The Vivisector (30 page)

‘Suppose I don’t go in with poor bloody one-lung Rafferty, into the sandwich business? That’s too bad, but you’ve sometimes gotter think about yerself.’ Her fingers were totting up his flies, but absently. ‘Supposing I concentrate on you, eh? Hurtle, love? D’you think anybody’s gunner buy this sort of art work? T’isn’t exactly pretty, is it?’

‘Not supposed to be.’

‘What is it, then? Explain to me. All this about modern art.’

‘If you could put it in words, I wouldn’t want to paint.’

Brandy, and gas heat, and Nance Lightfoot too, were making him doze. When he woke there was less sound of traffic in the street. Nance must have finished the brandy: he heard the bottle thump across the carpet and reach the lino.

She had turned nasty, it seemed. ‘. . . got a crick in me bloody neck lyin’ on this narrer bed talkun to a corpse. When I only wanter help yer. You’re just not realistic, Hurtle. Or perhaps it’s me. To get stuck with an intellectual no-hope artist . . .’

While trying to soothe her navel, he longed to explore every silence he had ever let slip through lack of appreciation. The gas fire continued hissing at him in blue.

Suddenly she had got her mouth, or muzzle, into his ear: the words were propelled like bullets. ‘What your sort don’t realize, ’ she wasn’t saying, she was firing into his brain, ‘is that other people exist. While you’re all gummed up in the great art mystery, they’re alive, and breakun their necks for love.’

‘You attend to that, don’t you?’

‘What?’

‘Love.’

‘That? There’s more love between the iron and the board!’ She kicked out, but as her shoes were off, she hurt herself.

‘Oh God,’ she moaned in a kind of mental revulsion, ‘when I think of men. The stockbrokers that are gunner miss their trains, the waterside bulls, the ones that apologize for their trusses, and those that are afraid they’ll carry home a load of syph! Oh, God!’ She continued heaving and protesting.

He wanted to console her great curvetting body. ‘Why do you do it, then?’

‘Because I do ut good,’ she shouted. ‘It’s my art—ha-ha!’ She got, or fell, off the bed. ‘And brings the gravy in.’

The fire had given up, the gas withdrawn to the wrong side of the meter. There was an inky silence in the room before she began feeling her way round the wall.

Then she pulled the light on: it was so sudden it wrinkled them both disastrously.

She was mumbling looking for her shoes: ‘. . . knock off a coupler shickered sailors. Pay for the art-work! By this timer night, the Navy’s pretty free . . .’

Hobbling and excoriating.

‘Don’t say it’s dishonest. It isn’t dishonest if they’re so damn stoopid. Oh, God!’ She joined her mouth to his. ‘I couldn’t ’uv made love to you tonight. It would ’uv been sinful. You didn’t know I was religious, eh?’

He listened to Nance Lightfoot tumbling down the stairs.

 

Next morning he began to work, but felt too dry, too corrugated. He got the wind up, too. He was less an artist than the night before: throwing up his job with the Greek to impress a prostitute.

Soon after, he stopped work altogether. He went through the advertisements, and decided to apply for the job of cleaner in one of the big department stores. He was taken on, and agreed to start the same night. It had quite an antiseptic effect after Nance Bloody Lightfoot.

Most of that afternoon he mooned around. There was a soft, lyrical breeze; there were pale, lettuce-coloured streamers of light above the indolent harbour. The mood he was in, and the prospect of a new job, prompted him to extravagance: he took the little ferry to Kirribilli. The voyage was so gently soothing he almost fell in love with poor bloody Nance. He would have liked to feel her thigh against his as the ferry rocked them. He could even have put up with some of her marshmallowy ideas.

On the way back a wind sprang up. The sea grew metal scales, and over the charred city an angry light reminded him of what he was. All his fellow passengers look so soft and vulnerable. Nance, if present, could have suffered worst of all.

That evening he ate a cardboard-and-gristle pie near the Quay before going back to his room to change. He would do so quickly, he decided, without looking at the drawings.

On the way up, the landlady called to him that a letter had been delivered by hand: a kiddy had brought it; which endowed the letter with greater virtue. He carried it up, examining it, trying to recognize the semi-literate writing.

The envelope contained a five-pound note and a scribbled sheet:

 

That night, pushing the mop draped with a waxed flannel round the floors of the deserted store, he had never had less faith in art. He blamed Nance rather than his menial employment. Art as he had known it, as Maman’s little sissy boy, as a priggish, pimply youth, or l’Huissier’s know-all pupil, had appeared more desirable, not to say more convincing, than life; when Nance Lightfoot, in her drunkenness, had started raising doubts. As he polished the scarred floors, a vision of Nance’s solid limbs seemed to prove her argument. He began to erect against his overall. He could have thrown the mop away, marched up to Darlinghurst, jumped the queue, and rooted the pross like any self-respecting ponce; till he remembered the arm protecting her eyes from him, the glad shudders of fulfilment, that most innocent place where the hair springs out of the naked temple, a drop of semen lost in stubble. So the ponce was donged. He was her lover again: he was the lover of his perjured art, by which he would celebrate the permanence of her rolling belly.

The following day, in his cramped room, a sense of freedom started him whistling and singing, until he realized the wrestling match was on: to recreate the body as he saw it without losing the feel of flesh. He knew, or thought he knew, how to fix the formal outline; perhaps he had already done so. Now he was faced with laying on the colour: the lettuce tones; kohlrabi purple; crimson radish; old boiled swede for the shabbier pockets of skin. What he conceived that day was vegetable in form and essence: limbs spongy in substance, though still crisp enough for breaking off; the necklaces around the fibrous throat carved deeper by love-throes. Like all human vegetables she was offering herself to the knife she only half suspected.

At the end of several hours he stood it face to the wall. He couldn’t look at it any more. He fell on the bed, and the rusty frame pinged and wheezed back at him. He was swallowed by a clutter of eiderdown—or paddocks of sleep.

For it was in fact the same journey as they jolted through the early light the same gullies in spite of the dazzlement of rock and dew the hills offering the same outline he tended to lose sight of since climbing down since hearing the future crunch away out of reach with those he had depended on.

Instead, it was herself standing at the bedside feeling his forehead.

‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘What were you dreaming?’ Herself dreamy by contagion.

‘Nothing.’ He drew in his breath too sharply between his teeth.

‘Whatever it was, it looked good,’ said Nance.

Honestly he couldn’t have told her his dream: it was too formless.

‘There must have been some woman you never told me about,’ she insisted.

He would have to get away from Nance: the smell of her powder, the spearmint she was chewing. The thought of her peering again at his work made him want to lock the balcony door.

When Nance was, in fact, his work; and he had only begun creating her.

‘You don’t look half sour,’ she mumbled through the gobbet she was chewing.

Then she stuck out her tongue, exposing the strings of warm, chewed, putty-coloured gum.

‘Here’—she came and sat on the edge of the bed, tearing the paper off a strip of fresh spearmint—‘stuff in some of this. There’s nothun like gum for puttin’ the juice back inter life.’

With his tongue he warded it off, still scented, still brittle. ‘Pffeugh!’

‘It’s what they all do now.’

‘I’m not “they”,’ he announced too prissily.

‘No,’ she said, ‘you’re the real aristercratic prick—in yer grandad’s ring.’

For safety’s sake he had taken to wearing the ring, and she had asked him to tell her what it was.

‘I could shit on you,’ he told her now.

‘Go on,’ she said, ‘if it’ll do you any good—through yer granddad’s bloody old ring!’

‘Oh Christ!’ He rolled over so that he would have his back to her.

‘I was never taught to be blasphemous,’ she said.

...

‘Hurtle?’

...

What were you dreaming about when I come in?’

...

‘Hurt?’

Because there was something in her voice, something which added to what he was trying to convey in paint, he turned again towards her, and said: ‘I don’t know, I tell you—truly. But once I went on a journey with my old man—my foster father—we got down very early from the train, and drove and drove in a buggy. There were paddocks on either side. I was half asleep. Perhaps I’d dropped right off. Then suddenly the sun came up.’

‘Oh yes, I know!’ her voice was moaning and grappling him to her. ‘Your limbs are still numb, but your thoughts aren’t!’ Her eyes were country eyes.

Everybody, it seemed even Maman, he remembered, had experienced the original thaw; so he fitted his mouth into Nance’s similar one, and they were throbbing together in the painfully bright light of memory.

When they had finished she showed him what she had brought: a pork pie looking as edible as a castle; a cream horn the raspberry blood had begun to stain; and a polished apple. The little girl couldn’t have exposed herself more completely under the pepper tree in the yard.

He should have thanked her, but as he was hungry he broke into the crenellation of the pork pie.

‘How is it?’ she asked humbly.

‘All right,’ he answered or munched. ‘How were the footballers? ’

‘Oh, strong!’ She pulled up a sleeve to show; then she pulled it down again, and said in short sharp tones: ‘I don’t wanter talk about men. Or sex. I do it as a business, like anything else.’

‘What about us?’

‘Isn’t that love?’

It made him feel guilty scoffing down her pork pie.

‘I want you to tell me about yer paintuns,’ she said.

‘Aren’t you trying to turn them into a business too?’

‘Well, it is in a way,’ she said, frowning it out, ‘isn’t it? But if it keeps you happy. And if I finance yer—to keep you happy—I oughter get my dollop back from the investment.’

‘Where does the love come into this?’ He looked at his watch.

She said: ‘It just does. I love you. You’ve gotter love somebody, haven’t yer?’ She was sitting on the edge of the bed, jiggling one of her heels.

‘I suppose you have. In the end,’ he said. ‘But I’ve got to think about my job.’

‘What job?’

He told her.

‘Don’t you trust me?’ She sounded genuinely dispirited.

Actually he trusted nobody, not even himself, or only that part of him which, by some special grace, might illuminate a moment of truth; but he hugged her and said: ‘Yes, I trust you, Nance. Of course.’

She should have been consoled.

They went downstairs, and up George Street, towards Martin Place. The first lights of evening were still looking too electric.

‘If you love me,’ he said, ‘would you be prepared to marry me?’

Perhaps it was subjecting her to a test more brutal than she deserved. She did harp on realism, though.

When she had thought a bit, she said: ‘No.’ It sounded final. ‘If I married you,’ she said, ‘I might become your prostitute.’

As they walked, swinging hands like a pair of lovers, he realized he was the prostitute: he was seducing Nance Lightfoot into giving him, not money, not her actual body so much as its formal vessel, from which to pour his visions of life.

On reaching the corner where they would have to part, Nance began, very heavily matter-of-fact: ‘I’m going away, Hurtle, for a day or two—professionally. The old sod gives me the gripes, but why pass up the good hay?’ She stuck her nose into her handbag, and continued more spasmodically: ‘Case you—run—short, love—better take these.’ She produced a couple of screwed-up notes.

‘What d’you think I took a job for?’

She looked puzzled.

‘The job? Of course. But this will buy any little luxuries.’ She turned it over on thick, bemused lips.

While flickering on this private situation of whore and ponce which he found so repulsive, her eyelids began to exert a fascination: the slightly scored, greasy skin had escaped the ritual powder, not that the loaded mouth looked more protected; but he remembered kissing the eyelids when it was not expected of him, and how she had fallen back, not crying but gasping, whinging, as though he had struck too deep.

‘Well,’ she said gloomily, ‘you’re gunner be late, aren’t you? For the job.’