Five Bells Page 7

  When Mrs DeMello opened her door she saw only a blazon of red. She let out a cry and fell to her knees before her son, then reached and pulled his thin body towards her face.

  ‘He’s not hurt,’ mother said quickly. ‘It’s not his blood.’

  But Mrs DeMello sang: ‘oh Dio, Dio, Dio.’

  ‘Chicken,’ mother added, in what must have been an incomprehensible explanation. But still Mrs DeMello did not acknowledge the visitors. She buried her face in her small son’s belly. Ellie was excited to see a grown-up so disarrayed. It was a kind of guilty pleasure; the sight of Mrs DeMello weeping, even before she knew what had happened, and the way her face reshaped, and James staring dizzily ahead, mystified, unfocused, embarrassed by his mother’s possessive display.

  ‘Italians are different,’ mother said later. ‘They have passions,’ she added. Ellie would wonder over this statement for the next few years.

  But then she saw that burst of feeling as something she might desire. To be clutched at like that. To be seized by an adult as if you might be the one to save them. Ellie glimpsed behind Mrs DeMello her orderly house. Although ramshackle outside it was impeccably tidy inside. There were doilies on every surface and plaster ornaments of lap-dogs and prancing horses and figures in puffy historical dress, rimmed in stiff lace. There was a Jesus on the wall, showing off his lolly-pink heart, and an old velour armchair with a crocheted cream cover. In so ruined a space lay foreign oddity and decorative excess.

  ‘Oh Dio, Dio, Dio.’ Still chanting, still distraught.

  Then at once Mrs DeMello rose up, uttered a hasty thank-you, smothered in tears, and pulled James inside. She banged shut the door.

  ‘Well I never,’ said Ellie’s mother. ‘You can’t tell with some people.’

  As they left Ellie grabbed at the rosemary bush, twisting free a twig. She crushed it as her mother had done, and breathed in its scent.

  ‘Rosemary,’ her mother said casually. ‘Rosemary for remembrance. ’

  Afterwards James did not talk to Ellie for three years. Mostly he was alone, but for a time, when he was eleven, he hung out with the tough kids, the bully, Col Harper, and Kev Andrews and Blue. Ellie saw how James used his wit to entertain them and didn’t squirm when they gave him Chinese burns or knuckle-punched him in the upper arm. They liked to whack other kids behind the knees, so that you buckled and fell forward and were scared they might kick you when you were down. For a while she seemed to see them everywhere, skinny boys with mean streaks, in their striped T-shirts like their hearts, Ellie thought, remembering those comic books in which prisoners wear stripy pyjamas. They were rowdy and rude, a collection of trouble-makers. They invented war games and shot at each other and died rolling in the dirt, clutching their bellies, scowling with enjoyable, make-believe agony. They chucked stones on old Mrs Taylor’s roof and ran away laughing when she came outside. They spat on the ground and looked at their gobs of spittle, proud. They were cheeky in shops and morose in the classroom, swearing under their breath, glowering, planning insurrections.

  ‘Dickhead!’ they shouted at the old metho drinker, Merv, who lay half insensible in the park that was only weeds and pussy tails and a tall lonely monument to the First World War. ‘Shitface dickhead!’

  Ellie felt sorry for Merv. And since in her home no bad language was allowed, she was transfixed by the swearwords, flung spinning into the sky, and by the cruelty of the boys and their bold bad behaviour.

  But she also missed James. Until the chicken and the botched slaughter he had been her best friend. She missed what had precariously existed between them, secrets, mostly; secret talks and words and sly imaginings. She knew James wanted to be a pilot when he grew up, so that he could see the world from the sky, he said, and go out across oceans, far, far away, where people were more interesting. He might even visit Italy, where his parents were from, and where he could speak the lingo and see the Coliseum in Rome. ‘Two thousand years old, Ellie,’ he had whispered, ‘just imagine that. Two thousand years.’ James wanted to go back in time, to find another history. Ellie would go forward and be a movie star, she dreamily confided, kissed by handsome men wearing hats and speaking American. Their ambitions were like stories they might some day live by. Ellie thought of a flashlight, its ray erratic in foggy darkness, seeking a pathway. And her own footfall, a child-searcher, sounding as she went.

  James had peered into Ellie’s face. She knew he saw her freckles and her sunburn and her stringy brown hair, but he did not mock or denigrate or suggest that her dream was impossible. ‘I’ll speak American too,’ he said, leaning close, ‘and I’ll fly to California, whatever, or to China or Czechoslovakia, and look down from the sky, from way up high. And you can wave, and I’ll see you, and I’ll wave back; and it will be a kind of spy-code we have, with no one else knowing …’

  Extraordinary to surrender like this, to so cogent a memory. To have her young self returned to her, and the particulars of one day.

  It was a trance Ellie walked in, with all the welter of details – the spluttering fear of Mrs DeMello that for years, absurdly, would denote ‘Italian passion’, the marriage drama of her parents, one submissive, one strong, the vision of James’s face, all alarm and pure shock; and more than that the improbable density of moments she’d not thought of for years – it was an oval-shaped arrowroot biscuit he nibbled, it was a chicken’s death, horribly messed, that had shattered their friendship, and all the blood it sent flying, all the irrevocable filth, and James’s over-reacting misery and sense of contamination. It was – could this be so? – the mustard-coloured walls of their kitchen that cast everything of that era in yellow light, and the listed names of their neighbours that tinted the yellow memories with affection. And it was the ‘Dio, Dio, Dio’, a terrible song, that broke through to this white morning and into the hurrying present.

  Ellie turned left at the Salvation Army charity shop on the corner. The university was to her right, beyond the ill-planned park, and the city, abustle, lay straight ahead. She headed downhill. Traffic, far too speedy, hurtled past. As Ellie strode she was aware of the preoccupying visions in her head, and made a conscious decision to notice more carefully where and when she was. She realised too that she was trying not to think about sex, not to be defined by her body, not to let it signify too completely.

  The pavements were busy. This was the summer every young woman displayed a cleavage, and every young guy a T-shirt logo. They were amassed on the footpath and moving in packs. No mortality here, no hesitation. Vital bodies passed by like rolling surf. Ellie walked quickly. Although she had all the time in the world, something enthused her limbs and her sense of expectation, something larger than she was commanded her movements.

  In the madding crowd James paused and looked around. He was at Central Station and would find the line to the Quay. He had entered under the sandstone arches at Eddy Avenue, taken an escalator, wandered around, but was already lost.

  It was a confusing place. There seemed to be tunnels in all directions, tiled passages with dingy post-atomic connotations and the possibility of hunched bodies, or beggars, or buskers with mournful demands, such as he had seen years ago in the London Underground. There were narrow chutes, all interconnected, which emerged at platforms outside in the glaring light, and people all-ahurry, knowing exactly where to go.

  He read the signs: Eastern Suburbs and Illawarra, Blacktown, North Shore. Olympic Park, Northern Line, Intercity lines … Inner West … that was it: that would take him to Circular Quay.

  James thought suddenly of dendrites and ganglia, all those diagrams he had seen in his one year as a medical student, all those cortical systems and webs that are our mysterious plumbing and electricity. Choroid plexus: why did he think of this term? Aqueducts of the brain, canals and cavities. He had forgotten most of it now.

  First-year medical students cram not only images and new imaginings, but a vast vocabulary that is exquisitely arcane: from the Greek chorion, meaning ‘membrane’ and the L
atin plexus, meaning ‘knot’. Their anatomy instructor, Professor Heller, insisted on teaching them the Latin or Greek roots; that way, he said, you will learn the poetry of the body. So it was not just capillaries, but a membranous knot. And the linguistic body was part of the surprising loveliness of medicine.

  ‘Anatomy of the Brain: Introduction’: it was his favourite part of the year. Professor Heller, with his bifocals and thick mammalian moustache, was his favourite professor. When they were given a slice of cerise-dyed brain to peer at through the microscope, it was a sublime and singular moment in James’s life. The channels and mounds, the trailing intricacies, they rose into focus as an entire new world. No other organ in the body looked like this. Nothing else was quite so tightly elaborated. James considered how few people had seen a slice of brain, how privileged doctors were to glance at this dark-side-of-the-moon self. He examined it fraction by fraction, forgetting that he was meant to be clarifying this or that, the purpose of the amygdala perhaps – though that was easy – or some more baroque, difficult-to-remember utility or facility. Euphonious and rhyming terms flooded his mind: endorphin, seratonin, acetylcholine. Transmitter, receptor, mediator. Any number of neurobiological arrangements or derangements existed in this flap of special flesh.

  James tried not to think of his mother in hospital, her mind confiscated, her senses blown, dealing with the blizzard in her mind that she liked to call her ‘snow’.

  In his novice enthusiasm, James knocked over a pile of glass slides. He saw the glass and brain matter mash together as someone stepped backwards in surprise and crushed them underfoot. As he knelt in his white medical robe, and tried to scrape up the mess, he was overtaken with the offence of it and an intimation of vulnerability. Just as he had worked during the year, not wholly successfully, to overcome his aversion to blood, this also became an abruptly threatening substance – mashed brain spiked with glass. He withdrew instinctively, his hands visibly trembling. The others were all watching. Professor Heller was watching. James was afraid he would cut himself and add blood to the mix.

  ‘Leave it,’ Professor Heller called. ‘Sally will get it.’

  Sally was the laboratory assistant who cleaned up after them. She appeared from nowhere and matter-of-factly set about the cleaning. Sally was the girl who dealt with the violet-pink open cadavers and mopped the floor of its rheumy spillages after the students had left. She dealt with all the unhallowed matter of the place: waste tissue, muscle, bone, leftover humans. She was a quiet girl with auburn hair and blotchy skin, teased by the male students and ignored by the women. James felt, though he could barely concede it, a furtive affinity with Sally. He thought of asking her to coffee, or whispering to her as she passed, or pushing her against the wall and running his hands under her shirt.

  Sally bent over the mess, scrabbling and wiping. James moved away. Something in the moment shamed him. He felt his throat flush and said something meaningless before he fled from the room.

  What upset him was not so much the crushed brain sample, the flagrant clumsiness and ineptitude, as the evidence of his precarious grip on things. Within seconds he had moved from poetical pleasure to unpoetical bungle; he had fallen from the prodigious terminology of medical life to mute departure and a pathetic, stammered excuse. He had failed before Professor Heller, whom he most wanted to impress. He had failed before Sally, to whom he had never spoken a word.

  James dropped out of university in the last few weeks of the year, just before his final exams. He had wanted once to be an artist, perhaps a figure like Magritte, who might paint with Surrealist extravagance all the anomalies of life, who might depict the illogical as though it were everyday. It would be like a holiday, being an artist. He would have a mistress and a casual, supercilious demeanour. He would wear a beret and drink toxic mixtures to excess. The clichés didn’t bother him. Coming from a small country town in Western Australia, European clichés of another life carried the prospect of seduction.

  Then he had wanted to be a doctor, because he was clever – everyone said so – and because this was a conventional aspiration for clever young men. He had won a university scholarship and medicine would earn him respect. James never really considered what this work might involve. He was initially shocked by encounters with gross, ruby innards and the sense that the body is perpetually prey to disorder. Against the magnificence of its system was the jeopardy of any organism. His mother and her snow dome. The list of communicable diseases. All those patients he had seen, randomly damaged and cruelly assailed. He was haunted by a young man, barely forty, with Fahr’s Syndrome, a degenerative neurological disease which caused him to writhe and jerk. Edward, his name was. Edward something. On one of his first visits to the hospital he had seen this unfortunate fellow, whose basal ganglia were crusting over, whose cells were popping away. From his wheelchair, bent over, Edward smiled up at him, feigning equilibrium beneath his acute distress. James could not bear it. He averted his eyes. Edward something-or-other.

  It was rather like discovering that the boy Magritte by the riverbank was also fourteen years old, an odd sense of having one’s boundary blurred, as if history or other people could carry premonition, or warning, or an obscure shared meaning. Behind his panic was the spectre of an overwhelming loneliness, but also the knowledge, then and there, that he would never be a doctor. Edward something-or-other.

  For all this, the study of medicine had surprised him. The intellectual appeal was something he had not anticipated. The body was more improbable and fantastical than he had imagined, and also more plausible and lavishly coherent. The chemistry alone was astounding, not to mention the mechanics. Diagnostic and treatment enigmas were everywhere to be found. Something as simple as laughing was physiologically complex. Professor Heller told them that the ancient Greeks had a word, agelasti, for those who never laughed. Once or twice, when the first-year medical students were bent in mirthless contemplation over their specimens or books, he would call out: ‘Ah, my Agelasti!’ and elicit a startled chuckle. ‘The baby cries,’ Professor Heller said, ‘approximately 4,000 times in the first two years of its life. Enough with the crying already!’ At which the class laughed again, a shudder of reply rippling through their backs.

  James wondered how comedy worked, calling up a collective response. Or words, just words, joining each of them in the same moment. But the puzzle of being-in-the-world, first and foremost, was this: the weirdness of one living body, and the precipitate touch.

  Ellie. How he had loved Ellie. She had gathered him in. James had been cautious at first – they both had – discovering the difference of another body still fully dressed and in outline. A tentative hand on the breast, her exploration inside his trousers. But the first time he pulled her thighs towards him and rocked into her, slowly, and then began fast-breathing and labouring for pleasure, the first time he dropped his face to her neck to whisper her name, and to gulp at her skin, and to convulse somewhere inside her, he felt astonished that no one had needed to teach them at all, but that this experience had arrived, and would arrive again, complete and intact. Ellie was kissing his damp forehead; he was saying Ellie, Ellie, and he did not want to extract himself or leave her embrace. He felt sodden, emptied, crazed by joy. He could smell the lavender scent of the powder she dabbed under her arms, and his own fluids, and hers, pungently intermingling. He could feel her breathing as though it were lodged in his own chest: the union had not broken but was there in the warm pounding of their hearts, almost pressed into each other, like a new organ shared.

  When they rolled apart in their quiet, shadowy space, he felt like singing. He remembered he said it out loud, ‘I feel like singing.’ He had turned to her reddened face and seen Ellie smile back at him.

  ‘Sing then,’ she said.

  And he had started something, probably Dylan, and ended humming deep inside, as if new knowledge rested there and a new understanding. He had heard guys talk about fucking, about the slags and the tarts, the bikes and the molls. Th
ere was a huge world out there of sticky yearning and illicit images, of schoolboys telling each other of mythical conquests, or of some girl with lank hair and bad skin who would do it with anybody. But this tenderness was not what they had described. And this correspondence was quiet, even unspeakable. He had no wish to tell anyone. His greatest fear was that, having found her, he might scare her away.

  Our secret, they agreed. Like the secrecy of their hideout. It was the secrecy of singing to a girl, of tucking his mother in bed at night after she had finished her hot milk, of sitting under the standing lamp, reading a book about artists, then dreaming he wandered through the ruins of a lost city and found something unbroken.

  James thought afterwards that the shyness of social situations – the school-room, the shops, even the road outside their houses – was a kind of fake distance under which this real life of connections happened. Perhaps all life was like this: affinities known but hardly ever expressed, pulsing and moving beneath an everyday encounter or conversation. A man might meet a woman in a corridor, exchange a few words as they held cups of coffee, enact a punctilious and austere restraint, and know afterwards that some code had passed between them. Some sympathetic quiver of recognition that finds its completed expression like this, only like this, with two faces touching.