From: The OZlit Collection Vol.
2, ganGAROO
Hewson/Walker
Malevolent
Fictions
© 1996 by Paul Hewson & Linda Marie Walker and gangan books australia
S found the grey truss, the story
began. Neither of us knew about trusses. Anger is an energy, he
said beating to the electronic band (with the flat sound). We
decided on two definitions: the device worn to support a hernia,
and, to tie or bind securely. After years of minor decisions,
stilted talk, and intermittent carnality he tied himself with rope
and jumped from a tall building. He told the woman in the lift
that he'd decided to drown. But he jumped onto the concrete
parking lot and broke everything and died ninety seconds later.
The woman said she'd always remember him jerking. Held tied the
rope tight around his chest and thighs. We were on the edge, that
was the point of our involvement, he was intent on proving
mortality. Anyway. the truss was just one of those tiny instances
which inevitably lead to a larger act, and so he jumped trussed. I
loved him. But you can't argue with obsession. He even had caring
friends. He always acted stories.
It's for me to tell something about him, even though I'm
unconvinced. For instance, he was selfish. That's all. I'm left
with a German text, it was sealed in a large brown envelope. His
hair was short, his eyes green. I met someone once who he said was
his friend, and she said, I go home when he arrives, I just have
to go, can't listen to him at all. I was at a party with her a
year ago and she saw him walk in and left. I knew his capacity for
words. He bought me nothing, not a single gift. If he hadn't died
I'd have stayed with him forever. He never told other women, even
though his greed was obvious. He was often boring. But this german
text turned up. I burnt his notebooks, I don't need those
memories. He ignored one potency: I can not be depleted, there is
the joy of departure. He took twelve months to calm, to walk with
ease, to talk slowly, to believe I loved him. He wasn't a fine
man, I was bad, he was bad, together we came to arrangements.
There was the question of a child once, but we decided no. He
stuck the white cutlery rack on a wall in the passage next to the
truss and the ivory shoe horn. It was square and new. We used a
yellow one. He was a restless man, called me a burden. Whole days
became halls where he delivered liturgies about the tyranny of
things. The white cutlery rack was one. He brought it back from a
party, carried it from room to room. Hammered nails in various
spots until satisfied. He said his friend from the bookshop gave
it to him. He lied, he'd stolen it from a kitchen. He didn't ask
me to the party. Then he died. A speck spiralling down. Floating
perhaps, He was sober, said the lift woman. She was upset, said
the detectives. They came to the house in twos. I didn't have an
answer. I tried to tell them about the liturgies but they couldn't
see the link. It was the same at a second hand shop where we
looked through a suitcase of pink corsets. We knew their
connection to the white cutlery rack. I'm pleased I held back
about that suitcase.
We often walked, no money for a car. He wanted to look at the
groins of statues. Again there wasn't a no in me. He was the one
with the no's and the one waiting for them. He was caught in his
own one thousand no's. There was a fine woman's groin in a garden
in the city and a fine man's groin beside a river near the sea. I
think he got what he wanted, Let's hope so. Trussing oneself to
the inner beat of a flat sound must mean something. He did not
like his body. I did. When I saw him laid out in the morgue he was
beautiful, clear glowing skin. For a man too deep for his own
vision, he looked outwardly healthy. I've never been sick, he
said. I was always going into or coming out of tiredness. Don't
forsake me. he managed to say between abusive mouthfuls. There
were times when he had the body of a woman. I'd catch him curled
asleep naked, his balls squeezed between his thighs, and the curve
of his body from waist to knee was female, his hand resting at the
back of his knee.
I couldn't stand being ordered from various rooms of our house.
But for a reason obscure, travelling fast from his past, he
couldn't trust me with his friends. By the time I'd been notified
he was long cold. Whenever he was bored he accused me of boring
him, he bored himself to death. He said to me, he couldn't bear it
if a man made a play for me when we were out, and I'd be charmed.
Yet he put great store in being charming. It's a curious attitude.
Was. Diaphanous was his favourite word. He had the youngest hands
in the world. In every woman's life there is an essential desire.
I'm wide awake, have been for weeks, remembering his arms wrapping
me, seeing his weary eyes, and hearing his horrid cries for
clemency. He was sometimes good company. He was ready for touch,
and corrected the array of things, potato-masher, frypan,
tea-strainer, vase. He was a man damaged by beauty, endlessly
soiling his symmetry. I'd never heard of new-order.
We'd been to Kevin's the day before he went up in the lift. There
was an eye chart on the wall and a pile of women's black shoes on
the floor below. Kevin's the type who drinks all night. So was S.
Apparently he'd found an empty room with a view, bound himself,
shuffled onto the balcony and rolled over the rail. I sat quietly
all through the evening. They talked about food. I had my own
thoughts. And I made up sentences from the chart; if I stared long
enough I could hold words together and see written on Kevin's wall
between the chart and the shoes: look behind, round where the
women gather. Even the German text materialised. If people took
with them when they died their images from back of my eves I'd be
grateful, and even more so if they'd reclaim the feel of
themselves from my throat and arms and belly. He is dead, he
filled me, still does. I wish no-one had told me about his
jerking. People are rarely silent when morbid. The ears are alert
in grief.
He hung the fillets to defrost on the clothes line and so another
idea hit. This time he traded a box of paperbacks for a sack of
small mullet and invited twenty of his friends for dinner, and
directed each of them to cook their fish a different way, no-one
lost. People often came to our house, I'd close myself away and
let them drink. There was a fear about him. He was an unkind drunk
to me. To others .he was charming, but to me he exercised the
exhaustion charm induced. He'd say, don't get defiant with me.
Then he'd say, put up with these travesties. Apparently he'd been
with his good friend before catching the lift; he didn't smell
death. When S was nine he beat up four teenagers. blinding one. He
said he'd kill anyone who tried to harm me. His friend was in love
with me: he had the brownest eyes I've ever seen. I was tempted.
They can say S was a bad man if they like, he was a good man. I
wish we'd had the child.
He was the best kisser ever. I go over conversations. Our time
well it wasn't based on anything love perhaps. But that seems too
abstract or cosmic (his word, not mine) or nondescript or even
easy. I suspect love was the core, but don't quote me. Why am I
calm about this. We would kiss for hours, it was necessary. He
collected cacti, but only for a short time, like the fish. Things
came and went without trace. Possibly the lift and truss came
fast. The lift woman said he told her a story about an old blues
singer who died at ninety two and had seventeen children and had
married fourteen times, the last at eighty seven to a fifty year
old virgin. She said he went on and on and ended up giving her a
list of his famous songs. He said to her twelve times, she
counted, that the best song in the world was Further On Down The
Road. He always said that though, everytime he was drunk, whatever
song he heard was the best song in the world.
He had a black shirt, I didn't. All my clothes were black except
for shirts. Once he asked me to dress totally in black with his
shirt. I couldn't think of a reason to say no. All his requests
were unreasonable on one level or another. He stood beside the
bed, I undressed by the wardrobe, He promised to buy me beautiful
underwear, for himself. I didn't object. I love black silk. I am
not yet passed this desire, and of course soon I'll indulge, as
soon as his life has edged away from me, been teased out to the
borders. This shirt was very old, ragged, but he took on the look
of strength. I have a scarf like that, he was scathing, but
whenever I wrapped it around my neck I was safe. The nearest I got
to its meaning was when he held my throat during lovemaking. I
never found that threatening even though we both knew my
vulnerability at each of those extreme seconds, I've felt two
other surfaces of similar softness: his eyelids, and the head of
his penis. He never realised when I put silk around my neck that I
was caressed by his eyes and penis simultaneously, and reminded of
my own trust.
This is what his good friend told me the German text said: A baker
and his wife from a German village had a seventeen year old
daughter who disappeared one day and the police investigated and
found traces of bone in the oven, and some bloodstained clothes in
the cellar. The couple were arrested and said no no the bones were
from a pig that she helped slaughter, they were pig bones and it
was pig blood (schweineblutt) on the clothes they were
going to throw away, But they were charged with murder, they
confessed, yes it was her blood and they had burnt the body. They
were sentenced to death, later commuted to life in prison, Then,
some time later, the daughter turned up with a baby. She'd had a
liaison with a soldier and run away with him, he'd left her, and
she'd come back, The parents were set free. They had killed a
pig.
End