Patrick White - The Solid Mandala

And here was George Brown knotting together the fingers which had learnt to handle the pound notes so skilfully. Who had nothing to feel ashamed of. Except perhaps his own will.

O Lord. The Barranugli train bellowed like a cow in pastures not her own.

“For instance, all these diseases.” George Brown found himself looking at his own flies. He looked away.

Waldo, though he did not want to, could not help looking at his father, at the sweat shining on the yellow edge of his celluloid collar.

“There’s a bit of advice, Waldo,” he was saying, “I’d like to give any boy. You can’t be too careful of those lavatory seats. I mean, the public lavatories. You can develop, well, a technique of balance. And avoid a lot of trouble. That way.”

When he had sweated it out George Brown turned again to Teach yourself Norwegian . Waldo could recognize by then the shapes of the repeated phrases: Hun hoppet i sjøen … 1 Han merest det og reddet henne … 2 Jeg har span penger for a kiøpe en gave til min søster … 3Because Dad had frightened, then embarrassed him, which was worse, he grew angry. He began to relate the solemn idiocy of the recited words to the unrelenting motion of the train. He would have liked to shout: A pox on old lavatory seats! Or worse — the scribbled words he had seen on walls. He sat looking sideways at his father. Min bloody søster ! He sat there muttering: I fucked my auntie Friday night.

In the varnished box in which they were sitting George Brown shifted on the parched leather, while holding down the pages of the book the draught was agitating. Hun hoppet i sjøen … Han merket det … It looked as though the only way was to memorize.

While Waldo, it seemed, was all memory and brutal knowledge. Tell me, Dad, he was tempted to make a challenge of it — tell me something I don’t know .

The raucous train gave to the unuttered words the cracked accents of insolence. The more scornfully Waldo rocked the more the obscene upholstery swelled, in contours of bulbous women, and opulent crutches of purple men. One serge gorilla, tufted with orange hair, passed his gold-and-ruby ring under a corsetted bum in Shadbolt Lane. No man is all that attractive, she said, that there isn’t a copy or two of him about. The man called her his copy-cat, and both laughed to bust their guts, to split the narrow stairs up which they were feeling their way.

Night thoughts, struggling from under the cestrum, floated on the surface bloated and gloating. The cestrum was at its scentiest at night, filling, and swelling, and throbbing, and spilling, while all the time rooted at a distance in its bed. Its branches creaked, though, enough for Arthur to breathe your dreams.

Sitting in the train Waldo suddenly looked straight into his father’s face. The train sniggered smuttily. Waldo might have leant back to continue enjoying the escape he had made, if his clothes tightening hadn’t constrained him, together with the fear that freedom might be the equivalent of isolation. So that in the end he would have liked to touch his father’s goodness, but could only be touched by it. His narrow body began not exactly to shiver, it was the train, running them over the outskirts of Barranugli, past the seeding docks and rusty tins, the tethered goats, and in their back yards, women whose pale skins still showed traces of night and mutton fat.

Dad was stuffing his book into his pocket — Dad alone must have kept the pocket editions going — and they were getting out at Barranugli. Amongst the other arrivals at the station Waldo usually saw to it that they drew apart gradually, to avoid what, for both of them, would have been the embarrassment of saying good-bye.

If George Brown threw away Teach Yourself Norwegian it was not because he no longer needed it. He could never rely on himself to sit in the train without a book. He began Thus Spake Zarathustra , and shortly after, went over to The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table , which he had picked up, he was proud to tell, the one for ninepence, the other for sixpence, second-hand.

As far as Waldo was concerned the journey to Barranugli repeated itself for more than years. Towards the end, not by choice, he was growing his first moustache. The truth was: they wouldn’t give him the money for a razor to shave it off.

“Arr, why?” he shouted at them angrily, in the house which had grown too small for him.

His father put on his gravest expression, and said in his most prudent voice: “Men who start shaving too early always regret it. Besides,” he said, “at your age most young fellows get a lot of enjoyment out of cultivating a moustache. Moustaches are in fashion, I would have thought.”

Waldo looked at his father. It was bad enough to be a twin without having to identify himself in other ways.

Mother, who was mending, had to try to smooth things over.

“You wouldn’t want to turn into one of those blue men,” she said, “who are all shadow by five o’clock.”

“I’m not that colour,” Waldo said. “I’m not a dago.”

“That is not a word,” said Dad, “I ever want to hear in my house.”

And Mother’s fingers started trembling. Later on, when she was ill, and fanciful, and old, Anne Brown, born a Quantrell, said to her sons absently: “It was for his principles, I suppose. And kindness. Poor George, he was too kind. It left him too often open to attack. And I, yes, I grew tough, I think. It often happens that the wives of kind men grow tough and stringy protecting them.”

For the present, a victim of their unconcern, Waldo could do nothing about himself. He could not afford a razor, so he cherished his resentment in unfrequented corners, his pulses raging, nursing his threadbare elbows. (His school things had to “do”.)

Arthur said: “Don’t worry, Waldo. Lots of people like a moustache. Let me feel.”

He might have done it, if Waldo hadn’t shouldered him off. The great lump. Arthur’s fingers smelled of aniseed and honey.

Waldo shouted: “You stink!”

Nothing was said by anyone else because so much had been said already.

“I think Dulcie,” said Arthur, “will probably grow a moustache. I like Dulcie.”

“Who?” Waldo shouted worse.

“That girl.”

“You know nothing about any girl!”

Nor did Waldo. Nor did he want to. He hated almost everyone, but above all, his family. They knew too much and not enough about one another.

But they were proud of Waldo. While remaining weak at Maths, he carried off prizes for other subjects. He had Idylls of the King , and Travels with a Donkey , and Tacitus in 2 vols. He even read them. He was always reading books, but because Dad was the reader in the family he did most of it furtively.

Most of what he did he did secretly, as though making a secret of his acts gave them a special importance. It was only too bad that more people were not in the secret, for in the circumstances he could only appear important to himself. And Arthur. Arthur hardly commented when Waldo read beside a shielded lamp half the night, or in the dunny, or copied extracts into notebooks, but it was natural for Arthur to accept a twin brother’s secret life. Perhaps Arthur even had a secret life of his own, but necessarily of such simplicity you did not stop to think about, let alone enter it.

On one occasion Arthur paused in some involved, though unimportant, activity as Waldo was sitting with a sheet of paper, his hand held to protect it, like a wall.

Arthur felt the need to ask: “What are you doing, Waldo?”

When he had considered long enough, Waldo answered: “I am writing.”

“What about?” Arthur asked.