Riders in the Chariot (58 page)

And his own life was restored by little twinges and great waves. His hands were no longer bones in gloves of papery skin, as he twitched the pictures over, and gave them the support they needed--against the bed, the rusted kero stove, an angle of the room. Once more the paintings were praising and affirming in accents of which his mouth had never been capable.

Returned into the bosom of conviction, he might not have resisted the impulse to bring out paints there and then, and reproduce the deepening yellow through which he had watched the evening streets, if that yellow had not begun to sicken in him. If he had not not discovered.

Then the teeth were terrible in his face. He began to fumble and bungle through his own possessions as well as the wretched trash of Hannah's lodger's room. His search toppled the dressmaker's dummy, which went down thumping out its dust. Perhaps he had just failed to see what he was looking for. Often, in moments of passion or withdrawal, he would overlook objects which were there all the time before him. But in the present case, only the hard truth emerged: "The Fiery Furnace" was gone, together with that big drawing.
The Chariot-thing
_. What else, he did not stop to consider. Nobody bothers to count the blows when he knows that one of them will prove fatal.

"Hannah!"

A voice had never gone down the passage like that before. He was running on those quiet, spongy feet. And breathing high.

Although he arrived almost at once, she was already advancing to meet him through the doorway of her room. She appeared to have decided she would not do any good by talking. That dry, white look, which her face had only recently acquired, had never been more in evidence than against the controversial fur. She had stretched the fox, straight and teachery, along her otherwise naked shoulders. No swagger any more. There was a sort of chain, with a couple of acorns, holding the fur together above the shabby, yellow parting of her breasts.

"Hannah!" he breathed. "You done that?"

He couldn't, or not very well, get it past a turn in his throat.

"I will tell you," Hannah answered, flat, now that the scene was taking place. "Only don't--there is no need--to do your block before you know."

And Norm looking over her shoulder. Norman Fussell was very curious to observe how, in the light of what he already knew, the rest of it would turn out.

For the present Dubbo was almost bent up. Breathing and grinning. His ribs would have frightened, if they had been visible.

But Hannah was slow as suet. With a nerve inside of it.

"I will tell you. I will tell you," she seemed to be saying.

She did not care very much whether she died. She could have exhausted her life by now. It was only the unimaginable act of dying that made her sick nerve tick.

Then Dubbo began to get his hands around her. She went down, quite easy, because she felt that guilty at first, she was offering no resistance. She intended to suffer, if it could not be avoided. She almost wanted to feel his fingers sinking into that soft sickness she had become.

So he got her down against the doorway of her room. The chain which had been fastening the fox had burst apart, and she was bundled in her pink slip. Or tearing. Her cheek was grating on the bald carpet when not ploughing the smell of new fur.

The abo was tearing mad, and white beneath his yellow skin.

All his desperate hate breath hopelessness future all of him and more was streaming into his pair of hands.

Then Hannah got her throat free. Perhaps she had expiated enough. She let out, "Aaaahhhhhhh! Normmm! For Crisssake!"

Norm Fussell just failed to exorcise the ghost of a giggle.

Not that things were getting funny. It had begun to be intolerable for him too, as he was officially a man, and had just been called upon to work a miracle. So now, he who had been hopping around in his normal flesh, after throwing off responsibility with his clothes, began with one arm to apply to the abo a hold which a sailor had once taught him. And which he had never known to work.

But at least they were all three involved. Their breath was knotted together in ropes as solid as their arms.

At one point, Hannah began again.

"Alf, I will tell you. I will tell you."

Her tongue was rather swollen, though. It would pop out like a parrot's.

In between, she was crying sorry for herself.

"I will tell"--she would manage to get it out. "That Mort bug Alf
Chrise
_ MORTIMER honest honest only took a few quid commish
on
_ Alf."

That made him fight worse. All the bad that he had to kill might escape him by cunning.

Because all three of the wrestlers understood at last they were really and truly intended to die at some moment, possibly that one.

Seeing the muck of blood on her arms, on her slip--it could only have been her blood--Hannah was whimpering afresh for what she had been made to suffer, ever, and so drawn out, when in the history book they chopped the heads cleanly off.

But at that moment, Norm Fussell, by dint of pressure, or weight, or the sailor's genuinely skilful hold, got the abo off of Hannah.

And Hannah was up. Self-pity did not delay her a second. Her flesh flew. But, of course, she had got thinner. She could not drag out the drawer too quick. Of the dressing-table. Scrabble under handkerchiefs. Fetch out what was flapping more than her own hand.

When the abo came at her afresh, she had the envelope to push against him.

"Honest," Hannah cried, shaking like paper. "I wouldn't never bite your ear! Look, Alf! Look, only!"

Dubbo was unable to look, but nature slowed him up.

"See, Alf? There is your name. I wrote. Only took a spot of commission. Bought a fur. What other intention? It was that puf Mortimer would not let me alone. Here, look, Alf, is the rest. I was gunna hand it over, dinkum, when things had settled down."

Dubbo was all in for the moment.

Seeing the blood on her arms, and her slip reduced to bandages, Hannah began again to cry, for what she had escaped, for all that life had imposed on her. The tufts of her hair, Norman Fussell observed, had turned her into the imitation of a famous clown.

There was a knocking on the door then: some neighbour, some Eyetalian, to see whether they wanted the police. No, said Norman Fussell, it was only a slight difference being settled between friends.

But Hannah cried.

"All the good money!" she blubbed. "And what is old paintings? We only done it for your own good."

That, apparently, was something people were unable to resist.

"Yes, Hannah," Dubbo agreed. "You are honest. If anybody is."

He could not get breath for more.

She was relieved to see that the blood she had noticed could not have been her own, but was trickling out of the abo's mouth.

"You knocked a tooth, eh?"

"Yes," he could just bother.

So now Hannah had to whimper because she was tenderhearted, and blood was sad, like hospitals, and wet nights, and old bags of greasy women, and fallen arches on hot feet, and the faces of people going along beneath the green neon.

"Arr, dear!" she cried, but checked herself enough to call, "Don't forget your money, Alf. Your money. Arr, well. You know it will be safe with me. You know I never bit anybody's ear."

For Dubbo had gone along the passage into that room of which the cardboard walls had failed to protect. Perhaps, after all, only a skull was the box for secrets.

But that, too, he knew, and swayed, would not hold forever; it must burst open from all that would collect inside it. All pouring out, from tadpoles and clumsy lizards, to sheets of lightning and pillars of fire. For there was no containing thoughts, unless you persuaded somebody--only a friend would be willing--to take an axe, and smash up the fatal box for good and all. How it would have scared him, though, to step out from amongst the mess, and face those who would have come in, who would be standing round amongst the furniture, waiting to receive. Then the Reverend Jesus Calderon, for all he raised his pale hand, and exerted the authority of his sad eyes, would not save a piebald soul from the touch of fur and feather, or stem the slither of cold scales.

The weight of night fell heavy at last on the house in Abercrombie Crescent. Norm Fussell, a nervous type, said he was going walk-about. Hannah did not go on the job--she was done up--but took an aspro, or three, and knew she would not drop off. Yet, it was proved, she must have floated on the surface of a sleep.

About five, the whore got up. She was not accustomed to see the grey light sprawling on an empty bed; it gave her the jimmies. She would have liked a yarn, to put the marshmallow back into life by offering right sentiments. There is nothing comforts like worn opinions. But in the absence of opportunity, she looked along the passage, touching her bruises.

There she saw the abo's door was open.

"Alf!" she called once or twice, but low.

She began to go along then, running her hand along the wall.

The room, it appeared, was empty. She had to switch on finally to see, although the electric light was cruel. But Dubbo had gone all right. Had taken his tin box, it seemed, and smoked off.

All around, amongst the junk she had been in the habit of shoving away in that room, was matchwood. He had, she saw, brought the axe from the yard--it was still standing in the room--and split his old pictures up. Nothing else. All those bloody boards of pictures. There they were, laying.

The thin light was screaming down from the bare electric globe.

Well, she realized presently, she could let the stuff lay where it was, and use it up in time as kindling. She was glad then. She had known other men do their blocks, and bust up a whole houseful of valuable furniture.

As she went back slow along the passage, in which the light was beginning to throb, from grey to white, gradually and naturally, it occurred to her the abo had not asked her for his money; it would still be in there under the handkerchiefs. He would come back, of course, and she would surrender up the envelope, because she was an honest woman. But sometimes a person did not come back. Sometimes a person died. Or sometimes what mattered of a person, the will or something, died in advance, and they did not seem to care. She remembered the abo the night before, after he got blown, propping himself in the middle of the carpet, on the bones of legs, all bones and breathlessness. If anyone had knocked on him at that stage, he might have sounded hollow, like a crab. But she did not think he had shown her his eyes, and in her anxiety to reconstruct a situation, she would have liked to remember.

Still, Hannah was throbbing with hopes. In the cool of the morning, she was already on fire. She was back in her room by now. She would move the envelope from the drawer, for safety, since it had been seen. Not that Norm, of course. Norm was honest too.

Dubbo did not return to the house in Abercrombie Crescent. Hannah's place was connected in his mind with some swamp that he remembered without having seen, and from which the white magic of love and charity had failed to exorcise the evil spirits. Certainly he had never expected much, but was sickened afresh each time his attitude was justified. Angels were demons in disguise. Even Mrs Pask had dropped her blue robe, and grown brass nipples and a beak. Such faith as he had, lay in his own hands. Through them he might still redeem what Mr Calderon would have referred to as the soul, and which remained in his imagining something between a material shape and an infinite desire. So, in those acts of praise which became his paintings, he would try to convey and resolve his condition of mind.

As far as the practical side of his existence was concerned, it was easy enough to find work, and he went from job to job for a while after he had run from Hannah's. He took a room on the outskirts of Barranugli, in the house of a Mrs Noonan, where no questions were asked, and where bare walls, and a stretcher with counterpane of washed-out roses, provided him with a tranquil background for his thoughts. He read a good deal now, both owing to a physical languor caused by his illness, and because of a rage to arrive at understanding. Mostly he read the Bible, or the few art books he had bought, but for preference the books of the Prophets, and even by now the Gospels. The latter, however, with suspicion and surprise. And he would fail, as he had always failed before, to reconcile those truths with what he had experienced. Where he could accept God because of the spirit that would work in him at times, the duplicity of the white men prevented him considering Christ, except as an ambitious abstraction, or realistically, as a man.

When the white man's war ended, several of the whites bought Dubbo drinks to celebrate the peace, and together they spewed up in the streets, out of stomachs that were, for the occasion, of the same colour. At Rosetree's factory, though, where he began to work shortly after, Dubbo was always the abo. Nor would he have wished it otherwise, for that way he could travel quicker, deeper, into the hunting grounds of his imagination.

The white men had never appeared pursier, hairier, glassier, or so confidently superior as they became at the excuse of peace. As they sat at their benches at Rosetree's, or went up and down between the machines, they threatened to burst right out of their singlets, and assault a far too passive future. Not to say the suspected envoys of another world.

There was a bloke, it was learnt, at one of the drills down the lower end, some kind of bloody foreigner. Whom the abo would watch with interest. But the man seldom raised his eyes. And the abo did not expect.

Until certain signs were exchanged, without gesture or direct glance.

How they began to communicate, the blackfellow could not have explained. But a state of trust became established by subtler than any human means, so that he resented it when the Jew finally addressed him in the washroom, as if their code of silence might thus have been compromised. Later, he realized, he was comforted to know that the Chariot did exist outside the prophet's vision and his own mind.