The Death of Noah Glass Read online

  When at last Evie slept, it was on the slide of a partial memory, the scary Italian woman with a mole on her chin. She possessed the malocchio, the evil eye. Framed in a booth like the illustration of a tourist attraction, she’d called out to the children from behind her wall of yellow-covered books. Yellow magazines were pinned with wooden pegs on a string above her head. She flapped a magazine and its pages fell open and gaped. They’d been frightened by the swatting motion and the loud appeal for their attention. They’d held hands, nervous, inventing the terror of her gaze. Naples. The malocchio of their childhood had lived in Naples.

  Evie slid away, darkly certain, on the inner surf of her zzzs.

  5

  NOAH GLASS WAS born in Perth, Western Australia, in 1946.

  He died in Sydney sixty-seven years later, fully clothed, face downwards, in the pristine turquoise swimming pool attached to his apartment block. A woman in a voluminous striped blouse, Irene Dunstan, long-time resident of number fourteen, came upon him as she sought her cat, Socksy, at about seven a.m. Socksy, she explained, always woke her early, but was nowhere to be seen. It was fishy, she declared, in the light of what happened.

  Socksy turned up two days later; now residents were reluctant to use the pool and there was talk of having it drained or disinfected. Irene Dunstan had used a leaf scooper to poke at the body, as if it might be a joke in bad taste or a mistake of some kind, but the drowned man had wavered only a little on the still water, revolving slowly like a synchronised swimmer. She rang the police, more excited than upset by the delicious horror of having a death to describe. The discovery gave her special authority, and the more she spoke of it the more she embellished her story. She fingered the cloth of her blouse as she offered the details; she was, if temporarily, the centre of attention. It had been a lifelong ambition.

  Of her neighbour, she knew little. Not even his name. Worked in an office, maybe. Kept mostly to himself. Quiet bloke, reserved. Not one to give a wave, or stop by in the evening for a chat.

  From the age of eight, Noah lived for four years at a leprosarium in the north of Western Australia. He knew that this time and this place had shaped him more than any other, but he rarely spoke of it, or wished to recall.

  His father, a doctor missionary, defied advice by taking his wife and two small sons with him, certain that faith and antibiotic breakthroughs would keep them all beyond harm. It was the mid nineteen-fifties. The world was still rebuilding after the war, and Joshua Glass, returned soldier, working off some undisclosed debt or secret thanksgiving, was doing his bit. He was a man convinced both of the bitterness of the world and its possibility of redemption, and filled, though obscurely, with higher purpose. He was also blunt, remote, authoritarian in his vocation, and too reserved with others to be easily loved. His patients were all Aboriginal, and this community of blighted black people, perishing in slow stages, confirmed his belief in the durability of suffering. Though dedicated and hardworking, he was a man apart. Secretly, he thought himself a creature of spiritual corruption.

  Noah would later reflect that he never knew his father, and what little he understood disturbed and confused him. There were rare gestures of connection, shy with tenderness and gruff in expression. He would remember most clearly his father’s hands, the wormy blue of raised veins, the long, rheumatic fingers, knobbly and mustard from the smoking habit he’d acquired in the army. How stiffly they splayed across the table or the cover of his Bible. How huge they had seemed, compared with his own. When he could not look at his father’s face, he stared at his large, bony hands.

  Only many years later, when his own children arrived, did Noah understand what was possible between parents and children, what unexpected feelings might open and release. He had missed his chance. Paternal power, he later reflected, meant that many of his generation had missed their chance. Joshua’s stern command, his cloak of sadness, his secretive wartime, his embarrassed, evasive air, made him largely unsuited to social intercourse; all these aspects of character removed and silenced him. Noah knew he was not alone—his mother and younger brother, James, felt this distance too—but would seek to ingratiate himself with his father, sacrificing a more intimate connection with his mother. He was perhaps forty before he understood the implications of this choice. Belatedly, he knew his own emotional stringency. When his mother whispered words of comfort, he despised her weakness, as well as his own.

  The community of lepers numbered one hundred and fifty or so. Some appeared comparatively healthy and were employed in baking and butchering, wood-carting and washing. A small garden of straggly vegetables was tended with particular pride. There was an ‘orchestra’ of violins, irregular cricket matches and a quarterly mass when a priest visited from afar. Two sisters of St John of God, smiling in their stifling habits, administered the community. Noah had assumed his whiteness and good health would secure a kind of status, but from the moment of his arrival he felt ignored. Just a kid, after all. His father was admired and respected for his labour; he was insignificant.

  In the privacy of darkness Noah felt outraged. Nightly, tossing in the heat, he was aware of James’s restful breathing, close by in the same room, and the syllables of unknown languages, drifting outside. Bird calls startled him, the nocturnal screech of something predated, and the click and ping of corrugated iron contracting. Dogs seemed to bark at all hours, apparently at nothing. There was no electricity. Obliged to reckon every day with evidence of disease, to learn new ways of being and behaving, he thought only of escape. In the future he would recall the stench of an extinguished kerosene lamp and those nights in which he turned to the wall, huddling and desperate, trying to seal himself away.

  The older, more disfigured residents filled Noah with panic. The sight of eroded faces and missing ears, of clawed hands, flattened noses and crusty patches of skin, made him distressed and afraid. Some of the elders were blind, several had amputations. One man had no forearms and a stub for a leg. Noah was aware of looking away, of ignoring a hello from figures at the edge of his vision, sitting in the shadows. There was guile in his behaviour, in the way he spun a rope around himself, as if to say ‘don’t come near’, in the way he bullied his little brother, pinching and punching, or spat after someone unknown called out to him. Desperation was a rough and inventive mood. Noah possessed the terrible energy of the miserable.

  Nothing made any sense. The few children of the community kept to themselves, and he had no resources to fill his new-found emptiness. Once his father appeared at the doorway with a headless chicken tucked under his arm, its neck still dripping blood. His father, the doctor, was now brutish and inexplicable. Noah had bolted outside, furious, to vomit into the dirt. Everything conspired to alarm and revolt him, and instinct told him this was a place to which he would never adapt. The earth was Mars orange, the baobab trees with their bloated bellies and spiky limbs signified nature deformed. Mangy dogs with yellow eyes hung about everywhere, claiming space and attention. There were two dormitories, one for men and one for women, a few corrugated-iron huts and water tanks, a weatherboard infirmary and a cluster of small sheds. Beyond the buildings lay the graveyard, a collection of neat timber crosses; and beyond that, terrifying distance and the dissolve of figures into space.

  Joshua consulted on the verandah of the infirmary—dentistry, medications, the setting of broken limbs—and seemed busily content. Noah watched as his father, gallant as a lover or a bridegroom, took a young woman’s palsied hand and gently, one by one, flexed her stiffened fingers. The woman looked away; she knew the intimacy of the act. Yet Noah remained gripped by flinch and recoil; he could not imagine touching anyone but his mother. Disease was everywhere implicit, in the rust-coloured drinking water, the sticky swarms of black flies that clumped on his back, the spiders in the sink, the snakes beneath the back steps. They’d been exiled not for a higher cause, but as a vile punishment.

  It was the isolation that truly terrified him. His family could die out here and no one would
ever know. They could disappear from the face of the orange earth and no one would even come searching.

  In the first weeks Noah argued incessantly with his father, who seemed pleased by his son’s torment, which he evidently regarded as a spiritual test. His mother, Enid, was weak and withdrawn, and only later did Noah realise she’d been depressed, that the days she didn’t rise from her bed were her own kind of trial, undistinguished by biblical precedent and more lonely than his own. Within a few months she returned south to live with her mother; they were a ruined family and Noah missed her quiet caress of his head, the way she plastered down his hair along the part line with her spit. He missed her fumbling for a hug and her desultory attempts at cooking. Had she stayed, he might have enlisted her as an ally. Together, they might have defeated his father. James, three years younger, was simply useless and exasperating.

  Later on, Noah was ashamed of his boyhood cowardice. He would have liked to tell his adult children of some outback adventure, but he kept his secrets close. In truth, he’d been a sullen, self-centred child, with no fellow feeling that might have helped him appreciate Joshua’s work, or understand that the banishment was not his, after all, but belonged to the suffering people around him. Most of all, he would regret his selfish revulsion, but it could not be forgotten, or disavowed.

  There was an exemplary moment; it would return clear as a wound. Once, when a man nearby began bleeding from the nose, his father impulsively jerked Noah and James away, telling them that sneezes and blood were all they had to fear. This attempt to reassure made him more afraid. Noah believed he’d breathed something in, and that germs had flown like tiny arrows to lodge in his throat. He loathed his father. Hysterical, he begged to be sent south, to live with his mother and grandmother. Joshua quaked, crossed the dirt, and struck his son across the face with an open hand. It was the only time in his life his father used violence against him. There was a pleasing second in which Noah saw that Joshua’s anguish was greater than his own. It was amazing, this sudden, inverted signal of love. James had burst into tears. Their father looked aghast, his mouth rigid and empty. It was plain to each of them that Joshua had no comprehension of his action, could not apologise, could not explain.

  Noah never forgave him. He ran into their shack, all obstinacy and pride, all jangled rebellion, and drank cup after cup of water to remove the leper germs. He wanted the fear gone. He wanted comfort. He wanted his father to express deep regret and beg for forgiveness. For the rest of his life, Noah’s anxiety appeared as a rash at his throat. The rash resembled the livid plaque symptomatic of the early stages of leprosy. It was both the disclosure and the return of his own faulty humanity.

  By degrees his father’s convictions began to make sense. Not quite old enough to dissent fully, not quite in control of his need to ingratiate, Noah eventually complied. He adopted the saving mentality of the religious. He was twelve when he left the colony, to attend boarding school in Perth, never to return. During those four years Noah had grown pragmatically servile, calming himself in study and rationalisation, sometimes engaging his distant father, hoping to win favour with a shrewd query or a casual display of knowledge. But he’d hardened his heart. He was tough, egotistical and emotionally absent.

  It was the strained peace of a truce. Some weeks after their mother left, Joshua permitted his sons to attend the school run by the nuns, Sister Agatha and Sister Perpetua, and despite his initial reluctance, Noah felt less alone. There was another life there: the books, the singsongs, the Bible stories, the saints. To be organised for half a day was a huge relief. To have somewhere to go. To have a desk to sit at. And in this barest of schools, every object was special. A blackboard, chalk, a pale-coloured map of the world. Sister Agatha gave music lessons with donated violins, some of which she’d repaired herself. Playing helped to exercise the fingers, she said. No musical knowledge needed, just following a tune. Years later Noah heard a fiddle and an accordion play in a backstreet in Lecce and tumbled as if in a dream to remembrance of Sister Agatha and her lessons, the way she nudged a violin under a chin and arranged fingers into a musical position.

  In a dusty pile of books Noah found Great Art Museums of the World. It bore the fuzzy stamp of a library in suburban Melbourne, but ended up in his own hands and before his own astonished eyes, and lived under his pillow, a treasure, and a night window to elsewhere. This single book marked the arrival of exotic visions. Other worlds and times blazed as portents from the pages, drifting into focus, contained and set apart in a shiny strangeness. He stroked the glossy paper and studied the legends to the paintings as if his future life depended on it.

  The younger of the nuns, and his teacher, was Sister Perpetua. Although Joshua had warned him about the fanatical Catholics, Noah found her unlike his father’s description. She was clever and listened to him when he spoke. She used his grandmother’s expressions—‘My word! Goodness me! Heavens above!’—which made her seem timeless and almost family. Occasionally she mentioned the gospels, but not as often as his father, nor with his stern theological absolutism. She said she was living in the community simply to serve. She didn’t think that Aboriginal people were sinful—no more, in any case, than anyone else. In fact, people in Adelaide, where she was from, were much more sinful, she said with a wink. Noah had no idea what this implied, but he was thrilled by what seemed a confidential remark. He was thrilled to have an adult pay him special attention.

  It was Sister Perpetua who sat Noah next to the boy called Francis, and encouraged their friendship. Francis was originally from Halls Creek, and, but for a few scattered macules and lesions, he looked more or less healthy. He was almost a lifelong resident of the community, having arrived as a toddler with his mother, Maggie, who was now one of the truly defaced.

  Noah was afraid of Maggie. He saw her often, sitting outside cross-legged, quietly observing. Her features were worn and scab-like, so that her eyes appeared prominent; she peered at him and smiled without lips, pleased that her son had another companion. Noah kept his distance. He was still a boy afraid. For all his compliance and acts of submission, religion had not dispelled his fear. In nightmares Maggie’s mouth opened crimson and appalling, and a contagious sneeze exploded in droplets all over him. She inspired a horror against which he defined himself, not to be one of those, not to be touched by this godforsaken woman, whose rotten face appeared to have been slashed at with a knife.

  When he recalled this time as an adult, he discovered his love for Francis. It was not affection, it was love. He’d longed for his presence. They’d grinned at each other, silently knowing. Yet his memories were mostly simplified, or gone. They must have passed time as boys do, mucking around. They must have shared unusual objects, and games and words. With James tagging along they often dawdled down to the creek, and made boats out of bark cut with pocketknives and assembled with string. He remembered that Francis taught them how to hunt for goannas and snakes, then how to use their thumbs to remove charcoal and taste the clean flesh of their killings. He remembered the shape of Francis’s back as he bent over a cricket bat. He remembered that with his friend beside him he’d felt brave and undefiled. This was a version of love, surely, to receive what was best in oneself, acknowledged and sweetly returned. They exchanged stories, but he recalled few details, something elusive that devolved to a tone of voice. Noah, in return, spoke of the city in the south. There were buildings as big as mountains, he boasted, and there were rivers of cars.

  This he remembered for sure—they had both loved cars. At the leprosarium a single wartime jeep spluttered in the dust. Sometimes they sat in its high-up seats, or watched as the driver, Jeremiah, tinkered with its engine. In the city, Noah told Francis, there were lines of brand-new cars, different colours, different sizes, moving along hard roads. Together the boys developed an obsession. Both received a Dinky car from Joshua dressed as Santa. It was as if God himself had chosen a gift for each of them.

  At some stage Noah realised he could tell Francis a
nything, since his world was bounded by the colony and he had little idea of what lay beyond. Like heaven, Noah said. Perth was like heaven. There was more food than anyone could eat and there was a river covered by swans. When they rose up, their wing-beats were like thunder in the air. Sometimes, in a mass, they blocked out the sun, casting the city into darkness. The houses were cool and full of furniture and plaster ornaments. There were trams, like long cars, and people stepped on and off to the sound of bells. A man in a gold-brocaded cap took money for the ride. There was a zoo, with an Indian elephant, and a street full of shops, where rich people stared at their reflections in sparkling windows. James sat hugging his knees, silent and credulous, and did not contradict him. Francis, Noah thought, ought to have been more impressed.

  When Noah left for boarding school, James became Francis’s best friend. Noah missed them terribly, but was also relieved. It was easier to think of those years behind a scrim of distaste: he imagined a man turned away, pissing hot against a wall; there was the stench and the acrid vapour of something you couldn’t quite look at. James dutifully wrote, in a neat hand, of his continuing adventures with Francis. But it was a gone world now, fifteen hundred miles away, and Noah believed he had made a great escape. Though helpless in the face of nightmares, he was still released, far away, and most of the time unblemished.

  ~

  He heard that Francis became a car mechanic and an electrical handyman, self-taught from books. The colony of lepers was disbanded in the 1980s, and the patients moved to the coast, to Derby. Francis joined them. After his schooling, James returned for a while to work in the north, and maintained his friendship with Francis for the rest of his life. Noah intended to stay in touch, but never did. He once thought of writing to Sister Perpetua, returned to Adelaide, but when he lifted his pen he had nothing to say. He recalled her occasionally, with confounded feelings, but it was hard enough writing with confounded feelings to his own estranged parents.