Slow Man Read online

  ‘Oh, I’ll take care of myself,’ he replies. ‘I do not expect a lengthy old age.’

  ‘You have family in Adelaide?’

  ‘No, not in Adelaide. I have family in Europe, I suppose, but I long ago lost touch with them. I was born in France. Didn’t I tell you? I was brought to Australia when I was a child, by my mother and my stepfather. I and my sister. I was six. My sister was nine. She is dead now. She died early, of cancer. So no, I have no family to take care of me.’

  They leave it at that, he and Marijana, their exchange of particulars. But her question echoes in his mind. Who is going to take care of you? The more he stares at the words take care of, the more inscrutable they seem. He remembers a dog they had when he was a child in Lourdes, lying in its basket in the last stages of canine distemper, whimpering without cease, its muzzle hot and dry, its limbs jerking. ‘Bon, je m’en occupe,’ his father said at a certain point, and picked the dog up, basket and all, and walked out of the house. Five minutes later, from the woods, he heard the flat report of a shotgun, and that was that, he never saw the dog again. Je m’en occupe: I’ll take charge of it; I’ll take care of it; I’ll do what has to be done. That kind of caring, with a shotgun, was certainly not what Marijana had in mind. Nevertheless, it lay englobed in the phrase, waiting to leak out. If so, what of his reply: I’ll take care of myself? What did his words mean, objectively? Did the taking care, the caretaking he spoke of extend to donning his best suit and swallowing down his cache of pills, two at a time, with a glass of hot milk, and lying down in bed with his hands folded across his breast?

  He has many regrets, he is full of regrets, they come back nightly like roosting birds. Chief among them is regret that he does not have a son. It would be nice to have a daughter, girls have an appeal of their own, but the son he does not have is the one he truly misses. If he and Henriette had had a son right away, while they still loved each other, or were enamoured of each other, or cared for each other, that son would be thirty years old by now, a man in his own right. Unimaginable perhaps; but the unimaginable is there to be imagined. Imagine the two of them, then, out for a stroll, father and son, chatting about this and that, men’s talk, nothing serious. In the course of that chat he could let fall a remark, one of those oblique remarks that people make at moments when the real words are too difficult to bring out, about it being time to pass on. His son, his imaginary but imagined son, would understand at once: pass on the burden, pass on the succession, call it a day. ‘Mm,’ his son would say, William or Robert or whatever, meaning Yes, I accept. You have done your duty, taken care of me, now it is my turn. I will take care of you.

  It is not beyond the bounds of the possible to acquire a son, even at this late juncture. He could, for instance, locate (but how?) some wayward orphan, some Wayne Blight in embryo, and put in an offer to adopt him, and hope to be accepted; though the chances that the welfare system, as represented by Mrs Putts, would ever consign a child to the care of a maimed and solitary old man would be zero, less than zero. Or he could locate (but how?) some fertile young woman, and marry her or pay her or otherwise induce her to permit him to engender, or try to engender, a male child in her womb.

  But it is not a baby he wants. What he wants is a son, a proper son, a son and heir, a younger, stronger, better version of himself.

  His willie. If you want me to wash your willie, said Sheena in her private time with him, you will have to ask. Does he have it in his willie, in his exhausted loins, to father a child? Does he have the seed, and enough animal passion to drive the seed to the right place? The record would not seem to indicate so. The record would seem to indicate that passionate outpourings are not part of his nature. A pleasant affectionateness, a mild if gratifying sensuality – that is what Margaret McCord will recall about him, she and half a dozen other women, not including his wife. As a lover rather doggy, in fact: not a word he is fond of but an apt one. A nice man to cuddle up to on a chilly evening; the kind of male friend you rather absent-mindedly go to bed with, then wonder later whether it really happened.

  All in all, not a man of passion. He is not sure he has ever liked passion, or approved of it. Passion: foreign territory; a comical but unavoidable affliction like mumps, that one hopes to undergo while still young, in one of its milder, less ruinous varieties, so as not to catch it more seriously later on. Dogs in the grip of passion coupling, hapless grins on their faces, their tongues hanging out.

  Eight

  ‘You want I dust your books?’

  Eleven in the morning, and Marijana would seem to have run out of tasks.

  ‘All right, if you like. You can run the vacuum cleaner over them with that nozzle attachment.’

  She shakes her head, ‘No, I clean them good. You are book saver, don’t want dust on books. You are book saver, yes?’

  A book saver: is that what they call people like him in Croatia? What could it mean, book saver? A man who saves books from oblivion? A man who clings to books that he never reads? His study is lined from floor to ceiling with books he will never open again, not because they are not worth reading but because he is going to run out of days.

  ‘A book collector, that’s what we say here. Just those three shelves, from there to there, are a collection properly speaking. Those are my books on photography. The rest are just common or garden books. No, if I have saved anything it has been photographs, not books. I keep them in those cabinets. Would you like to see?’

  In two old-fashioned cedarwood cabinets he has hundreds of photographs and postcards of life in the early mining camps of Victoria and New South Wales. There is a handful from South Australia too. Since the field is not a popular or even a properly defined one, his collection may be the best in the country, even in the world.

  ‘I began saving them in the 1970s, when first-generation photographs were still affordable. And when I still had the heart to go to auctions. Deceased estates. It would depress me too much now.’

  For her eyes he takes out the group photographs that are the core of his collection. For the photographer’s visit some of the miners have put on their Sunday best. Others are content with a clean shirt, the sleeves rolled high to show off their brawny arms, and perhaps a clean neckerchief. They confront the camera with the look of grave confidence that came naturally to men in Victoria’s day, but seems now to have vanished from the face of the earth.

  He lays out two of his Faucherys. ‘Look at these,’ he says. ‘They are by Antoine Fauchery. He died young, otherwise he might have become one of the great photographers.’ By their side he lays out a few of the naughty postcards: Lil displaying a length of thigh as she snaps a garter; Flora, in déshabillé, smiling coyly over a plump naked shoulder. Girls whom Tom and Jack, fresh from the diggings, flush with cash, would visit on Saturday nights for a bit of you-know-what.

  ‘So this is what you do,’ says Marijana when the show is over. ‘Is good, is good. Is good you save history. So people don’t think Australia is country without history, just bush and then mob of immigrants. Like me. Like us.’ She has taken off the head-scarf: she shakes her hair free, smoothes it back, gives him a smile.

  Like us. Who are these us? Marijana and the Jokić family; or Marijana and he?

  ‘It was not just bush, Marijana,’ he says cautiously.

  ‘No, of course, is not bush, is Aboriginal people. But I talk about Europe, what they say in Europe. Bush, then Captain Cook, then immigrants – where is history, they say?’

  ‘You mean, where are the castles and cathedrals? Don’t immigrants have a history of their own? Do you cease to have a history when you move from one point on the globe to another?’

  She brushes aside the rebuke, if that is what it is. ‘In Europe people say Australia have no history because in Australia everybody is new. Don’t mind if you come with this history or that history, in Australia you start zero. Zero history, you understand? That’s what people say in my
country, in Germany too, in all Europe. Why you want to go to Australia, they say? Is like you go to desert, to Qatar, to Arab countries, oil countries. You only do it for money, they say. So is good somebody save old photographs, show Australia has history, too. But they worth lots of money, these photographs, eh?’

  ‘Yes, they are worth money.’

  ‘So who gets them, you know, after you?’

  ‘After my decease, do you mean? They are going to the State Library. It is all arranged. The State Library here in Adelaide.’

  ‘You don’t sell them?’

  ‘No, I won’t sell them, it will be a bequest.’

  ‘But they put your name on, eh?’

  ‘They will put my name on the collection indeed. The Rayment Bequest. So that in future days children will whisper to each other, “Who was he, Rayment of the Rayment Bequest? Was he someone famous?”’

  ‘But photograph too, maybe, eh, not just name? Photograph of Mr Rayment. Photograph is not the same as just name, is more living. Otherwise why save photographs?’

  No doubt about it, she has a point. If names are as good as images, why bother to save images? Why save the light-images of these dead miners, why not just type out their names and display the list in a glass case?

  ‘I’ll ask the people at the library,’ he says, ‘I’ll see how they feel about the idea. But not a picture of me as I am now, God spare us that. As I used to be.’

  The dusting of the books, a chore that cleaning women in the past disposed of by running a feather duster over the spines, is attacked by Marijana as a major operation. Desk and cabinets are covered with newspaper; then, half a shelf at a time, the books are carried out to the balcony and individually dusted, and the emptied shelves wiped immaculately clean.

  ‘Just be sure,’ he intervenes nervously, ‘that the books go back in the same order.’

  She treats him to a look of such scorn that he quails.

  Where does the woman get the energy? Does she run her home on the same lines? How does Mr J cope with it? Or is it for his eyes alone, her Australian boss’s: to show how much of herself she is prepared to give to her new country?

  It is on the day of the book-dusting that what had been a mild interest in Marijana, an interest that had not amounted to more than curiosity, turns into something else. In her he begins to see if not beauty then at least the perfection of a certain feminine type. Strong as a horse, he thinks, eyeing the sturdy calves and well-knit haunches that ripple as she reaches for the upper shelves. Strong as a mare.

  Has whatever it is that had been floating in the air these past weeks begun to settle, faute de mieux, on Marijana? And what is its name, this sediment, this sentiment? It does not feel like desire. If he had to pick a word for it, he would say it was admiration. Can desire grow out of admiration, or are the two quite distinct species? What would it be like to lie side by side, naked, breast to breast, with a woman one principally admires?

  Not just a woman: a married woman too, he must not forget that. Not too far away there lives and breathes a Mr Marijana Jokić. Would Mr Jokić or Pan Jokić or Gospodin Jokić or whatever he calls himself fly into a rage if he found out that his wife’s employer indulged in daytime reveries about lying breast to breast with her – fly into one of those elemental Balkan rages that give birth to clan feuds and epic poems? Would Mr Jokić come after him with a knife?

  He makes jokes about Jokić because he envies him. When the chips are down, Jokić has this admirable woman and he does not. Not only does Jokić have her, he also has the children who come with her, come out of her: Ljubica the love-child; the distracted but no doubt equally pretty middle daughter whose name he cannot recall; and the dashing boy with the motorcycle. Jokić has them all and he has – what? A flat full of books and furniture. A collection of photographs, images of the dead, which after his own death will gather dust in the basement of a library along with other minor bequests more trouble to the cataloguers than they are worth.

  Among the Faucherys he did not bring out for Marijana is the one that haunts him most deeply. It is of a woman and six children grouped in the doorway of a mud and wattle cabin. That is to say, it could be a woman and six children, or the eldest girl could be not a child at all but a second woman, a second wife, brought in to take the place of the first, who looks drained of life, exhausted of loins.

  All of them wear the same expression: not hostile to the stranger with the newfangled picture-machine who a moment before this moment plunged his head under the dark cloth, but frightened, frozen, like oxen at the portal of a slaughterhouse. The light hits them flat in the face, picks out every smudge on their skin and their clothes. On the hand that the smallest child brings to her mouth the light exposes what might be jam but was more likely mud. How the whole thing could have been brought off with the long exposures required in those days he cannot even guess.

  Not just bush, he would like to tell Marijana. Not just blackfellows either. Not zero history. Look, that is where we come from: from the cold and damp and smoke of that wretched cabin, from those women with their black helpless eyes, from that poverty and that grinding labour on hollow stomachs. A people with a story of their own, a past. Our story, our past.

  But is that the truth? Would the woman in the picture accept him as one of her tribe – the boy from Lourdes in the French Pyrenees with the mother who played Fauré on the piano? Is the history that he wants to claim as his not finally just an affair for the English and the Irish, foreigners keep out?

  Despite Marijana’s bracing presence, he seems to be on the brink of one of his bad spells again, one of the fits of lugubrious self-pity that turn into black gloom. He likes to think they come from elsewhere, episodes of bad weather that cross the sky and pass on. He prefers not to think they come from inside him and are his, part of him.

  Fate deals you a hand, and you play the hand you are dealt. You do not whine, you do not complain. That, he used to believe, was his philosophy. Why then can he not resist these plunges into darkness?

  The answer is that he is running down. Never is he going to be his old self again. Never is he going to have his old resilience. Whatever inside him was given the task of mending the organism after it was so terribly assaulted, first on the road, then in the operating theatre, has grown too tired for the job, too over-burdened. And the same holds for the rest of the team, the heart, the lungs, the muscles, the brain. They did for him what they could as long as they could; now they want to rest.

  A memory comes back to him of the cover of a book he used to own, a popular edition of Plato. It showed a chariot drawn by two steeds, a black steed with flashing eyes and distended nostrils representing the base appetites, and a white steed of calmer mien representing the less easily identifiable nobler passions. Standing in the chariot, gripping the reins, was a young man with a half-bared torso and a Grecian nose and a fillet around his brow, representing presumably the self, that which calls itself I. Well, in his book, the book of him, the book of his life, if that ever comes to be written, the picture will be more humdrum than in Plato. Himself, the one he calls Paul Rayment, will be seated on a wagon hitched to a mob of nags and drays that huff and puff, some barely pulling their weight. After sixty years of waking up every blessed morning, munching their ration of oats, pissing and shitting, then being harnessed for the day’s haul, Paul Rayment’s team will have had enough. Time to rest, they will say, time to be put out to pasture. And if rest is denied them, well, they will just fold their limbs and settle down in their traces; and if the whip starts to whistle around their rumps, let it whistle.

  Sick at heart, sick in the head, sick to the bone, and, if the truth be told, sick of himself – sick even before the wrath of God, transmitted through his angel Wayne Blight, struck him down. He would never want to diminish that event, that blow. It was nothing less than a calamity. It has shrunk his world, turned him into a prisoner. But escaping death o
ught to have shaken him up, opened windows inside him, renewed his sense of the preciousness of life. It has done nothing of the sort. He is trapped with the same old self as before, only greyer and drearier. Enough to drive one to drink.

  One o’clock and Marijana has not finished with the books. Ljuba, usually a good child – if it is still permitted to divide children into the good and the bad – is beginning to whine.

  ‘Leave the cleaning. Finish it off tomorrow,’ he tells Marijana.

  ‘I am finished in flesh of lightning,’ she replies. ‘Maybe you give her something to eat.’

  ‘Flash. A flash of lightning. Flesh is what we are made of, flesh and bone.’

  She does not reply. Sometimes he thinks she does not bother to listen to him.

  He should give Ljuba something to eat, but what? What do small children eat other than popcorn and cookies and toasted cereal flakes encrusted in sugar, none of which he has in his pantry?

  He tries stirring a spoonful of plum jam into a pot of yoghurt. Ljuba accepts it, seems to like it.

  She sits at the kitchen table, he stands by her leaning on Zimmer’s invention. ‘Your mum is a great help to me,’ he says. ‘I don’t know what I would do without her.’

  ‘Is it true you’ve got a artificial leg?’ She produces the long word casually, as though she uses it every day.

  ‘No, it’s the same leg I always had, just a bit shorter.’

  ‘But in your cupboard in your bedroom. Do you got a artificial leg in your cupboard?’

  ‘No, I’m afraid not, there is nothing of the sort in my cupboard.’

  ‘Do you got a screw in your leg?’

  ‘A screw? No, no screws. My leg is all natural. It has a bone inside, just like your legs and your Mommy’s legs.’

  ‘Doesn’t it got a screw, to screw on your artificial leg?’

  ‘No, not as far as I know. Because I have no artificial leg. Why do you ask?’