Patrick White - The Solid Mandala

“I got to come in, Mrs Dun,” Mrs Poulter shouted, “then I’ll tell.”

“No, you don’t!” Mrs Dun croaked back. “I said: What is it?”

The flaps of her lips flew in on her empty gums.

Mrs Poulter realized she would never succeed in reaching Mrs Dun, but continued, for continuity’s sake, rattling the old brass door-knob. Even if she broke it off. As Mrs Dun had broken their always fragile relationship.

“Mr Brown — Mr Waldo Brown is dead,” Mrs Poulter said in spite of all. “I can’t tell exactly what ’as ’appened. Who done it. I don’t know. But something funny. Something. Dead,” Mrs Poulter rattled.

“Ring the police,” Mrs Dun hissed, you could see the spray on the glass door. “That’s what you do. Don’t you know?”

“Yes,” Mrs Poulter said, while continuing to rattle the knob.

Then suddenly she felt quite exhausted.

She began to recede, like Mrs Dun, as through water, only it was glass. Both backing. Mrs Poulter smiling, because she didn’t know what else to do. To hear and feel the fuchsia sticks, so frail, snapping against her body. Cool at least the leaves were. And Mrs Dun backing through her always darkened house into the deepest darkness of it. Her lips clamped to her gums. Perhaps Mrs Dun would be too terrified to open even to Mr Dun, when he returned, carrying his bowling kit.

Mrs Poulter manoeuvred past the fuchsias. To ring the police. At least she could thank her friend for reminding her of the obvious, though even so, she was not so very grateful. For the moment her leg was hurting more than her thoughts. The rain didn’t exactly wet, but warned, out of the purple-looking clouds. The light had deepened until it was sort of moss-coloured.

She began running again through the heavy landscape, through which she had meandered formerly with Arthur Brown. Now she whimpered for the sparkle of it, the long lost bird-shot silences.

Then she fell down. She lay amongst the cold mossy-coloured grass at the side of the road, extended, not so much injured by her fall, as bludgeoned by this moment at which the past united with the present, her own pains with those of others.

When she got up, her stocking down, her right knee grazed blue and bleeding, Arthur should have been standing beside her. As she ran on, he was that close to her thoughts, without putting out her hand she could feel the shape of his.

For a moment, on her own gate, she hung gasping like a stranger about to ask a favour of the house. Then she went in to the telephone.

“Yes,” she said. “Mr Waldo Brown. The dogs,” she could not say. “Mr Arthur Brown is not, he isn’t anywhere about. Mr Arthur Brown didn’t do it,” she said. “He couldn’t of. Not Mr Arthur.”

Sergeant Foyle, a decent fellow, must understand.

When she had shuffled the phone together, she turned round and there He was, dressed as some old hobo. Which of course was how he always had been. Only you forgot.

“What have you done to yourself?” she asked, raising the kind of joky voice a person might expect. “You look as if you was dragged through a tunnel!”

“Yes,” said Arthur. “I had a shock.”

He sat down, and she went to him.

When he had run out of the room, out of the house, slamming doors, he had at first some intention of escaping a murder he had committed. So he ran down across the paddocks, into the thin remainders of scrub. An escaped cow he had chased as a boy flickered around him as he listened to the lunging and crashing of his own body. With a recurrence of houses, and people staring over fences, he had to walk, to appease the faces. While failing to appease Waldo’s eyes. He began to suspect he might never escape the hatred of which his brother had died.

Waldo had always hated people, but always rather, well, as a joke. Waldo had done his block at Arthur, but always more or less as a brother. Till it was made plain as a bedstead that the life, the sleep they had shared, must have been jingling brassily all those years with the hatred which only finally killed.

Arthur walked chafing his killer hands, big blurry lips blubbing through the streets for what he had caused.

“Who is this crazy old bugger going or gone off his rocker?” people were asking one another.

Without ever addressing Arthur, at most an animal, at least a thing.

This was possibly why he had been moved to take the bus, the train: to lose his name, if not the hateful load of his body. Streets are full of guesses which rarely develop into questions. Certainly in the days when the city had been celebrating with relief and joy the ends of wars, people had plastered themselves all over him, boozily expecting to discover a new style of love. No one, fortunately, was over-anxious to investigate grief or terror. So now he went unmolested. Provided it was dark enough, he was free to enter where he liked, to prepare himself for putrefaction. Several dark corners dedicated to garbage might easily have assimilated his bundle of old torn clothes and older aching flesh. Collections thrice weekly removed the possibility of a too obtrusive stench.

Arthur Brown did in fact enter a narrow printer’s lane, and got down alongside the cold-smelling bricks, in the corner in which drunks, evidently, came to piss.

He began to hear a pair of these, streaming and calling to each other as they stood buttressing the wall.

“Is it Friday ter-morrer?” one of them asked.

“At this time a night,” the other replied, “you couldn’t christen it any bloody day at all.”

“We done our best!” laughed the first, belching, and shaking the drops off his end.

Then he fell to tripping and cursing.

“God sod the bastard!” he shouted.

“What’s up, Leslie?”

“A body.”

“A dead body, Leslie?”

“Wouldn’t be surprised.”

They walked away, leaning and laughing, and buttoning their flies.

But Arthur, who had known at most times, even after his attack, even after Waldo had walked him and walked him and, yes, walked him, knew again that he was not intended to die. Though an immensity of darkness in the printer’s lane almost overwhelmed him. He would have liked to be a little boy, staring at the sky through hydrangea leaves. But couldn’t manage it. All his family gone, he was threatened with permanent manhood. Or protected by his permanency. The sound of dogs gnawing at rib-bones, the faces of women exploring his face or weighing his words, eased him gently towards the future.

Snivelling for this considerable prospect he pulled out the ribbon of grey lint, which was what his handkerchiefs always became. And heard the sound of a glass marble, leaping, out of his control, away. At once he began the search which ended nowhere but in filth and darkness.

Only when reduced to nothing he remembered that one mandala must be left, and rummaged through the other contents of his pockets. The first and sleaziest ray of light from the entrance to the lane showed him the whorled marble lying in the hollow of his hand. The knotted mandala was the one he had lost.

Nursing his survivor he lumbered farther, moved by no specific desire, napping on his feet by moments, till the morning, it seemed, was noisily clattering amongst the leaves of the Moreton Bay figs, feathering the water, breaking and entering on all sides, only stopping short at the depths in early-opened eyes.

How many days Arthur Brown walked his guilt he didn’t think to calculate; time was all of a piece, and meat pies, and snatches of sleep on the slats of benches. He began to feel his age at last. If he continued experiencing guilt while the sorrow drained out of it, it was because he knew Waldo would have been ashamed of sorrow. Waldo had always been ashamed. Himself, never, but the cause of shame in other people.