ he tells Marijana. ‘He is testing himself. You cannot stop young men from exploring their limits. They want to be the fastest. They want to be the strongest. They want to be admired.’

  He has never met Drago, probably never will. But he enjoys Marijana’s performance, enjoys its transparency: too well-mannered to boast about her boy, she complains instead about his unruliness, his recklessness, his joie de vivre, about how he will be her ruin.

  ‘If you want to give Drago a fright,’ he suggests not entirely seriously, ‘bring him here one day. I’ll show him my leg.’

  ‘You think he will listen, Mr Rayment? He will say is nothing, is just bicycle accident.’

  ‘I’ll show him what’s left of the bicycle too.’

  He still has the bicycle in the store room downstairs, the back wheel folded in two, the stays jammed into the spokes. No one bothered to steal it after all, that day on Magill Road, though it lay by the roadside till evening. Then the police took it in. They rescued the plastic box too that had been strapped to the carrier, along with a fraction of the morning’s purchases: a can of chickpeas with a dent in it, a quarter kilo of Brie that had melted in the sun and then congealed. He has kept the can as a memento, a memento mori. It is on a shelf in the kitchen. He will show Drago the can, he tells Marijana. Imagine if that was your skull, he will say to him. And then: Spare a thought for your mum. She worries about you. She’s a good woman. She wishes you to have a long and happy life. Or perhaps he will not say the bit about her being a good woman. If her son does not know, who is he, a stranger, to tell him?

  The next day Marijana brings a photograph: Drago standing beside the motorcycle in question, wearing boots and tight jeans, in the crook of his arm a helmet emblazoned with a lightning bolt. He is tall and husky for a sixteen-year-old, with a winning smile. A dreamboat, as girls used to say in the old days, just as his mother must have been a peach. No doubt he will break many hearts.

  ‘What are your son’s plans?’ he asks.

  ‘He wants to go to Defence Force Academy. He wants to join
navy. He can get bursary for that.’

  ‘And your daughter, your older daughter?’

  ‘Ah, she is too young for plans, her head is in sky.’

  Now she has a question for him, one that has taken surprisingly long in coming. ‘You have no children, Mr Rayment?’

  ‘No, alas not. We did not get around to it, my wife and I. We had other things on our minds, other ambitions. And then, before we knew it, we were divorced.’

  ‘And you never worry about it after?’

  ‘On the contrary, I worried about it more and more, particularly as I grew older.’

  ‘And your wife? She worry about it?’

  ‘My wife remarried. She married a divorcé with children of his own. They had a child together and became one of those complicated modern families where everyone calls everyone else by the first name. So no, my wife does not worry about our childlessness, my childlessness. My ex-wife. I do not have much contact with her. It was not a happy marriage.’

  It is all within bounds, what is passing between them, within the bounds of the impersonal personal. A conversation between a man and a woman, a woman who happens to be the man’s nurse and shopping assistant and cleaning woman and general help, getting to know each other better in a country where all persons are equal, and all faiths. Marijana is a Catholic. He is no longer anything. But in this country the one is as good as the other, Catholicism and nothing. Marijana may disapprove of people who marry and unmarry and never get around to having children, but she knows enough to keep her disapproval to herself.

  ‘So who is going to take care of you?’

  An odd question to ask. The obvious answer is, You are: you are going to take care of me, for the immediate future, you or whoever else I employ for that purpose. But presumably there is a more charitable way of interpreting the question – as Who is going to be your stay and support?, for instance.