The White Body of Evening (2 page)

As they made their way into a drab hotel foyer on Elizabeth Street, and then into the beige wedding suite, it was this regret that ate into him. He looked at her long, lithe body in the darkened room and firmly caught hold of her wrist, drawing her towards him.

“Albert,” she said, surprised at this fervour. “Albert, are you very drunk?”

He didn’t say anything, but yanked her down onto the bed where he rapidly began to undress her. She lay back, unintentionally hindering his progress, unsure of herself. He was mauling her. Touched by the awkwardness of his desire, she giggled to herself. The laughter, so slight, so unobtrusive, washed over him like a drug. He lay back on the bed and she fell beside him, nestling into his arm, feeling more affectionate than she had the entire day. At that moment he thought again about the waxwork corpse, the white skin, the slit throat and the leering Chinamen. It was as vivid in his memory as it had been when he was twelve or thirteen years of age. Something in him ached. He was drunk enough for the room to spin as soon as he was still.

“Anna, love,” he said, “I think I need a bit of air.”

“I’ll be waiting for you,” she said with a hint of regret as he stood up and moved towards the door.

For a moment she felt foolish, having to negotiate his drunkenness with this trite token of affection. But as the door closed she was relieved and grateful to be alone. She quickly drifted to the edge of sleep, overwhelmed by the exhausting jumble of emotions and sensations that had assailed her during the day and that now danced before her in a confused montage. For a moment she was stunned at how thoroughly she had lost control of her life. How had it happened? Albert hadn’t forced her to have sex, but she hadn’t exactly sought it out either. Afterwards he had kissed her tenderly and treated her well, and so it seemed all right. But now that they were married all she wanted was the obliviousness of sleep.

Albert walked back down Bourke Street into the heart of the city, which was alive with activity as young men and women began to assemble at street corners, at coffee stalls on the pavement and around the entrances to the theatres and the dance halls. It was a warm night, almost the beginning of summer, and there was a carnality about the unfolding evening that overwhelmed him. He meandered through the crowds and in a few minutes was walking down Little Bourke Street, where he imagined wretched opium dens hidden away in back rooms and wasted addicts lost in frightful dreams of ancient cruelty played out amidst pagodas and burning paper lanterns. At Russell Street he turned north and shortly after was on Little Lonsdale Street, watching an itinerant patterer trying to sell chapbooks to uninterested passers-by. He walked aimlessly for a block or so until he came to a row of decrepit cottages fronted by a pair of ragged young women. In his impaired state they looked to him like visions dragged up from the depths of a troubled dream.

“Why don’t you come inside, Sir?” said the bolder of the two, stroking the cuff of his jacket and gesturing towards a dirty brown building with sagging gutters and boarded-up windows.

The girl was standing directly in front of him, looking unflinchingly into his eyes with a subtle hint of malevolence.

“What’s your name?” he asked, laughing. But he knew already that he wanted to touch her, to grip her arms in his hands, to draw her to him. His heart was beating furiously as he struggled to remain aloof.

“Angelique,” the girl said.

The name had a delirious quality that swirled like an elaborate arabesque. Hadn’t he married Anna for the sake of appearances? Surely she didn’t expect him to sacrifice all of himself to that lie? Angelique’s eyes were murky green, the colour of the ocean, and shaped like two perfectly symmetrical almonds. Her gaze paralysed him with indecision. Again he thought of the two wax Chinamen and the bleeding body.

“Anything you want, Sir,” she said, taking his hand. “Suck and swallow, anal buggery. Anything you want.”

Stunned by this frankness, he was on the verge of following her into the hovel when, quite unconsciously, he shook himself free and turned back towards the hotel.

He stumbled along the crowded streets with only the barest recollection of what had just happened. The noise of the city, the din of the trams, the frenetic movement of rushing bodies swept him up. It was only a matter of moments before he was outside the hotel on Elizabeth Street, mounting the stairs and opening the door to the room. Anna was in bed, stirring drowsily as he walked past her into the bathroom. He looked at his haggard face in the mirror, quickly turned on the tap, thinking that he’d wash away the smell of the streets, and proceeded to vomit into the sink.

“Are you all right?”Anna asked, half asleep.

“Yes. A bit seedy. Tired.”

“Come to sleep then.”

She was so trusting, so unsuspecting. How was it possible? He felt sick at the thought of his own potential for depravity. But as he lay down beside his wife and closed his eyes, the thought of the girl – malevolent and vulgar – smouldered away within him until the embers caught again and the darkness of sleep was consumed with flames.

A
nna tried to look at ease as she sat on the couch and read a novel about the perils of love. She could hear Albert stomping impatiently around the bedroom. He’s too big for the house, she thought. When he appeared at the threshold of the cramped living room, her eyes wandered away from the page in search of his, but he walked past her as if she were not there. She returned to the novel, so anxious she couldn’t concentrate on the words. They skipped and blurred in front of her as she listened to her husband groaning into the kitchen.

“Are you all right, Albert?” she asked, dropping the book on her lap.

“Hmm, hmm,” he said groggily, as if he’d just woken up. “Headache. Just a headache.”

She closed her eyes, resting her hand on her stomach, pressing it for signs of life. Only the thought of the child let her pull herself above the loneliness of her marriage, the fear lurking at the bottom of her.

At times she suspected he felt trapped, as if he had been tricked into marrying her, or that living in her house offended his pride. When her aunt died Anna inherited her small cottage in South Melbourne, and Albert had moved in shortly after the marriage. It was a dank little place in Brooke Street, a narrow, curving lane crowded to the point of congestion with similar single-storey cottages. There was no sewerage in the area and the yard at the back of the house was often plagued by puddles rising up from the swamp beneath it. Compared with the larger brick and stone houses with nice wide verandahs only blocks away from them, it felt dilapidated.

Albert muttered something to himself. When she stood up and went to check on him, he was sitting opposite the sink. She put her hand on his shoulder.

“What’s the matter?” she said gently. She knew it was futile asking.

He shook his head and shrugged off the question. “Nothing, love,” he said. “Just work. I’m feeling worn out.” He couldn’t look her in the eye as he said it.

She thought it prudent not to push him, sat back down on the couch, and gave in to the atmosphere of unease he generated, deciding to make the best of it, for the sake of the child.

Sometimes, when a mood of tenderness overcame him, her gratitude seemed to embarrass him back into his usual remoteness. Only when they had company did his spirits seem to lighten. When Sid and Sadie Packard came over, or his brother Robert, he was comfortably distracted and regained some of the simple amicability he’d had when they’d first met.

Usually Sid and Albert discussed politics, but in a language that was alienating to Anna. Early in the new year Sid had started talking about joining an anti-Chinese league. Cheap Chinese and Kanaka labour was putting real Australians out of work, he said. Anna thought that Albert merely kept up the tone of these conversations to save face, and in fact she pitied him when she suspected that he was being pulled along by Sid’s sense of urgency.

She thought it was strange that people could talk about real Australians in a country that was so young, in a country that, in fact, was not even a country at all, at least not in the old European sense of a
Volk
with a shared history etched so indelibly into the landscape. It seemed so wishful to her, innocent even. At the same time she was bewildered by her own lack of connectedness to the place. Sometimes she felt that she was floating just above the ground, light enough to be blown away altogether, while others around her were walking with their feet firmly planted on the solid terrain.

“Don’t you think it’s a little odd to talk about an Australian people,” she ventured timidly, “at least if you mean a people other than the original blacks?”

Albert poured another beer, deferring to Sid.

“That might have been true once upon a time,” Sid explained patiently, “but nowadays a real change is occurring. White Australians are standing up for their rights more than ever. For the first time we’re coming together as a people.”

“It’s different, of course, for you Barossa Germans,” Albert added. “I mean not really speaking English and all.”

“I suppose,” said Anna.

“But on the other hand,” Sid went on, “the English and the German races are really the same. And here we have a chance to protect ourselves from the low influences of Latin and Slavic peoples that have mixed everything up in Europe.”

Unconvinced, Anna decided then and there that she’d have to teach her child to speak her parents’ language, as a bulwark against people like Sid. She had noticed him glancing quizzically at the tattered volumes of Goethe and Heine on the shelves and the wistful Rhineland vistas on the wall. The banality of the coming Australian nation, concentrated in his suspicious eyes, filled her with dread.

“How’s the tummy coming along?” Sadie asked, patting Anna’s knee.

“You can’t really see much,” said Anna.

“Well, they say the muscles are firmer the first time.”

As Sadie examined Anna’s unobtrusive belly, there was a knock at the door. Jack McDermott, a next-door neighbour who worked on the wharves, peered in through the open front window.

“I say, Albert, you wouldn’t have a bottle of disinfectant, would you? Hamish has damn near cut his bloody hand off.”

“Oh, poor kid,” sighed Anna, moving into the bathroom while Albert let Jack inside.

“What did the young fella do?” he asked, welcoming the new visitor with a friendly pat on the shoulder.

“I don’t know. Bloody idiot was mucking around with a penknife and sliced his finger.”

Anna and Sadie accompanied Jack next door, determined to be of assistance. In the kitchen of the neighbouring cottage Sarah McDermott was clutching the bleeding hand of her three-year-old son, who whined with a look of petrified shock on his pale face.

“We’ve got some alcohol and a bandage, Sarah,” Anna said. As she spoke the child stopped crying and looked at her blankly, apparently distracted by a new face in the house, though he had seen his neighbours several times before.

“Ach, Liebchen
,” said Anna under her breath as she doused the boy’s hand in spirits. Hamish winced, but didn’t cry as she wrapped the bandage tightly around his hand.

“Probably needs a stitch or two,” Sadie said.

Jack had already vanished in search of a doctor a few blocks away in St Vincent Place. Hamish clutched at Anna, who tried in vain to pass him back to his mother once the bandage was secure.

“Little bugger won’t let go,” Sarah said nervously. “Thanks Anna.”

“Lieb,” the child lisped as Anna finally managed to unload him.

When Dr Winton arrived he lifted Hamish onto his knee and slowly undid the bandage that Anna had worked so hard to put on. The cut on the child’s hand opened again and in a second or two filled with blood, which the doctor tried to conceal with the bandage.

“This is going to need a few stitches,” he said calmly, rummaging about in his leather bag. “Mustn’t let the little man here get his hand infected, must we?”

Jack held Hamish on the kitchen table while the doctor swabbed the wound and then, with no more finesse than a short–sighted seamstress, proceeded to sew the folds of skin together.

When the operation was complete, and mother and child had both been lulled into a tentative calm, the doctor strolled out onto the pavement in front of the McDermotts’ house. Albert and Sid were leaning on the fence, smoking cigarettes.

“Hello there, Albert,” Dr Winton said in a subdued, but good-natured tone of voice.

“Hello there yourself, Doc.”

Anna and Sadie had walked out onto the pavement behind him.

“Feeling all right then are we, Albert?”

“Fine, thanks.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

He bowed respectfully at Anna and then walked off down the street with a curious, self-satisfied swagger that put one in mind of an old-style dandy or flâneur of the sort that might have flourished when Melbourne was still a gold rush city able to afford such social extravagances.

“What an odd bloke,” said Sid.

Anna had noticed it too. The doctor seemed to be amused at Albert’s expense, as if there were a secret understanding between the two that played to his advantage. She wondered if Albert had been ill recently. Anyway, it was inconsiderate of Dr Winton to insinuate like that, and she resented him for it.

“You know,” said Sid after a minute, “that doctor bloke reminds me of someone, but I don’t know who.”

“Let’s go in,” said Albert, rubbing out the butt of his cigarette with his shoe.

It was twilight and the hot afternoon had faded into a warm, but dull grey. The street was silent and motionless. It put Albert on edge and he felt a tension arise in him that, he knew, was related to this strange sense of inertia as evening approached. He would have liked to have gone out somewhere, the Limerick Arms for a drink or a stroll along the bay, but knew he’d feel the inertia of nightfall all the more intensely as he tried to wrestle free of its clutches. The world took on a flatness that offered nothing but the same old amusements, frayed and threadbare, over and over again. It left him feeling empty and finally a bit hateful.