“I beg your pardon, mister. Who are you calling an idiot?”
“No one, yet. It’s conditional. You have to earn it.”
“Oh, good. I like a challenge.”
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“Terry Pratchett, I want three titles.”
“Or I’m an idiot?”
“You said it, babe.”
“Okay. Mort, The Reaper Man, and . . .”
“The pressure’s on.”
“Shut up.”
“Can’t you make up another title by an author you’ve just made up?”
“Shut up, Simon. I’m thinking . . . The Color of Magic.”
“Oh, very good, very fast.”
“Am I an idiot?”
“No, anyone who can lie that fast under pressure . . .”
“Hey, more people have heard of my favorites than those . . . Frederick Exel and Stephen Swain.”
“Frederick Exley and Stefan Zweig.”
“Whatever.”
“Oh, and while we’re correcting names, it’s William Empson, not Roy Hampson.”
“Who’s Roy Hampson?”
“He used to host excremental television shows aimed at my mother before you were born. You shouldn’t even know about him. This is not Terry Pratchett we’re talking about,” he said, giving me a little squeeze.
“Simon.”
“Yeah.”
“I like you.”
“You are an idiot.”
We walked and he told me everything: about his brothers, about William and May, his parents, and about their marriage. He told me about Empson, the poet and critic, and about Empson the dog, Simon’s dog. We talked about our schools, the one I had attended as a student and the one in which Simon had been a teacher. He asked whether I had heard of the spate of child stealing in Melbourne, and I told him that I had. Then he told me about Carlo, the little boy he had taught, who was among the first to be kidnapped.
“Carlo was always the last to come and play with Empson whenever I brought him to school.”
“Why? Was he scared of dogs?”
“It wasn’t that so much. He was just shy. He was small for his age and very quiet, too quiet to be popular. I think popularity requires a certain amount of extroversion, at least with children. Quiet kids can only hope to be forgotten. That’s the best that can happen to them. That’s what happens if they’re lucky. If they’re unlucky, they get picked on. Don’t you think?”
“I think it’s possible to be quiet and popular as an adult.”
“Really?”
“Yes, if a man is rich or good at sports he can be popular even if he doesn’t talk much.”
“And a woman?”
“She has to be pretty . . . or sexy . . . attractive in some way. If she’s beautiful, she doesn’t have to be the life of the party.”
“I think you’re right.”
“But you’re right about little children.”
“Well, Carlo was young and little and neither of his parents had English as a first language. You could just see the beginning of a life of pain for him.”
“What did you do?”
“I tried to help him. You see, the kids read out loud to us and even though you try to do it one on one, the other kids listen, or at least, some of them do, and an anxious child—”
“Like Carlo.”
“Right, an anxious little boy like Carlo would have been acutely aware of any other kids listening, so it wasn’t easy to tell whether he was a slow reader because he was having difficulty actually reading or whether it was just that he was embarrassed to do it in front of the other kids. So I arranged for him to stay after school a couple of days a week so that I could read to him and he could read back to me, all of it alone. I had to okay it with his mother.”
“Get permission?”
“Yeah. I had to get permission but I also didn’t want her to think there was anything terribly wrong, because there wasn’t. He was within the normal range. I just thought he could be higher within it. So I’d read to him and he’d read back to me. Sometimes I’d even sing to him. It seemed to be working. He was also more confident during the day with the other kids.”
“You sound like a dream teacher.”
“Wait till you hear the end of it.” He exhaled. “You’ll wish it had been a dream. We’d had one of our usual sessions after school. Everyone else had gone, the school was deserted. When we had finished we went to check on Empson, to see if he needed his water bowl filled, that sort of thing. It was actually more of a reward for Carlo. Empson was all right, but it was sort of a treat for Carlo to get to play with him without having to share him with the other kids.”
“That’s so sweet.”
“Well, on this day, Carlo told me he needed to go to the toilet. So off he went, and I waited for him. I waited about . . . I don’t know, ten minutes or so and he hadn’t come back. I gave him another ten minutes because I thought that maybe he’d had an accident in the toilet and he might be trying to clean himself up. He was five and a half or six. Kids would shit in their pants at school all the time. It was terrible for them and for us. We should’ve gotten danger money. Anyway, I didn’t want to check on him too soon because I didn’t want to risk embarrassing him. I didn’t want him to feel humiliated.
“Well, after a little while I had to check because he still wasn’t back.”
“And?”
Simon put the palm of one hand to his face and let it slide slowly from his forehead over his eyes past his mouth to his chin.
“And he was gone. He wasn’t in the toilets or the changing rooms. He wasn’t with Empson. I ran around the school yard calling out his name. My mouth was dry. I was absolutely terror-stricken. I’ve been over it a million times in my mind. That’s the way it happened. That’s the way I told it to the police. It might have been the worst moment of my life . . . and they still haven’t found him. That was the last day I remember feeling really good about anything . . . over a sustained period.
“I can’t believe I’m telling you this. I haven’t talked this way to anyone,” Simon said with amazement.
“Do you blame yourself?”
“Well, I know I shouldn’t, but of course I do. My arrogance kicked in, my naive liberal faith in intervention, in getting involved. I thought that by involving myself in the little boy’s life I could do him some good, as though I knew something about . . . anything.”
“Don’t you think people should get involved?”
“That’s just the thing. I have always thought people should get involved with the problems of other people. People don’t help enough. It’s the . . . it’s probably the closest thing I’ve ever had to a philosophy. A pragmatic philosophy. You see it every day. Most people are too . . . they’re not evil. They’re just . . .”
“Lazy?” I volunteered.
“Apathetic.”
“You’re sure they’re not evil?” I asked him.
“Some people are definitely, unequivocally evil, but most people are not. Most people are simply apathetic, unaware, and frightened. A lot of bad gets done by people who are not bad people. Maybe it’s always been this way but I think it’s more so now than ever. I saw a documentary about the sixties on TV the other day. They showed all these people in their twenties and thirties sitting around holding candles singing ‘We Shall Overcome.’ They were protesting against racism and the Vietnam War. It’s not that people in their twenties and thirties then were better or smarter than people in their twenties and thirties now.”
“So, what is it?”
“It’s the times. The times, they have changed. Where once people were told that the answers were blowing in the wind, now it’s they who are blown by the wind, the wind generated by the market. The ruthless pursuit of the bottom line is the siren song of the times, and the song is played over the public-address system in banks, in stores and supermarkets. It’s played when you are downsized because your company can replace you with somebod
y in another country for two dollars a day. And it’s played whenever you call up anywhere needing assistance and they put you on hold because they’ve cut back on staff in order to increase their share price.”
“But people have always been obsessed with the bottom line. Why is it any different now? Hasn’t money always been the siren song?”
“It has never been so loud. It’s never been so ubiquitous. It has never before so routinely, so blatantly, ousted and nullified citizenship and notions of the common good, what was once called the commonweal. It has never before so successfully colonized men’s souls.”
“Except yours.”
“Except mine. Not just mine. I know that. But you see, if you are not with this zeitgeist, if you are a victim of it or if you resist it, you’re out in the cold. You are left to sell crafts at weekend markets.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you don’t belong, you’re marginal, you don’t count. You live hand to mouth off intermittent piecework or part-time work. Or you’re on welfare. You are ignored by the mainstream. You are part of that nation which is the less fortunate of our two nations, and the other nation doesn’t want to know about you.”
“What two nations?”
“The rich and the poor. It was how Disraeli described nineteenth-century England.”
“And which nation do you belong to? The marginal one?”
“I think so.”
“Ever since someone took Carlo?”
“That’s when I first realized it. What about you?”
“Me? Am I marginal?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh no. I’m gonna make money.”
“Well, you’re doing a great job so far.”
7. I had never met anyone like him before. He was sincere, passionate, intelligent, and yet humble. He was an intellectual but he didn’t think that made him better than anyone else, quite the contrary. I still haven’t met anyone remotely like him, with the possible exception of Alex, but he is more formal, in a European sort of way, less relaxed and, anyway, he is almost old enough to be my father. The way Simon spoke, what he said, the way the words sounded when shaped by his voice, made me feel as though I had spent all my life till then in a deep sleep, a sleep interrupted occasionally by a nightmare.
His honesty about himself was breathtaking, especially later when he talked about his unemployment, about his drinking, and about what he called his failure as a man, his failure to approximate his idea of a man. Despite being a little drunk, this gifted and eloquent man seemed so sane. He seemed so fair. As we talked and walked, arm in arm after a while, more for comfort and support than for any kind of titillation, I waited for him to talk down to me, not by way of condescension but because he had thought so much more about things. Important things. He had read so much more than me. He knew so much more than me. I waited for it but it never happened. If anything, he became more self-deprecating with every hour. He talked about William, his father, and how he had accused him of being depressed. He stressed that coming from William, this was an accusation. For William, being depressed was egocentric, self-indulgent, weak, and, most important, it was spiteful. I listened to everything he said and wondered what good deed, what kindness, I had performed that God or fate or whoever controls these things had led Simon to choose me to put his arm around, to talk to, to listen to, without expecting anything in return.
“You asked me if I wanted a date. It had been a long time since anyone had asked me out,” he told me much later.
Even in bad times, in the moments of decline, as Alex describes them, when I have had to throw the covers off his bed, shower him, and then walk him and Empson, he never turned on me. He was always gentle with me. He only ever attacked himself. Until now. He says that I’ve done it to myself. And though I don’t think I have, Kelly has to wake me up at night when I cry out. I am lost now.
We had been together for hours, walking, talking, drinking, eating, and sitting for long periods, not talking, just looking at the sky. I didn’t know how the night was going to end. I hoped that it wouldn’t end. I was scared I hadn’t done or said the right things, the things that would make him want to see me again. Although I had never experienced anything like that night, what was special about it, what was always special about us as a couple, was him. It was a fairy-tale night that I was afraid would end when he kissed me and turned me back into a whore he had met on a street corner.
The streets had not changed in those last few hours. They were still wild with the noise, the mess, and the shove of unregulated street commerce. The gawking tourists, the crowded ice-cream shops and bistros, the hookers, the young men wearing back-to-front baseball caps, their families only recently arrived from the Middle East or Eastern Europe, in their family sedans with the thud thud thud of African-American music flattening the ground beneath them, they were all still there. The difference was that now I could observe it without being part of it.
“Take it easy, bitch,” I heard one call out. But it was not to me, because I was with Simon and our body language suggested we were a couple, not a whore and a lonely guy. We too often laughed at the same time to be a whore and a lonely guy. Laughter protected us from what other people were doing to each other. It protected us from everything except Simon’s parents.
We were laughing when we met them coming out of a restaurant with another couple. Simon changed instantly. He stiffened in an attempt to hide how much he had drunk. Everyone was embarrassed. The way I was dressed did not help. There were some perfunctory introductions and that’s when, for the first time, I went from Angela to Angelique. I did it myself, capriciously.
“Angelique, is it?” said the older man who wasn’t Simon’s father. “We’ve just had a lovely meal here to celebrate William’s retirement. Have you ever eaten here? You should, if you live in the neighborhood.”
“You’re absolutely right. The food is great. I often eat here. The owner is a regular client of mine.”
“Henry, let’s go!” the man’s wife said, grabbing him by the arm.
“It’s all right, Dad, we’re leaving,” Simon said from the curb, trying to hail a taxi.
“What did you want a taxi for?” I asked him later when we were back at his apartment.
“I wanted the two groups of people to be separated as soon as possible, and you can never hail a helicopter on Fitzroy Street at that time on a Friday night.”
“Were you ashamed to be seen with me, a prostitute?”
“I didn’t think you really were a prostitute.”
“Were you ashamed to be seen with me anyway?”
“No. I was ashamed long before I met you.”
His apartment was a sea of books and newspapers, magazines, photos from his past, CDs, and video cassettes onto which he told me he had recorded years of movies and documentaries. It was quite a collection, an archive of a world still foreign to me. Then there was the cuddly Empson. The dog had Simon’s often-sad eyes, but he was easier to amuse than his owner. When Simon took him outside for a pee, I looked inside the pantry in the kitchen. All it contained was tea, coffee, cereal, scotch, canned soup, two-minute noodles, and dog food. The refrigerator was empty except for milk, beer, and some sad-looking fruit. I felt immediately comfortable there, at home. It needed a woman’s touch to brighten the place up a little, but it felt like a sanctuary. By the time Simon had brought Empson back in, I had made us both a cup of tea. It was very late but I told him all about my life in Adelaide, about my dancing, my brothers, and my parents. I told him about our house, how it looked onto the prison for young ladies that was my school, about Suramia and the other girls, about my father and about university. I told him about Romesh, about the abortion, and about coming to Melbourne. I told him about the habitués of the city’s nightclubs and about Steve. But I didn’t tell him about the rape.
Shortly after four in the morning, after we had finished watching a videotape of Simon’s about a revolt on some Russian battleship, I worked up the courage
to ask him about the woman in the photos. I hoped without much confidence that he would tell me it was a sister or a cousin or something but, of course, it wasn’t. It was Anna, the great Anna. He was a little tentative talking about her at first, more tentative than he had been talking about anything else, but then he began to warm to his subject, a little too much. I already had the picture. I understood how important she had been to him and when he paused for breath or else because the gravity of the subject demanded it, I leaned over and kissed him. We made love slowly and quietly on his couch. Then, as we were falling asleep, he took me to his bed where we slept for hours.
The next morning, or rather it was early afternoon, I woke with a start and realized that my suitcase with all my belongings was back in the motel on Carlisle Street and that not only had I missed checkout time but I didn’t have the money to pay for even the night I had just spent at Simon’s place, let alone the nights to come. He was in the kitchen feeding Empson when I came upon him with my problem.
“It’s no problem, unless of course someone has stolen your suitcase. Drink your tea and then go and pay them. You’ll get your suitcase out.”
“Are you kicking me out?”
“Well, no, I’m not, but . . . what did you have in mind?” he asked me.
“I don’t know, I just thought . . . you know . . . after everything that happened last night . . . and anyway, I don’t have the money to pay for the room.”
“Yes you do,” he said, pointing to my handbag. I didn’t remember leaving it there. He must have brought it in from the living room.
“What are you talking about . . . what’s this?” I said, holding two fifty-dollar bills he had put in there. “What the hell is this?” I asked him.
“It’s money, Angela. What do you think it is?”
“I know it’s money, Simon. Why the hell are you giving it to me?”
“Calm down, will you? I’ve made you a cup of tea.”
“I don’t want your fucking cup of tea. I don’t want anything from you. Look, last night . . . I wasn’t . . . I hope you . . . I wasn’t your whore, you know.”