Riders in the Chariot (54 page)

There was also, of course, his secret gift. Like his disease. He would no more have confessed those to a black than he would have to a white. They were the two poles, the negative and positive of his being: the furtive, destroying sickness, and the almost as furtive, but regenerating, creative act.

As soon as he had saved a few pounds, Dubbo had gone about buying paints through the medium of a store catalogue. They were crude, primary things to amuse children. But they made him tremble. And were quickly used. Then he took to breaking into the tins of paint he discovered in station storerooms, and would slap at any obscure wall until he had exhausted his desire. He would spend Sundays in the shade of an iron water-tank, drawing and tearing off, and drawing, until he had a whole heap of hieroglyphs which perhaps only he could interpret. Not that it would have occurred to him to attempt communication with another. But his forms were crystallizing. While his organism was subjected to the logic of disease, an increased recklessness of mind helped him take short cuts to solving some of the problems. Many others remained, though as he wandered deeper into himself, or watched the extraordinary behaviour of human beings on the periphery of his own existence, he was often hopeful of arriving eventually at understanding.

Everything he did, any fruit of his own meaningful relationship with life, he would lock up in a tin box, which grew dented and scratched as it travelled with him from job to job, or lay black and secret underneath his bed, while he played the part of factory-hand or station roustabout.

Nobody would have thought of opening that box. Most people respected the moroseness of its owner, and a few were even scared of Dubbo.

He grew up, tall, thin, and rather knobbly. He had already matured by the time he developed the courage and curiosity to make for Sydney. Arriving there, he left the tin box in a railway parcels-office, and slept in parks at first, until he discovered a house sufficiently dilapidated, a landlady sufficiently low, and hopeful, and predatory, to accept an abo. He settled at last, although two of his fellow lodgers, a couple of prostitutes, objected eloquently to such an arrangement. But only in the beginning. It soon became obvious that the abo was going to disappoint, by his decency, his silence, by his almost non-existence. The landlady, who had been deserted the year previous by a lover, gave up knocking at his door, and shuffled off into the wastes of linoleum, to nurse her grievance and a climacteric.

During those years it was easy to stay in work. Dubbo managed to adapt himself to that monotonous practice for longer stretches by sealing his mind off, and by regarding those dead hours as a period of mental fallow for the cropping of his art. But he longed to close the door of his room, which he had made neat enough to please a parson's sister, and to take from his double-locked box the superior oils he could now afford to buy.

There were also the grey days, and the streaming, patent-leather evenings, which turned his skin a dubious yellow, his mind to a shambles of self-examination and longing. Often he would take refuge by slipping into the public library, to look at books. But reading did not come easily; an abstraction of ideas expressed less than the abstraction of forms and the synthesis of colours. There were the art books, of course. Through which he looked with a mixture of disbelief and criticism. On the whole he had little desire to learn from the achievement of other artists, just as he had no wish to profit by, or collaborate in the experience of other men. As if his still incomplete vision would complete itself in time, through revelation. But once he came across the painting by a Frenchman of the Apollonian chariot on its trajectory across the sky. And he sat forward, easing his brown raincoat, his yellow fingers steadying themselves on the slippery page. He realized how differently he saw this painting since his first acquaintance with it, and how he would now transcribe the Frenchman's limited composition into his own terms of motion, and forms partly transcendental, partly evolved from his struggle with daily becoming, and experience of suffering.

In the great library, the radiators would be pouring out the consoling soup of warmth. All the readers had found what they had been looking for, the black man noticed with envy. But he was not altogether surprised; words had always been the natural weapons of whites. Only he was defenceless. Only he would be looking around. After reading, and yawning, and skipping, and running his thumb down a handful of pages to hear them rise like a flock of birds, he would arrange the books in an all too solid pile, and stare. On days when he was master of himself, his sense of wonder rewarded him. But in a winter light, if he had not been nourished by his secrets, if he had not enjoyed the actual, physical pleasures of paint, he might have lain down and died, there amongst the varnish and the gratings, instead of resting his head sideways on the table, and falling asleep on the pillow of his hands. Then the sweat would glitter on the one exposed cheekbone, and amongst the stubble at the nape of his neck.

On one such occasion he sat up rather suddenly, yawned, tested a sore throat by swallowing carefully once or twice, and picked up a volume which someone else had abandoned along the table. He was reading again, he found, the sad story of Our Lord Jesus Christ. He could remember many of the incidents, and how he had hoped to love and reverence the individuals involved, at least enough to please his guardians. He read, but the expression of the eyes still eluded him. All was pale, pale, washed in love and charity, but pale. He opened the Gospel of the Beloved Disciple. Then his throat did hurt fearfully. It burned. The bubbles of saliva were choking him.

He got up, and went away, his badly fitting raincoat, of an ugly and conflicting brown, floating and trailing. He walked a considerable distance that night, with long, sliding steps, and lay down under a sandstone ledge, under some wet lantana bushes, with a woman who told him how she had been done out of a quarter-share in a winning lottery ticket.

The couple proceeded to make love, or rather, they vented on each other their misery and rage. The woman had with her a bag of prawns, of which she was smelling, as well as of something slow and sweet, probably gin. She attempted repeatedly to fasten on him her ambitious sea-anemone of a mouth, and he was as determined to avoid being swallowed down. Consequently, he could have killed that poor drunken whore. She was a little bit surprised at some of it. As he held her by the thighs, he could have been furiously ramming a wheelbarrow against the darkness. But her misfortunes were alleviated, for the time being, and until she discovered they had been increased. Even after her lover had left her, in the same rage which she had chosen to interpret as passion, she continued to call to him, in between doing up her dress and searching for her prawns.

As for Dubbo, he slithered down the slope through the smell of cat which lantana will give out when disturbed after rain. Since his guardians had taught him to entertain a conscience, he would often suffer from guilt with some part of him, particularly on those occasions when his diseased body took control, in spite of the reproaches of his pastor-mind. Now he might have felt better if he had been able to roll his clothes into a ball, and shove them under a bush. But it was no longer possible, of course, to abandon things so easily. And he had to walk on, tormented by the intolerable clothes, and the lingering sensation of the whore's trustful thighs.

In the white hours, he came to the house where he lived, and let himself shivering and groping into the room which was his only certain refuge. When he had switched the light on, the validity of certain forms which he had begun to work out on a sheet of plywood made his return a more overwhelming relief, even though his deviation had to appear more terrible. Shambling and fluctuating in the glass, he lay down at last on the bed, and, where other men might have prayed for grace, he proceeded to stare at what could be his only proof of an Absolute, at the same time, in its soaring blues and commentary of blacks, his act of faith.

Dubbo was sufficiently sustained both physically and mentally, by his vocation, to ignore for the most part what people called life. Only the unhappiness of almost complete isolation from other human beings would flicker up in him at times, and he would hurry away from his job--at that period he was working in a Sydney suburb, in a factory which manufactured cardboard boxes and cartons in oiled paper--he would hurry, hurry, for what, but to roam the streets and settle down eventually on a straight-backed bench in one of the parks.

There he would indulge in what was commonly called
putting in time
_, though it was, in fact, nothing else but
hoping
_.

One evening he was sitting on such a bench in such a park, and the big fig-trees were casting their most substantial shadows on the white grass, a woman came and sat beside him. With no intentions, however. She looked deliberately in her handbag for a cigarette. And lit one. With her own match. Then she blew a trumpet of smoke, and watched the water of the tranquil little bay.

If they had not recrossed their legs at exactly the same moment, they might never have spoken.

As it was, the woman had to smile. She said, "Two minds of the same opinion. Eh?"

He did not know what to answer, and looked away. But the attitude of his shoulders must have been a receptive one.

"How do you find it down here?" the woman asked.

Again he was perturbed, but just managed to reply.

"All right."

Knotting his hands to protect himself.

"I came from up the country," the woman persisted, and named a northwestern town.

"Many of you boys down in the city?" she asked.

She was kind and polite, but bored by now. She frowned for a shred of tobacco that she could taste as it drifted loose in her mouth.

"No," he said. Or: "I dunno."

He did not like this.

She was looking idly at the colour of his hands.

"What is that you've got?" she asked.

"What?"

"That is an ulcer," she said. "On the back of your hand."

"It is nothing," he said.

It was a sore which had broken out several weeks before, and which he carried for the most part turned away from strangers, as he waited for it to disappear.

"Are you sick?" she asked.

He did not answer, and was preparing to go away from the seat, from the park, with its dusty grass and little basin of passive water.

"You can tell me," she said. "I should know."

It was very strange. Now he took a look at the strange woman, with her rather full, marshmallowy face, and her lips that she had painted up to shine. She smelled of the powder with which the white women covered their bodies in an effort to soften the impact of their presence.

The woman sighed, and began to tell her life, which he listened to, as though it had been a spoken book.

"You are sick," she sighed. "I know. Because I had it. You got a dose of the syph. When I was young and foolish, a handsome young bastard of a Digger put it across me with a hard-luck story. God, I can see 'im! With the strap of his hat hangin' onto 'is lower lip. I can smell the smell the khaki used to have then. Well, that chapter was short, but the consequences was long."

The woman was a prostitute, it began to emerge, successful, and fairly satisfied in her profession.

She told him that her name was Hannah.

"Of course," she said, "I had luck too. I got my own home. An old cove who used to come to me regular left me a couple of semi-detached homes. I let one, live in the other. Oh, I am comfortable!" she said, but aggressively. "We all laughed when some solicitor wrote about Charlie's will. But it was a
good
_ joke, as it turned out. No one thought Charlie had the stuff to put away. He was a rag-dealer."

This story made her audience glad. He loved to listen to the tales in which the action was finished. They had the sad, pale, rather pretty, but unconvincing colours of Mrs Pask's sacred prints.

"Of course," said Hannah, "although I am comfortable, I am not all that. That is why I have never retired from business. You never know."

She threw away her cigarette and frowned, so that he noticed how the white powder lay in the cracks between her brows.

"Many young fellers would not notice me now," she said. "I know that." Suddenly she screwed up her mouth excruciatingly. "You would not notice me," she fired.

He looked down, because he did not know what to answer. He only knew that he would not have noticed Hannah.

"Go on!" She laughed. "I was not trying you out. Or rather, I was. I have a proposition to make. And did not want you to think I was offering you the job of a ponce. Oh, I am in no need of men. I have my friend, too. No," she said, sinking her chin. "Sometimes I will take an interest in a person. And you are sort of down on it. See? Well, I have a small room at the back. Lying idle. What do you say, Jack, to dossing down in my small room? Eh? Of course I won't say you needn't pay me a little something for the privilege."

He was very, very silent, wondering whether it could be a trap.

"It was only an idea," she said, looking over a couple of passers-by. "I never influenced even the cat. Funny, I was to have been a teacher. Can you see me with a mob of kids in a shed beside the road? But do you know what," she said, turning to him, "I was frightened at the whole thing. I took up with men instead. Men are stupider."

The blackfellow laughed.

"I am a man," he said.

"You are something else as well." She pondered something she had not yet solved, but could not begin to speak again too quickly. "I could help you, too." Pointing at his hand. "There is a doc I know a little." She mentioned a certain hospital. "You are not frightened, are you, Jack?"

Then he knew that he was, and that this floury woman in her dress of lace doilies was leading him poignantly into a dining-room from which the kindness had not yet fled.

"Anyways," said Hannah, "if you decide, I would let you have that small room for ten bob." She had begun suddenly to enunciate very clearly, as some people did for blacks, but dropped her voice a little to give the address at which she lived.