An Indecent Obsession (22 page)

‘He was talking about you, Mike. Dirty talk.’

‘There’s nothing dirty about me, Ben, so why let it bother you?’ Michael got up to fetch the chess set, and began to lay it out on the table.

‘I’ll be black tonight,’ he said.

‘
I
am black.’

‘All right, then, I’ll be white and you can be black. My advantage,’ said Michael cheerfully.

Benedict’s face twisted, his eyes closed, his head reared back and tears began to catch the light between his lashes. ‘Oh, Mike, I didn’t know there were any children there!’ he cried.

Michael paid no attention. Instead, he moved his king’s pawn two squares forward, and simply sat waiting. After a moment Benedict’s eyes opened, saw the move through a wall of tears; he duplicated it quickly, snuffling like a child, wiping his nose on the side of his hand. Michael advanced his queen’s pawn to stand alongside the king’s pawn, and again Benedict duplicated the move, his tears beginning to dry. And when Michael lifted his king’s knight over the pawn in front of it and set it down ahead of his king’s bishop, Benedict chuckled, shaking his head.

‘You never learn, do you?’ he asked, toying tenderly with a bishop.

Sister Langtry heaved an enormous sigh of relief and got up, smiling a good night to everyone before leaving. Neil also got up, but walked around the table to where Matt was sitting, quite forgotten in the little crisis.

‘Come and have a talk with me in my room,’ Neil said, touching him lightly on the arm. ‘Colonel Chinstrap gave me something this afternoon I’d like to share with you. It’s got a black label, just like Luce, but inside—ah! It’s pure, unadulterated gold.’

Matt looked bewildered. ‘Isn’t it lights out?’

‘Officially I suppose it is, but we all seem to be a bit wound up tonight, which is probably why Sis has gone off duty without tucking us up. Besides, Ben and Mike look settled to chess. And don’t forget Nugget—if we do get to sleep before he heaves up his guts, he’ll only wake us.’

Matt’s movements as he got up seemed a little fumbling, but he was smiling with keen pleasure. ‘I’d love to come and talk. And solve your riddle. What’s labelled black yet inside is pure gold?’

Neil’s cubicle was just that, a space six feet wide by eight feet long, into which he had managed to jam a bed, a table and one hard chair, besides several shelves nailed rather precariously to the walls where he wasn’t likely to stand up and hit his head on them. It was littered with painter’s impedimenta, though someone in the know would have seen immediately that he had limited his techniques to less permanent and messy media than oil. Pencils, papers, charcoal, brushes, jars of dirty water, tins of children’s watercolors, tubes of poster color, crayons and pastels. There was absolutely no order in the chaos; Sister Langtry had given up long ago trying to make him keep the cubicle tidy, and merely bore with fatalistic calm Matron’s endless strictures about the state of Captain Parkinson’s room. Luckily he could when he wanted charm the birds out of the trees, even, as he said most disrespectfully, a silly old chook like Matron.

The perfect host, he got Matt settled comfortably on the bed and swept various bits and pieces off the hard chair onto the floor before seating himself on it. There were two small tooth tumblers and two bottles of Johnnie Walker black label Scotch whisky sitting on the end of the table. Neil slit the seal and prized the cork carefully out of one bottle, then poured a generous measure into each glass.

‘Cheers!’ he said, and drank deeply.

‘Mud in your eye,’ said Matt, and did the same.

They gasped rather like two swimmers coming up after a dive into unexpectedly frigid water.

‘I’ve been a sober man too long,’ Neil said, his eyes watering. ‘God, this stuff packs a punch, doesn’t it?’

‘It tastes like heaven,’ said Matt, and drank again.

They paused to breathe deeply and savor the effect.

‘Something must have happened tonight to push Ben off the deep end,’ said Neil. ‘Do you know anything?’

‘It was Luce, chattering like a machine gun and taunting Ben with killing civilians. Poor old Ben burst out crying. Bloody Luce! He told me to go to hell and pushed off out somewhere. I think that man’s possessed.’

‘Or else he really is the devil,’ said Neil.

‘Oh, he’s flesh and blood, all right.’

‘He wants to be mighty careful, then. Otherwise, one of us might put his mortality to the test.’

Matt laughed, holding out his glass. ‘I’ll volunteer.’

Neil refilled the glass, then refilled his own. ‘God, how I needed this! Colonel Chinstrap must be a mind reader.’

‘Did he really give it to you? I thought you were joking.’

‘No, it came from him in person.’

‘What on earth for?’

‘Oh, I expect it’s a part of his ill-gotten hoard, and he worked out how much he can get through himself before Base Fifteen folds up. Then he decided to be Father Christmas and give the surplus away.’

Matt’s hand trembled. ‘We’re going home?’

Cursing the loosening effect of the whisky on his tongue, Neil looked at Matt gently, but of course all the gentle looks in the world couldn’t penetrate blindness, real or imagined. ‘About a month to go, old son.’

‘So soon? She’ll know!’

‘Sooner or later she has to know.’

‘I thought I’d have a bit more time than that.’

‘Oh, Matt… She’ll understand.’

‘Will she? Neil, I don’t want her any more! I can’t even think of that any more! She’s been waiting to have her husband back, and what’s she going to get? Not a husband.’

‘You can’t say that from where you’re sitting now. Try not to cross your bridges—you don’t know what’s going to happen. But the more you stew about it, the worse it will be.’

Matt sighed, tipped up his glass. ‘I’m glad you had this stuff on hand. It’s like an anaesthetic.’

Neil changed the subject. ‘Luce must have been in the foul mood to end all foul moods tonight. He had a go at Sis before he had a go at Ben,’ he said.

‘I know.’

‘Did you hear it too?’

‘I heard what he said to Ben.’

‘You mean there was more to it than the machine gun?’

‘A lot more. He came raving out of Sis’s office and went for Ben because Ben objected to the things he was calling Sis. But what got Ben so upset was what he said about Mike.’

Neil’s head turned; he looked at Matt as if at something precious. ‘What exactly did he say about Mike?’

‘Oh, that he was a queen. Did you ever hear anything so silly? He kept telling Ben he’d read it in Mike’s papers.’

‘The bastard!’ Oh, sometimes fate was kind! Handed all this, and by a blind man, a man who couldn’t see how he looked, what effect the news had… ‘Here, Matt, have some more.’

The whisky went very quickly to Matt’s head, or at least so Neil thought until he looked at his watch and saw it was well past eleven. He got up, draped Matt’s arm about his shoulders and hoisted him to his feet, feeling none too steady on his own.

‘Come on, old son, time you were in bed.’

Benedict and Michael were putting the chess set away; Michael came quickly to help Neil, and together they stripped Matt of his trousers, shirt, singlet and underpants, then tipped him into bed, for once without his pajamas.

‘Out to it,’ said Michael, smiling.

And looking at that calm, immensely strong face, knowing what he was going to do to blight it, Neil suddenly loved it clear through to his whisky-maudlined soul; he put his arms around Michael’s neck and his head on Michael’s shoulder, close to tears.

‘Come and have a drink,’ he said sadly. ‘You and Ben come and have a drink with an old man. If you don’t I’m going to cry, because I’m my old man’s son. If I start thinking about you and him and her I’m going to cry. Come and have a drink.’

‘We can’t have you crying,’ said Michael, disentangling himself. ‘Here, Ben, we’ve got an invitation.’

Benedict had finished stowing the chess set in the ward cupboard, and came across. Neil reached out an arm and hung onto him.

‘Come and have a drink,’ he said. ‘There’s a bottle and a half left. I’m going to stop, but I can’t leave all that lovely grog there undrunk, can I?’

Benedict drew back. ‘I don’t drink,’ he said.

‘It’ll do you good tonight,’ said Michael firmly. ‘Come on now, none of that holier than thou crap.’

So all together they walked across the ward, Michael and Benedict supporting Neil between them. At the corridor junction Michael reached up to switch off the light above the refectory table. There was a discordant rattle from the fly-curtain inside the front door as Luce came in, not stealthily but defiantly, as if he expected Sister Langtry to be lying in wait for him.

The three men stood looking at him, and he at them. Michael cursed Neil’s dead weight between him and Benedict, worried that Luce’s sudden appearance would start Ben off again. But at that moment Nugget managed to terminate his headache by vomiting.

‘Oh, God, what a revolting noise!’ said Neil, coming to life immediately.

He pushed Benedict and Michael through into his cubicle, went in after them, and shut the door firmly.

3

Luce continued toward his bed without another glance in the direction of the cubicle; he was alone in the ward in the soft dimness, with only a hideous retching sound for company.

So tired he could hardly move, he sat down on the edge of his bed; he had walked for hours up and down the paths of Base Fifteen, along the beaches, through the pallid groves of coconut palms. Thinking, thinking… Wanting with a blind ferocity to lash out at Langtry until her head went rolling away as free as a football. The stuck-up bitch! Luce Daggett wasn’t good enough, and then she’d had the hide to compound the insult by throwing herself away on a shirt-lifting pansy. She was mad. If she’d picked him she could have led the life of a princess, for he knew he was going to be rich and famous, a bigger star than Clark Gable and Gary Cooper combined. You couldn’t want something as much as he wanted that and not get it. She’d said that, too. Every single minute of every single hour of every single day since before he left Woop-Woop had been directed toward hitting the big time as an actor.

On the day he arrived in Sydney, a half-grown lad of almost fifteen, he already knew that acting was his ticket to the big time. And he already hungered for the big time. He had never seen a play nor been to the moving pictures, but he had been listening for most of his school days to the adoring chatter of the girls about this actor and that actor, and fended off their suggestions that he should try to get into pictures when he grew up. Let them mind their own business; he’d do it his way and not have any idiot female walking around boasting that she’d pushed him into it, that it was all her brilliant idea.

He went to work as a storeman in a dry goods warehouse down on Day Street, filching the job right out from under the noses of several hundred men who had also applied. The manager had not been able to resist the lad with the beautiful hair and the amazing bright face, the quick mind to back them up. And the lad turned out to be a very good worker, too.

It hadn’t taken Luce long to discover where and how to break into the acting profession, and he was working, therefore he was eating, so he grew quickly, filled out and soon looked older than his age. He sat around in Repins drinking innumerable cups of coffee, hung around Doris Fitton at the Independent Theatre, made his face known to the Genesians, and finally began to get small parts in radio plays at 2GB and the ABC, even a few one-liners at 2CH. He had a wonderful voice for radio, non-sibilant, the right timbre, and a quick ear for accents, so that by the time he had been six months moving in the right circles he had polished the Australian from his voice unless it was required.

Envying the people who could afford to finish high school and go on to university, he educated himself as best he could by reading everything people recommended, though his pride would not permit him to ask outright what he should read; he would winkle the information out of his friends very cleverly, then go to the library.

By the time he was eighteen he was earning enough from small radio jobs to be able to quit his warehouse employment. He found a little room for rent on Hunter Street, and did it up as artfully as he could by lining the walls with solid books, only he didn’t tell anyone that the books were job lots purchased at Paddy’s Markets for as little as threepence the dozen, as much as two and eightpence for a leather-bound set of Dickens.

As an escort he was a notorious nipfarthing—the girls soon learned that if Luce took them out, they paid. And after thinking it over, most of them decided to continue to pay quite cheerfully for the privilege of being seen out with a man who could literally turn all heads in a room. It was not long, of course, before he discovered the world of older women, women who liked nothing better than to foot his bills in return for the pleasure of his company in public, his penis in private.

At this time he began to train himself sexually, so that no matter how uninspiring, offputting or downright ugly the lady was who took him into her bed, he could rise to the occasion most satisfactorily. Simultaneously he developed a line of lover’s small talk which charmed them into overestimating their desirability. And the presents flowed in, suits and shoes, hats and coats, cuff links and watches, ties and shirts and hand-made underwear. It worried him not at all to be the recipient of such largesse, for he knew he paid in full.

Nor did it worry him when he learned there were plenty of older men willing to indulge him financially in return for his sexual favors, and in time he came to prefer older men to older women; they were more honest about their needs and their monetary obligations, nor did he have to weary himself to distraction perpetually reassuring them that they were still beautiful, still desirable. Older men had better taste, too; from them he discovered how to dress superlatively well, how to conduct himself like an aristocrat at everything from a cocktail party to a ministerial banquet, and how to sniff out the best people.

After several small parts in small plays put on at small theatres, he auditioned for the Royal, and almost got the part. The second time he auditioned for the Royal he did get the part, a significant role in a straight drama. The critics treated him kindly, and he knew as he read the notices that he was really on his way at last.