The Death of Noah Glass Read online

  Dora’s cell phone rang. ‘Pronto?’ She was listening, head down, in strictest silence. Noah watched her face slacken and then harden. An accident of some sort, a death, a catastrophe. When she snapped closed her phone, she said, ‘Vito. They’ve threatened Vito again. I have to go.’

  Who? he was thinking. Who has threatened Vito? Dora’s face was cloudy. She was now tense, edgy, driven by the command of filial piety. Noah saw her rise, almost toppling in haste, and pull her leather handbag over her shoulder. Sand flicked in a tiny shower from her heels and her clothes. Her shadow passed over him. She was striding up the beach when he realised she was heading back to the train station and seemed to have forgotten him.

  They sat together mute in the returning train. Dora was enfolded in misery. The late afternoon fled by in a sequence of reversed scenery, yellow now, and spoiled, in the thickening light. When at last the train arrived, she announced she would arrange the theft the next day. She would book a ticket to Tokyo, if they agreed to stay away from her uncle.

  ‘Book two,’ Noah said. ‘Book two tickets to Tokyo.’

  Dora did not even turn. She did not acknowledge what seemed to him an enormous commitment. She walked quickly from Palermo Centrale, crossing the dangerous roads around the Piazza Giulio Cesare without much care.

  Noah rushed to guide her between the buses and cars taking the roundabout too fast. In the traffic he saw a group of five men, all African, carrying buckets and squeegees, and rushing to attack the windows of any car halted at the lights. They were precariously alive in the swift current of the traffic. They were abused and reviled. Occasionally one was paid a meagre coin for cleaning a windshield. Noah felt ill watching them, their flesh so exposed and defenceless. The migrant misfortune they carried. Each at risk, and imperilled. Their faces flashed towards him, another man in the traffic, another conspicuous foreigner, guiding a woman. He didn’t wish to make eye contact, but somehow he did. One man stared at him, and suddenly smiled.

  In the distress of the moment, in all that had happened and would happen, Noah was unguarded. He acknowledged, he smiled back.

  25

  WHEN EVIE ANSWERED the knock at the door, she was faced with an older woman who looked as if she had been disappointed by life. Her forehead was etched with a self-righteous scowl. She had the grey stubble of a slight moustache and her hair was the same colour, set in an unflattering coiled perm.

  ‘Irene Dunstan, yours truly. Resident of number fourteen.’ She stood her ground, expecting to be admitted.

  Evie knew this was the woman who had found her father’s body and wondered if she might need to express her shock, or grief. They had met only briefly, when she first arrived. Perhaps now she could offer her neighbour more time and show more compassion.

  Irene Dunstan peered past her and noticed the gin and tonic on the coffee table, beside Evie’s book. ‘A little early, isn’t it?’ she said with wowserish scorn, but then added in a chirp, ‘I’m happy to join you.’

  So Evie found herself pouring a drink for this uninvited guest, who within minutes told her that her husband, Bill, a sales rep, had died three years earlier of cancer of the oesophagus, that she herself had numerous ailments of an esoteric female kind, and that her cat, Socksy, communicated with her by animal clairvoyance. ‘We’re like that,’ she said, entwining her fingers.

  Socksy. Evie remembered that Noah had mentioned the cat, and he had called it Strozzi.

  She took a gulp of her drink. She endured hearing that her father was dashing, but reclusive, that he had fed Socksy, even though Irene had asked him not to, and that he didn’t attend a single residents’ meeting. Irene finished her drink and held out her glass for another. ‘Don’t mind if I do,’ she said.

  So in the late afternoon Evie, who considered herself a patient woman, found she was impatient with her neighbour who had nothing to say to her other than to list her father’s shortcomings. It was a kind of persecution. She watched Irene finger the blouse straining at her over-large bosom. At the neckline sat a silver scarab brooch, and Evie focused her interest there, on the Scarabaeus sacer. She recalled a cartouche Noah had shown her in the British Museum as he bent beside her, explaining why Egyptians worshipped scarabs. In the midst of this woman’s free-form complaint, Evie knew again that what her father had shown her had an imperishable aspect, gleaming through time.

  ‘My mother’s,’ Irene replied in answer to her inquiry. ‘I had it valued, but it’s not worth much. Rubbish, really.’

  The humble object held the attention of both women. Irene was doubtless thinking of her mother’s faults, not least in bequeathing inexpensive jewellery, and perhaps also remembering her well-brought-up childhood, the lace hankies stuffed in her sleeve, the polished patent-leather shoes, the command to keep her knees together when sitting on the bus. Evie wanted to be generous, but found it impossible. She poured herself another drink, and, gesturing with the bottle, found that Irene was prepared to dash down her second to ensure a third.

  Somewhere in their futile conversation they heard a loud splash from the swimming pool. Both gave a little jump.

  ‘Well, I never,’ said Irene. ‘And not yet cleaned!’

  Evie stood up. She had just noticed the time, she said. She was late for an appointment. She shuffled Irene Dunstan out of the door, and leaned against it, as if in a storybook illustration, holding the wolf at bay. Evie would feed Strozzi. She would not invite Irene in again. She needed to decide if, after all, she could bear to stay here, where her father had a history and relations unknown to her. Others did this, moved into family homes, ‘deceased estates’, appreciating what remained and establishing continuities. But this would not be possible. She would clear Noah’s apartment and together she and Martin would sell it. Irene Dunstan, resident of number fourteen, had stirred her to become decisive.

  To confirm her lie about having an appointment, Evie took up her shoulder bag and left the apartment. She made a point of slamming the front door, so that her neighbour would hear. It was self-indulgent, stupid. But she was shaken by the insolent liberty of Irene’s criticisms of her father. She imagined him bending over the black-and-white cat, fondly offering a morsel, his hand cupped at its head.

  A skinny teenager, about seventeen, dive-bombed the swimming pool. He leaped up, clutched at his knees and came down on the water as hard as possible, sending spray into flower shapes and flicking spurts. He was not swimming, or relaxing, but hitting the water with his body, again and again. There was a violence to his repetition, a wish to force his tight body into a kind of explosion.

  Evie watched as he ran to the edge of the pool, leaped, curled and fell. She avoided the splash. This crazy kid was blasting the pool with his insistent force. He was almost delirious with what Evie considered a vicious enjoyment. She hurried away down the blue funnel of the plumbago-lined drive and headed in a swift walk towards the harbour.

  There it was, Sydney Harbour, bombed only by sunburst. The great expanse of water opened before her, blazoned with small craft and the occasional ferryboat. Evie sat on a slatted bench and looked into the distance. Nothing was simpler than the way ruffled water pushed back the horizon and unfastened the known dimensions of space. She heard birdsong and mobile phones and the calls of small children. She listened to the wind across the water, feeling her senses refine. The world had explicit definition; she might have been wearing lenses or hearing aids from the future.

  When her own phone rang, it was Benjamin. Evie pressed the phone open and heard the appeal of his voice. She had been waiting to hear from him. Since she’d undressed in his bedroom, since she’d seen the taxi carrying him away, she had wanted more of his presence. Benjamin’s blindness seemed partially to conceal him, and Evie was unsure of exactly how she should behave. He greeted her warmly and said that his mother was resting, that it was not a stroke, after all, and that—there was a cautious pause—he was hoping she would be available for dinner in a few hours, not as an employee, of course, but as a f
riend.

  Evie found a pen and wrote down the name of the restaurant he had booked; it was close by, on Macleay Street. She looked out across the water, saw a distant ferry rounding the headland, disappearing in a scintillation, and responded, ‘Yes, eight o’clock.’

  In the self-regarding confinement of her grief for her father, Evie had not expected the relief of a new acquaintance. When she met Benjamin, she had adjusted her sense of desolation; this was not a moral adjustment, the comparison disability inspires, nor was it the appealing peculiarity of her work, but something more to do with how they each moved through darkness of some kind. He possessed a mysterious coherence she envied. In his poised adaptation to his condition he appeared to her exemplary. When, over dinner, she shyly expressed this opinion, he responded that she was mistaken.

  ‘Nothing so dignified, I’m afraid. I simply exhausted my despair, then accepted what was beyond my control. It was not a noble decision.’

  After that they made small talk, wishing to avoid what most mattered. The intercession of a pesky waiter meant their conversation never settled. They fell silent as he burbled, then resumed in fragments. When Benjamin asked about her father, Evie felt a welling of emotion; she recalled the turmoil of Irene Dunstan’s visit, and the boy bombing the pool.

  ‘He was a scholar,’ she began, ‘of Piero della Francesca, 1415 to 1492.’

  Evie had automatically cited the dates. She must be careful, she reflected, not to divulge a list.

  Benjamin smiled. ‘And?’

  ‘And my father spent his career seeking answers and revelations. He was quasi-Christian, quasi-mystic. He was attracted not to Piero’s mathematical virtuosity—as many scholars are—but to something mysterious about his arrangement of figures, certain anomalies in time and space. Eternity implied, that sort of thing.’ She waited, then added, ‘I suppose you think that is foolish.’

  ‘Not at all. I’ve heard of Piero, but I don’t remember his paintings: you’ll have to describe some for me.’

  This was not the right time. Evie had no wish, over dinner, to try to describe Italian artworks of the fifteenth century. She thought of the altarpieces and the famous fresco Noah had shown them in Arezzo. Then of twin portraits, a couple, the Duke and Duchess of Urbino. The duke, her father told them, was blind in one eye, which was why he was depicted in profile, his destroyed eye hidden. The paintings were always hung so that the couple faced each other. Evie loved the carved nose of the duke, the insistence on the reality of a face.

  ‘Another time, perhaps.’

  She watched as he felt for his glass, sliding his hand across the table towards its stem. She watched him lift the glass to his mouth, then replace it on the table. She saw his hand uncurl. She realised again that she could stare at him as she wished.

  ‘You’re staring,’ he said.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘People go quiet. They like to see if I’ll knock over my wine. You develop a feeling for these things.’

  And with that forgiving remark they relaxed again.

  Evie asked Benjamin about his mother. He could hardly stand it, he told her, the nursing home, her failing health, the thought of her slow decline. Judith was better at dealing with it. Women are stronger, he added. Over panna cotta he described a visit to Italy when he was twelve, before his parents divorced.

  ‘This is our connection,’ he insisted, perhaps looking for a way to link them. ‘Memories of being in Italy, as children, and with our younger parents.’

  Evie had not mentioned her mother and realised Benjamin would assume she was still alive. Where to begin, with the disordered narrative of her life? How might they know each other but in interrupted stories?

  ‘The scent of tiglio,’ he added. ‘It always takes me back.’

  Tiglio: lime. She adored this word. It could have been a seduction.

  Evie hoped he would ask her back to his house, but after the short journey to Elizabeth Bay his taxi dropped her off and sped away. There was no kiss, or hug, or an attempt to hold her hand. No welcome fondle or arm slid around her waist. She stood outside her building watching the red tail-lights of the retreating car slide out of sight. She felt querulous and lonesome. The dinner, though pleasant, had been like a false pretence. Was it her own fatigued youth and passivity that stranded her? She must avow; she must act on what remained of strong feeling. Pride or fright might have held her back. Or was it that she thought herself unworthy?

  There were shell-shaped lights up the driveway, but the apartments were all dark. There was no wind at all, an extraordinary stillness. The swimming pool lay flat, a shiny black mirror.

  Evie unlocked her father’s apartment and stepped inside. She did not switch on the light, but moved into the shadows of an incomplete darkness. Irrationally, she sensed her father still there, drifting as a breeze might, in a ghostly tremble. The sound of the harbour rose up, a ferry passing by. A night bird, possibly an owl, let out a long, hollow call. The staccato sound of crickets; the tidal hum of distant traffic. There was a slight glaze at the window that could have been moonlight. In the mostly dark, Evie brushed at the air with her hands, swishing away blackness, feeling for her father’s armchair. There. Here.

  She lowered herself down and rested a while in quiet concealment, where he, her dead father, had not long ago rested. She allowed herself to whisper his name. Noah: her father, Noah.

  26

  MARTIN WOKE WITH an erection and a feeling of despair. He hated his body, so needful, so alone and unpleasured. He groaned at the banal variations of his gloom.

  Bored, he stood in silence at the window of his bedroom. Across the lane he saw two men about his age linger for a while, looking suspiciously around them. One dropped a cigarette and crushed it with his heel. The other stroked lovingly his thick black moustache. Then they knocked on the door of the brothel. The woman who opened to admit them also looked around. She spotted Martin and sent up a cheery wave. He waved back diffidently, with just the hand, as monarchy does. He felt meek and exposed. For a moment he yielded to the fantasy of walking outside and crossing the lane, being led upstairs, undressing, taking the plump, round woman in his arms and entering her instantly. It was a dull, impersonal lust he felt, a drive to be discharged. It was also the sickened spirit of having witnessed an accident no one cared about.

  The driver of the three-wheeler van may after all have survived. Martin could not know for sure that he had died. Perhaps he was now being tended in the electric world of a hospital room. A wife kissing his forehead, a child taking his hand. Or perhaps he had suffered terribly beneath the truck and was in unspeakable pain, hearing the cruel boom of car horns, scudding up and down the street, the final sounds, gross and tyrannical, before he died.

  Martin retched a little in the toilet, pouring out a thin stream of stink, but still he felt ill. He wanted to sober up. It was important, he told himself, to sit quietly, to think, to make some decisions. Should he rent a studio here for the deconsecration sequence or start the Piero-Barbie piece? Should he keep trying to find out what his father had been up to? Maria would be downstairs, moving around in the kitchen or sitting with her crochet; perhaps he should talk to her. Martin paced the floor. He looked out the window, again, but there was no sign of activity across the street. It was a discreet establishment, one that admitted clients with a furtive check and then hid them away.

  Martin could not think in a sensible sequence about his options or plans. He could not draw, or read, or compose himself. He felt ravelled and restless. His solitude oppressed him. He decided to walk a new route to the harbour and stare at infinity for a while. He would visit the ocean and he would drink no more alcohol. He noticed that the light in his room had changed colour with the advent of late afternoon sunshine. The streets were still wet, but charged with a baroque, brassy glow. It was more reason to go out, to see the changed city.

  As he came down the stairs, Maria greeted him with a smile and gestured to the light outside the window. It
had rained for almost three weeks; now there was a cessation that was bright and clear. When Martin stepped outside, he felt his spirits rise. Shutters had opened, and even some doors; as he walked down the lane, he could see into the cramped lower floors of the ancient houses, into dim sitting rooms with plastic covers on chairs, and religious icons, and Padre Pio calendars hanging on the walls. There were many lives here, historical and inconspicuous. Martin had the sense of a whole population of women tucked away, recessed into the stony shadows of the old city. When he bent to look into a window, an old woman in a black headscarf looked back. She swore at him and let out an aggrieved shout. He’d frightened her, he realised, bending down into her world. ‘Mi scusi! Mi scusi!’

  Like Dora’s hidden courtyard, the trace of an Arabic seclusion, this face flaming up at him told Martin what he’d neglected to see, another kind of life, another kind of architecture, the passages and secret places he had still not encountered. Raising his gaze, he saw a small shrine affixed high on the wall, the painting of a blushing Madonna, blotched and flaking, and a jar of fake carnations on a ledge before her. He’d seen them before, these shrines, but now noticed them everywhere, as though they had proliferated overnight and the change of light made them newly visible. Martin took out his camera and kindly shot her.

  Turning a corner, he saw a phalanx of five teenage girls, with arms fondly linked, walking towards him. They spanned the narrow lane as if they owned it. The girl in the centre wore a hot-pink hoodie covered with ornate silver script. It read Abbracci, baci. Hugs, kisses. Martin found it transfixing. Abbracci, baci: this was a chant he and Evie had shared as children, singing it in the back seat of their old Morris Minor or lying together on their parents’ bed, staring up at the ceiling. Their mother had taught them; they may have been his first words in Italian, charming because they rhymed, because they sounded nonsensical, because they sang of the happy-family intimacy before she died. In this singsong was a micro-history of their emotional lives.