Slow Man Read online

  ‘My son come look at your bicycle,’ says Marijana. ‘He can fix it maybe.’

  ‘Yes. Of course.’ (But, he asks himself, whatever gave her the idea he wants the wreck of a bicycle fixed?) ‘Hello, Drago, good to meet you, thanks for coming.’ He fishes out the key to the store from a mess of keys in a drawer and gives it to the boy. ‘See what you think. In my opinion the bike is beyond help. The frame is bent. Ten to one the tubing is cracked. But have a look.’

  ‘OK,’ says the boy.

  ‘I bring him to talk to you,’ says Marijana when they are alone. ‘Like you said.’

  Like he said? What could he have said? That he would give Drago a lesson in road safety?

  The yarn that Marijana has spun her son to get him to give up his morning emerges only piece by piece: that Mr Rayment has a bicycle that he wants fixed so that he can sell it, but that, being not only crippled but maladroit too, he cannot do the fixing himself.

  Drago returns from his inspection and delivers his report. Whether the frame is cracked or not he cannot say offhand. He and his mates, one of whom has access to a machine shop, could probably bend it back into shape and respray it. But even so, a new wheel and hub and derailleur and brakes would probably set him, Mr Rayment, back as much as a good second-hand bike.

  It is perfectly sensible advice. It is what he would have said himself.

  ‘Thanks for looking at it anyway,’ he says. ‘Your mother tells me you are into motorcycles.’

  ‘Yeah, my dad bought me a Yamaha, 250 c.c.’

  ‘That’s good.’ He casts Marijana a glance which the boy pretends not to pick up. What more does she want him to say?

  ‘Mum says you had a pretty bad accident,’ offers the boy.

  ‘Yes. I was in hospital for a while.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I was hit by a car as I was turning. The driver said he didn’t see me. Said I didn’t signal my intentions. Said he was dazzled by the sun.’

  ‘That’s bad.’

  A silence. Is the boy absorbing the lesson he is supposed to be absorbing? Is Marijana getting what she wants? He suspects not. She wants him to be more voluble – to warn the boy how perilous the lot of cyclists is, and by analogy the lot of motorcyclists; to bring home to him the agonies of injury and the humiliations of the crippled state. But his sense of this youth is that he prefers laconism, that he will not take kindly to being preached to. In fact, if Drago were to sympathise with anyone in the story of the encounter on Magill Road, it would more likely be with Wayne Blight, the speedy youngster behind the wheel, than with Paul Rayment, the absent-minded old geezer on the pushbike.

  And what sea-change does Marijana want him to bring about anyway? Does she really expect this handsome youth, bursting with good health, to spend his evenings at home curled up with a book while his mates are out having fun? To leave the gleaming new Yamaha in the garage and catch a bus? Drago Jokić: a name from folk-epic. The Ballad of Drago Jokić.

  He clears his throat. ‘Drago, your mother has asked me to have a word with you in private.’

  Marijana leaves the room. He turns to the boy. ‘Look, I’m nothing to you, just the man your mother looks after and very grateful to her for that. But she asked me to speak to you and I agreed I would. What I want to tell you is, if I could turn back the clock to before my accident, believe me, I would. You may not think it, looking at me, but I used to lead an active life. Now I can’t even go to the shops. I have to depend on other people for the smallest thing. And it happened in a split second, out of nowhere. Well, it could happen to you just as easily. Don’t take risks with your life, son, it’s not worth it. Your mother wants you to be careful on your bike. I think you should listen to her. That’s all I’m going to say. Your mother is a good person, she loves you. Do you understand?’

  If he had been asked to predict, he would have said that young Drago would sit through a lecture of this kind with his eyes cast down, picking at his cuticles, wishing the old geezer would get it over with, cursing his mother for bringing him. But it is not like that at all. Throughout his speech Drago regards him candidly, a faint, not unfriendly smile on his well-shaped lips. ‘OK,’ he says at the end. ‘Message received. I’ll be careful.’ Then, after a pause: ‘You like my mum, don’t you?’

  He nods. He could say more, but a nod is enough for the present.

  ‘She likes you too.’

  She likes him too. His heart swells unreasonably. I don’t just like her, I love her!: those are the words he is on the point of bursting out with. ‘I’m trying to be of assistance, that’s all,’ he says instead. ‘That’s why I’ve spoken to you. Not because I think I can save you by talking, since something like this’ – he slaps the bad hip lightly, jocularly – ‘just happens, you can’t foresee it, you can’t prevent it. But it may help your mother. It may help her to know that you know she loves you and wants you to be safe, wants it enough to ask a stranger, namely me, to put in a word. OK?’

  There are the words themselves, and then, behind or around or beneath the words, there is the intention. As he speaks he is aware of the boy watching his lips, brushing aside the word-strings as if they were cobwebs, tuning his ear to the intention. His respect for the boy is growing, growing by leaps and bounds. No ordinary boy, this one! The envy of the gods he must be. The Ballad of Drago Jokić. No wonder his mother is fearful. A telephone call in the early hours of the morning: ‘Is that Mrs Jokić? Do you have a son named Dragon? This is the hospital in Gumeracha.’ Like a needle in the heart, or a sword. Her first-born.

  Marijana returns, Drago rises. ‘I’ll be getting along now,’ he says. ‘Bye Mum.’ From his lofty height he stoops and touches his lips to her forehead. ‘Bye Mr Rayment. Sorry about the bike.’ And he is gone.

  ‘Very good tennis player,’ says Marijana. ‘Very good swimmer. Very good at everything. Very clever.’ She gives a wan smile.

  ‘My dear Marijana,’ he says – heightened emotion, he tells himself, in a moment of heightened emotion one can be forgiven for slipping in the odd term of endearment – ‘I am sure he will be all right. I am sure he will have a long and happy life and rise to be an admiral, if that is what he wants to be.’

  ‘You think so?’ The smile has not left her lips, but now it speaks pure joy: despite the fact that he is useless with his hands and a cripple to boot, she believes he has powers of foretelling the future. ‘That’s good.’

  Eleven

  It is Marijana’s smile, lingering in his memory, that brings about the longed-for, the long-needed change. At once all gloom is gone, all dark clouds. He is Marijana’s employer, her boss, the one whose wishes she is paid to carry out, yet before she arrives each day he fusses around the flat, doing his best to make things spick and span for her. He even has flowers delivered, to brighten the drabness.

  The situation is absurd. What does he want of the woman? He wants her to smile again, certainly, to smile on him. He wants to win a place in her heart, however tiny. Does he want to become her lover too? Yes, he does, in a sense, fervently. He wants to love and cherish her and her children, Drago and Ljuba and the third one, the one whom he has yet to clap eyes on. As for the husband, he has not the slightest malign intent towards him, he will swear to that. He wishes the husband all happiness and good fortune. Nevertheless, he will give anything to be father to these excellent, beautiful children and husband to Marijana – co-father if need be, co-husband if need be, platonic if need be. He wants to take care of them, all of them, protect them and save them.

  Save them from what? He cannot say, not yet. But Drago above all he wants to save. Between Drago and the lightning-bolt of the envious gods he is ready to interpose himself, bare his own breast.

  He is like a woman who, having never borne a child, having grown too old for it, now hungers suddenly and urgently for motherhood. Hungry enough to steal another’s child: it is as mad as that.


  Twelve

  ‘How is Drago getting on?’ he asks Marijana, as casually as he can.

  She shrugs despondently. ‘This weekend he will go with his friends to Tunkalooloo beach. You say it like that – Tunkalooloo?’

  ‘Tunkalilla.’

  ‘They go by bike. Wild friends, wild boys. I’m frighted. Is like gang. Girls too, you can’t believe it so young. I’m glad you speak to him last week. Spoke.’

  ‘It was nothing. Just a few fatherly words.’

  ‘Yes, he don’t get enough fatherly words, like you say, that’s his problem.’

  It is the first criticism she has voiced of the absent husband. He waits for more, but there is no more.

  ‘This is not an easy country for a boy to grow up in,’ he replies cautiously. ‘A climate of manliness prevails. A lot of pressure on a boy to excel in manly deeds, manly sports. Be a daredevil. Take risks. It is probably different back where you come from.’

  Back where you come from. Now that he hears them, the words sound condescending. Why should boys not also be boys where the Jokićs come from? What does he know about the forms that manliness takes in south-eastern Europe? He waits for Marijana to set him right. But her mind is elsewhere.

  ‘What you think of boarding school, Mr Rayment?’

  ‘What do I think of boarding school? I think it can be very expensive. I also think it is a mistake, a bad mistake, to believe that in boarding schools young people are watched over night and day to make sure they come to no harm. But you can get a good education at a boarding school, no doubt about that, or at the better boarding schools. Is that what you are thinking of for Drago? Have you checked into their fees? You should do that first. Their fees can be high, absurdly high, in fact astronomical.’

  What he refrains from saying is: So high as to exclude children whose fathers assemble cars for a living. Or whose mothers nurse the aged.

  ‘But if you are serious about it,’ he plunges on, and even as he speaks he feels the recklessness of what he is saying, but he cannot stop himself, will not stop himself, ‘and if Drago himself really wants to go, I could help financially. We could treat it as a loan.’

  There is a moment’s silence. So, he thinks, it is out. No going back.

  ‘We are thinking, maybe he can get scholarship, with his tennis and all that,’ says Marijana, who has perhaps not absorbed his words and what must lie behind them.

  ‘Yes, a scholarship is certainly a possibility, you can investigate that.’

  ‘Or we can get loan.’ Now the echo of his words seems to reach her, and her brow furrows. ‘You can loan us money, Mr Rayment?’

  ‘I can make you a loan. Interest-free. You can pay it back when Drago is earning.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It is an investment in his future. In the future of all of us.’

  She shakes her head. ‘Why?’ she repeats, ‘I don’t understand.’

  It is one of the days when she has brought Ljuba with her. In her scarlet pinafore, with her legs, one in a scarlet stocking, one in a purple, stretched out on the sofa, her arms slack at her sides, the child could be mistaken for a doll, were it not for the searching black eyes.

  ‘Surely you must know, Marijana,’ he whispers. His mouth is dry, his heart is thudding, it is as awful and as thrilling as when he was sixteen. ‘Surely a woman always knows.’

  Again she shakes her head. She seems genuinely puzzled. ‘Don’t understand.’

  ‘I will tell you in private.’

  She murmurs to the child. Obediently Ljuba picks up her little pink backpack and trots off to the kitchen.

  ‘There,’ says Marijana. ‘Now say.’

  ‘I love you. That is all. I love you and I want to give you something. Let me.’

  In the books that his mother used to order from Paris when he was still a child, that used to arrive in brown pasteboard packets with the Librairie Hachette crest and a row of stamps bearing the head of stern Marianne decked in her Phrygian cap, books that his mother would sigh over in the living-room in Ballarat where the shutters were always closed, either against the heat or against the cold, and that he would secretly read after her, skipping the words he did not know, as part of his sempiternal quest to find what it was that would please her, it would have been written that Marijana’s lip curled with scorn, perhaps even that her lip curled with scorn while her eye gleamed with secret triumph. But when he left his childhood behind he lost faith in the world of Hachette. If there ever was – which he doubts – a code of looks that, once mastered, would allow one to read infallibly the transient motions of the human lips and eyes, it has gone now, gone with the wind.

  A silence falls, and Marijana does nothing to help. But at least she does not turn on her heel. Whether or not her lip curls, she does seem prepared to hear more of this extraordinary, irregular declaration.

  What he ought to do, of course, is embrace the woman. Breast to breast she could not mistake him. But to embrace her he must put aside the absurd crutches that allow him to stand up; and once he does that he will totter, perhaps fall. For the first time he sees the sense of an artificial leg, a leg with a mechanism that locks the knee and thus frees the arms.

  Marijana waves a hand as if wiping a windowpane or flapping a dishcloth. ‘You want to pay so Drago can go to boarding school?’ she says, and the spell is broken.

  Is that what he wants: to pay for Drago’s schooling? Yes. He wants Drago to have a good education, and then, after that, if he holds to his ambition, if the sea is indeed his heart’s desire, to qualify as a naval officer. He wants Ljuba and her elder sister to grow up happy too, and have their own hearts’ desire. Over the whole brood he wants to extend the shield of his benevolent protection. And he wants to love this excellent woman, their mother. That above all. For which he will pay anything.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘That is what I am offering.’

  She meets his gaze squarely. Though he cannot swear to it, he believes she is blushing. Then, swiftly, she leaves the room. A moment later she is back. The red kerchief is gone, her hair is shaken free. On one arm she has Ljuba, on the other the pink satchel. She is murmuring into the child’s ear. The child, thumb in mouth, turns and inspects him curiously.

  ‘We must go,’ Marijana says. ‘Thank you.’ And in a whisk they are gone.

  He has done it. He, an old man with knobbly fingers, has confessed his love. But dare he even for a moment hope that this woman, in whom he has without forethought, without hesitation sunk all his hopes, will love him back?

  Thirteen

  The next day Marijana does not arrive. Nor does she come on Friday. The shadows that he had thought gone for ever return. He telephones the Jokić home, gets a female voice, not Marijana’s (whose? the other daughter’s?), on an answering machine. ‘Paul Rayment here, for Marijana,’ he says. ‘Could she give me a call?’ There is no call.

  He sits down to write a letter. Dear Marijana, he writes, I fear you may have misunderstood me. He deletes me and writes my meaning. But what is the meaning she may have misunderstood? When I first met you, he writes, beginning a new paragraph, I was in a shattered state. Which is not true. His knee might have been shattered, and his prospects, but not his state. If he knew the word to describe his state as it was when he met Marijana, he would know his meaning too, as it is today. He deletes shattered. But what to put in its place?

  While he is dithering the doorbell rings. His heart gives a leap. Will the troublesome word, and the troublesome letter, not after all be needed?

  ‘Mr Rayment?’ says the voice on the entryphone. ‘Elizabeth Costello here. May I speak with you?’

  Elizabeth Costello, whoever she is, takes her time climbing the stairs. By the time she gets to the door she is panting: a woman in her sixties, he would say, the later rather than the earlier sixties, wearing a floral silk dress cut low behind to reveal una
ttractively freckled, somewhat fleshy shoulders.

  ‘Bad heart,’ she says, fanning herself. ‘Nearly as much of an impediment as’ (she pauses to catch her breath) ‘a bad leg.’

  Coming from a stranger the remark strikes him as inappropriate, unseemly.

  He invites her in, offers her a seat. She accepts a glass of water.

  ‘I was going to say I was from the State Library,’ she says. ‘I was going to introduce myself as one of the Library’s volunteers, come to assess the scale of your donation, the physical scale, I mean, the dimensions, so that we could plan ahead. Later it would have come out who I actually am.’

  ‘You are not from the Library?’

  ‘No. That would have been a fib.’

  ‘Then you are – ?’

  She glances around his living-room with what seems to be approval. ‘My name is Elizabeth Costello,’ she says. ‘As I mentioned.’

  ‘Ah, are you that Elizabeth Costello? I am sorry, I was not thinking. Forgive me.’

  ‘No need.’ From the depths of the sofa she struggles to her feet. ‘Shall we come to the point? This is not something I have done before, Mr Rayment. Will you give me your hand?’

  For an instant he is confused. Give her his hand? She reaches out her own right hand and he takes it. For a moment the plump and rather cool feminine hand rests in his own, which he notices with distaste has taken on the livid hue it does when he has been inactive too long.

  ‘So,’ she says. ‘I am rather a doubting Thomas, as you see.’ And when he looks puzzled: ‘I mean, wanting to explore for myself what kind of being you are. Wanting to be sure,’ she proceeds, and now he is really losing her, ‘that our two bodies would not just pass through each other. Naïve, of course. We are not ghosts, either of us – why should I have thought so? Shall we proceed?’

  Heavily she seats herself again, squares her shoulders, and begins to recite. ‘The blow catches him from the right, sharp and surprising and painful, like a bolt of electricity, lifting him up off the bicycle. Relax! he tells himself as he tumbles through the air, and so forth.’