The Death of Noah Glass Page 5

  In his thirteenth year Noah discovered the meaning of his boyhood experience. He pushed his shame away. In the movie Ben-Hur, he saw the hero descend into a leper colony, tucked into caves, and retrieve from the darkness his mother and sister. Both were bundles of rags. Ben-Hur witnessed Christ carry his crucifix on the road to Calvary and the shadow of the cross passed over his family. In a magnificent rainstorm, the women were cured. Their complexions cleared, their rags fell away, they possessed the innocent glamour of the saved. Noah was captivated; his boy’s heart was full. He could hardly believe it: the restored beauty of the ladies, the weepy hero, the crescendo of violins and the soft light illuminating their salvation. Charlton Heston’s profile was aristocratic and his skin shone bright and holy, with an antiseptic glow. Noah was interested less in the famous chariot race, round and round, each cycle more terrible and shattering than the last, than by this sentimental story of descent and return, divine blood in rainwater, contagion overcome.

  With this story Noah hauled himself into another country. Now that he was away from the leprosarium, he could consider himself a kind of hero. He too had looked at rags that might be people, and his fear and revulsion could be reworked into a ripping yarn. Even as he knew this was false, still he asserted it. Noah reconstructed his shame as a story: ‘Just like in Ben-Hur.’ And he could see that the boys at Guildford Grammar, rapt, gullible, their eyes wide as cinemascope, imagined caves and bloody rain as Francis might have imagined a sky full of swans. In his story Francis became the one he rescued (‘You actually touched him?’ they asked), a boy like themselves, but pitiable and tragic. A black boy, waiting in a cave to be saved, squinting in a gritty wind, moping in shadows, solitary, sad. It was something, Noah told himself, to do with the tangible and the intangible. You started with what you could feel, and soon enough you could visualise a picture, or a story. It was just like religion, it was just like belief. As an adult he understood how assiduous he’d been, sealing his confused desolation in this way. The film logic reassured him, even if his version of the colony was the product of cynical lies.

  In the neurotic and competitive community of his school, Noah was one of the elect. He was tall and smart, and he carried an inner conviction. His teachers assumed he would become an engineer or a doctor, perhaps even a surgeon or a famous scientist. He was brilliant at maths and physics, and could do sums in his head. Everyone was disappointed when Noah took Arts at university, and ended up in the poncy, embarrassing business of writing about paintings. The school hero shrank into a kind of joke. As his friends made money, bought large houses, and found their own models of perfection in mining shares and real estate, he continued his studies. He went to Cambridge—Pommy-land, they said—and thence to a small university in the south-east of England. When they heard he had married, they were also surprised, having decided that his art studies were conclusive proof he was a poof. Noah heard all of this through the devoted reportage of James, who dropped out of school, joined a local band and, as one loyally obedient, wrote weekly to his brother.

  A scrap returned, one day, in the shape of a small religious card. Noah discovered it tucked in the dust jacket of his childhood copy of Great Art Museums of the World. Jeremiah, the jeep driver, had given Noah a palm card depicting St Lazarus. The leper saint was an old man, covered in sores, his thin body leaning on a wobbly stick. Two dogs, of some gentle but unidentifiable breed, licked with compassion at the sores on his legs. The card was one of those old lithographs in which the magenta and cyan are too bright, so that the saint appeared garish, propagandist, and unworthy of sombre regard. He was smeared with old grime. What possessed him, Noah wondered, to make a keepsake of this card? He clenched the found image into a hard, tight ball. There. Dealt with. From that moment, vicious in its pleasure, he considered his early life crushed and flung away.

  ‘He was a nice gent,’ Irene Dunstan announced to her newer neighbour. ‘But kept to himself, mostly.’

  She worried that the swimming pool was forever spoiled, and that, if word got out, her property would fall in value. Now a young woman had come, claiming to be his daughter, and she also worried that there’d be other young people traipsing here and there, parties and whatnot, wandering strangers scaring Socksy. Irene had never seen the woman before—not one to visit her old dad, clearly—and they’d barely spoken when she arrived in an unironed dress, tugging a battered case up the driveway, looking disgraceful, looking for all the world like the wreck of the Hesperus.

  6

  EARLY IN THE morning Martin returned to the police station. He wanted more details, but without Evie present. A week ago he’d seen the coroner’s report, and the findings were straightforward. Their father had died of a heart attack, a myocardial infarction. The incident had been assumed suspicious because the official note from Italy had just arrived, and the proximity of death and a possible crime seemed unusual, to say the least. There was also a red patch of inflamed skin at Noah’s throat, as if he had been grabbed there, or suffered an abrasion of some kind. His doctor’s records confirmed it was a chronic problem and, though distinctive, not the consequence of mishap or attack. There were other questions, too: how he came to be fully clothed in the swimming pool; why he had left his front door open. His blood-alcohol reading was high, but not excessively. No drugs in his system. If he was a criminal himself, now exposed, this could have been a cause for suicide; but this too had now been conclusively ruled out. Noah had a heart attack during the night and somehow fell into the swimming pool.

  Martin was seeking the reason Noah had been named as a suspect. Might his father be involved in some disgrace? The investigation was launched from Palermo, so there could be something internationally nefarious to consider. The business of the sculpture was also puzzling. Noah would have told him or enlisted his help if he had been in any trouble. Until their interview with the detective, Martin had never heard of the sculptor, Vincenzo Ragusa—a minor figure, surely.

  Malone reiterated that he wanted to pursue the Italian connection—perhaps he was the one who hoped for a trip to Sicily with the missus. Something in his doleful look made anything possible. He was too sure of himself, too gravelly in the baritone with which he declared, as if singing, ‘Carabinieri Cultural Heritage Protection Agency.’ Martin shook his hand, once again, and felt no fellowship at all. He had learnt nothing new. Malone gave laconic and almost surly responses to his questions. The detective seemed aware he might be the object of sly derision; he must have known that his looks inspired aversion. This made him act as if self-conscious and on guard, Martin thought, or perhaps it was simply a policeman’s manner, to seem unyielding and professionally unhappy.

  Martin returned to the café he’d visited the day before with Evie. The waitress recognised him and gave a flirty smile. He ordered a macchiato again, and the same all-day breakfast, though he consumed it this time with little satisfaction, feeling the absence of his sister and the need to talk to her of their father. Now the café seemed almost unbearably noisy. The air crackled and the sound of crockery smashed and clattered. Martin looked down at the remains of his meal and felt grief sweep over him—some larger, confused feeling of being alone in the world, some intimation of abandonment at the knowledge that his father had secrets. They had been close, Martin and Noah. Both were proud of the fact that they spent time together, liked each other, planned trips to galleries, and the cinema, and went walking along the beach. In all that had happened to Martin—the failure of his marriage, his time in the clinic, his wavering sense of worth—Noah had been a wise and dependable support.

  What Martin feared was that his memories would throw him off balance. Somehow this did him in. Small recollections were overtaking him and seemed a kind of weakness, almost feminine. There was a moment he could have sworn he felt the sensation of his father cutting his hair. Gentle fingers hovering at his nape, the soft click-click of silver scissors, his hair lifted, lightly combed, then falling away. His father fluffed his hair up at the back,
as he’d seen real barbers do, before he combed it again, lifted it again, found a small section, parting it both languidly and precisely, to begin again his neat clicking. How Martin had loved the feel of his father’s fingers in his hair, and the moment when he blew on his neck, to clear away stray remainders, when he patted his head and proclaimed the haircut complete.

  At about thirteen Martin insisted on going to the barber’s. It was a matter of self-respect, he told himself, to sit in the upholstered chair tilted before the mirror and watch a true professional at work. Martin could not admit it had been a disappointment, that the real barber had pushed at his head and cut his hair too short. He had glowered, curt at the till, refusing even to say thank you as he paid. But it was important to join the world of other boys, and not have his sissy dad humming and chatting and playing mum as he wielded his scissors. Martin never allowed Noah to cut his hair again, even though he longed for it, and wanted again the feeling of boyhood trust, and of his father’s hands, those particular hands, fussing over the vulnerable surface of his scalp. The force of this memory made him giddy as if from a slap. How could he protect himself from phantom assaults that came from nowhere?

  The waitress hovered at the table as if she wanted to ask a question. Martin ignored her. In the end, rather too sharply, she said, ‘Finished?’, annoyed at his lack of responsiveness. Martin heard the espresso machine behind him issue a cyclonic roar. He felt flustered and guilty, though he had no reason to be. He felt like announcing that his father’s funeral was only two days ago, enlisting her pity, shaming her into kindness. Instead, he left a large tip and slipped away. He wished he wore a symbol of some kind—a black armband, say—that would warn the ordinary world to offer respect and allow him his intervals of stupefied grief.

  He texted Evie to ask if he could see her at Noah’s flat, and she responded that she was waiting for the ferry, heading to the North Shore to visit Angela and Nina. ‘Come for dinner, 8,’ she replied. Not even her name. His phone shone with her blank unfeeling message.

  His last ‘episode’ had ended in pneumonia, naltrexone and disgrace. Now he craved that subdual of feeling again, and the soft hit of shadows. But there were Nina and Evie, and the promises he had made, not least to his father. The promise to his father. He began a swift walk, his thoughts disastrous and racing. Insecure, he imagined himself as a crash-test dummy, the mere shape of a man, hairless and featureless, hurtled forwards, filmed in slo-mo as he was yanked and damaged. As a boy he’d loved that kind of footage: the wallop of a body, the crumpling moment of impact, the almost joyful brutality of a human shape broken. Now, he needed to be anchored by Evie. Martin had a vision of her on the harbour, sailing away into sunlight, her thin form receding into a silhouette. The leporello opera house, the restless ferries, the dazzle that made any foregrounded figure black. It was a vision of her leaving. It implied her impermanence. The force of her image passed over him like the shadow of a bird. Nothing touched, but he was darkened, momentarily, and visited by shapes unbidden.

  Martin set off towards the harbour. It was the long way home, but he wanted to clear his head. Instead, driven by images, he found himself free-associating on his crash-test self. There were those life-sized figures used for CPR training, shop-store mannequins, inflatable sex-dolls. There were the small articulated wooden shapes that artists studied, there were robots in movies, with lit chests and eyes. And there was Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, a dummy of paint-strokes and the impression of movement in time. This itemisation calmed and externalised Martin’s feelings. There were any number of brainless man-shapes existing around him, a mock world of art-stuff and anthropomorphic intention. He would paint a sequence on fake humans. He would place his own portrait in there somewhere, specific and identifiable among the anonymous faces.

  As Martin walked he realised that Noah’s death had renewed his desire to paint. It was a resurrection—though he baulked at this word—of what for almost a year now had gone stale, producing only indecision and preparatory sketches. Martin watched the people walking ahead and towards him, their impulsive coordination, their rhythmical grace, the engine of so many diverse organisms pumping away, driving a mass of flesh forwards with tremendous confidence. Walking, that’s all it was. Pushing into time. He thought of Marey, of Muybridge, of the fascist Futurists. No one since them had seen it better. He could feel a strong fresh wind blowing from the east. He ran his hand through the worry of his thinning hair. He would like a gaudy palette, as in fifties movies. And a disciplined style, like the nude descending. As he took a short cut up a set of steps, he thought, Martin Glass, Ascending a Staircase.

  For almost an hour he’d barely thought of his father, floating face downwards, limbs outstretched, his childhood fear ablaze at his throat. Just yesterday it had seemed that he and Evie were caught up in a story, a giallo written as if to disturb their memories. There was dishonour and vulgarity in what the detective had told them. It was a grubby fiction about a blameless man, felled by ill health. His drifting form, suspended, was a challenge to the scheme of things that said one should die in an armchair or a bed, eyes closed in a decorous, private conclusion.

  Martin caught the whiff of fresh-roasted coffee once again. As a child he loved to sniff at pencil shavings—there was piquancy there, and an obscure sense of ambition. Now he breathed in the scent that his father had truly given him, and more decisively set off for his home, and the apathetic ease of his studio. Against what Sydney displayed, against the summer city, he was thinking Piero della Francesca, Prussian-blue Neptunist, crash-test dummies; he was thinking of the almost erotic moment when paint squeezes out, depositing the sludge of its glossy impasto onto the palette. All he needed was the strength to keep walking, to keep painting, and to stay relatively sane. He would go to Sicily with or without Evie. He would solve his father’s mystery there.

  7

  AS SHE STOOD on the deck of the ferry at Circular Quay, Evie was conscious of storing up things for future recollection. Here was the lustily gleaming harbour, the absurdly golden midday, and the bridge, swinging away like a door on brass hinges as the ferry executed a slow turn. Above was an infinity of blue-becoming-black reaching far into space, almost shocking after the grey security of Melbourne. The scale of things was all wrong, too lavish, too sunny, too geared to applause.

  Nevertheless.

  There was a solace in being upon water that might be the trace of ancient feelings. The idea of drift, perhaps, of not being entirely solid, as the essential state of any self. She had always thought of the mind as adrift in sensation: phenomena wash over us; we are less intention than ceaseless flow. It was anxiety, perhaps, that caused her to assemble a structure. In alphabetical order Evie compiled a list of oceans and seas of the world: Adriatic, Aegean, Andaman, Antarctic, Arabian, Arctic, Atlantic, Azov, Baltic, Bering, Bismarck, Black, Caribbean, Caspian, China, Coral, Dead…

  Through the glass panels of the ferry she saw faces animated in chatter, addressing invisibles with mobile phones, holding up a screen to take a photo. A child, staring back at her, poked out his tongue. Evie did likewise and he mimed a peevish frown. Then he dived headlong into his mother’s lap, and she saw how very young he was, not far beyond babyhood. Small children love exchanges of petulance, she thought. How open their feelings, with their arbitrary attractions and unfixed capabilities. How unfaithfully volatile. Now the boy had already forgotten her. He was pulling at his mother’s jacket, and climbing her body.

  As she turned back, Evie saw the opera house, its fins falling into the water, scattering in white reflections, and the cartoon-form of another ferry bobbing alongside, also leaving the quay, but faster. Others stood with her on the deck, their faces in the wind. The opera house exerted a peculiar pressure: it carried hypnotic command; it was a wrench to avert one’s eyes. Whatever was embodied in this structure was innate art-sense. Lighthearted, in the present, she withheld an impulse to wave, to no one and everyone. Then she devised a witticism,
droll and superior, for her friends in Melbourne. It was irresistible, possibly ethical, to denounce such splendour, to assert the claim of her own, more serious city.

  Evie could see Angela and Nina floating towards her, on the small wooden dock of the ferry stop, the sun in their straw hair, mother and daughter alike. Angela still had her near-sighted, unfocused look, and she had dressed up for the occasion of Evie’s visit. Always stylish in a boho manner—dangling scarves, silver jewellery, eastern fabrics—she wore an embroidered kurta tunic in saffron over baggy pants. Nina wore a sun-frock covered in a pattern of lemons. Together—had Angela contrived it?—they were a vision in storybook yellow. Others had a knack of suitable elegance she’d never quite accomplished. Evie was aware of how shabby she must appear in her creased shirt and jeans. Nina was holding her mother’s hand, and Evie’s affections flew in a swift gust to the child’s sweet face. How good to be an auntie. How vividly this child was alive to her.

  On the dock she bent and swept her niece upwards, laughing. Nina threw her arms around Evie’s neck and made a mushy drama of kissing her. It was an intense and easy happiness, carrying a child, loading her weight, having her face so breathy and close. And the manifest pleasure of children was so admirable, Evie thought; it was a comfort to recover this grasp of blithe unconcern, generation to generation, as if the future had been made physical.

  In Angela’s apartment at Lavender Bay Evie played on the floor with her niece, who had glue and magazine images to paste in assorted combinations. The polished paper crinkled with the glue, so that Nina was constantly smoothing with the heel of her hand pictures that would not behave and lie flat. She was a tidy child, devoted, like her aunt, to system and order. She bent at her task with tight lips and studious concentration. After pasting, they scribbled affably with felt pens for half an hour, while Angela prepared a salad. The silence between them was an enveloping contentment. When it was time for her nap, Nina kissed Evie on the cheek, and with unnatural obedience headed to her room with her favourite soft toy, a ragged penguin. She was five years old. She was self-possessed, and complete.