Patrick White - The Vivisector

‘I thought ter make a puddun, Mrs Lightfoot, but am fucked for fat,’ the old woman said. ‘Could you loan me a penny or two for suet?’

‘A puddun at five in the mornun? You muster wet yer bed, dear.’ But she scratched around on the dressing-table and gave the old thing half-a-crown.

‘I won’t forget. A nice slice of puddun for Mrs Lightfoot.’

‘You could light ’er breath with a match any hour of the twenty-four,’ Nance said when her neighbour had gone.

She was shivering now. It was so grey. Her shivery, suety flesh was grey, and the desert range of the sheets. Two or three blades of clean steel had struck between the slats of a blind.

‘You’re like the others,’ she observed, sandpapering her arms with her hands.

For he was buttoning up his underpants, perhaps too fast for etiquette.

‘Silly, bloody-lookun men! Silly-lookun plucked men! You all look plucked once you’ve had what you come for.’

It made him laugh; but she’d lost her sense of humour.

‘I didn’t want to tangle with the milkman,’ he laughed.

‘Why the milkman?’

‘Or whatever the early client is.’

She couldn’t cotton on to the reference, and started sniffing, sniffling, got down on all fours beside the grate, poking at the black gobbets and grey flakes of dead fire.

He had to leave off what he was doing: the complicated problem of buttons in a room from which he was trying to escape. He was fascinated by her again. Where there had been golden-pear tones, a matt charcoal had taken over, with the long black shadows of her hair flowing into the deeper shadow of hearth and grate. He was fascinated by the burnt-out cleft of her formal arse.

Nance was holding a match to a ball of grubby paper and a couple of pale splinters of kindling.

‘I’m gunner sleep,’ she announced. ‘If I’m in luck, I’ll sleep all day.’

Her drooping cheek, chalky at the edges, was gilded afresh by the little flame.

‘Shall I be able to get in?’

‘When?’ she asked, listening.

There was the sound of paper catching fire.

‘I dunno,’ he said. ‘When I come.’

‘Course,’ she said. ‘Course you can. It’s me business, isn’t it?’

Her thigh thumped the carpet as she reeled over on to the pivot of an elbow. ‘You had it free for once: that doesn’t mean for every time. I’ve always been practical,’ she said. ‘Greasy little dishwasher!’

As she lolled looking at him from out of her tent of hair, her chalk-and-charcoal skin, her black lips, began yet another transformation. Shavings of golden light were crumbled on her breasts and thigh through the slats of the decrepit blind; little rosy flames began to live around the contours of her mouth, so that he was forced to get down on his knees beside her in his half-dressed goose-pimpled state, to identify himself with what was at least a vision of his power: he didn’t doubt he would translate the world into terms of his own.

Whether she realized or not, she allowed his mouth a moment’s entry into the warm, but now directionless, current of hers, then bit him, with affection rather than passion.

‘Oh Christ,’ she bellowed, ‘I gotter get some sleep, you little bastard!’ and flopped back on the gritty carpet.

He was by no means a ‘little bastard’. In spite of the wretched, rucked-up suit and cheap, bulbous-toed shoes, he was a man of some distinction. He would have invented it for himself if the eyes of others hadn’t told him, particularly those of women and girls: respectable ladies, old enough to enjoy detachment, smiled happily at his looks; disgruntled, shapeless housewives devoured him greedily, bitterly; neat young colourless women, of erect carriage and fragile jawbones, blushed for their own, timid thoughts, and averted their faces; schoolgirls nursed their lapful of Globite, and yearned after the abstractions of love as the tram rocked their slommacky bodies.

It was always worst, or more open, in trams. He remembered how, in his boyhood, his thoughts had often fallen victim to the eyes of strangers. It was a moment of delicious shame, sometimes even consummation. No chance of that since experience had given him a key of his own. He was so quick to lock the intruder out, he might have felt lonely if it hadn’t been for his thoughts: not the consecutive, reasoned grey of intellectual thought, but the bursts of kaleidoscopic imagery, both flowering in his mind, and filtered sensuously through his blood.

On the surface he was employed at Café Akropolis, Railway Square. He got there around five in the afternoon and did whatever was asked of him: gutting and scaling fish, peeling and slicing potatoes, with spells of the greyer washing-up. Sometimes his thoughts would flare up marvellously even then. He knocked off anywhere between midnight and two.

Nick asked: ‘You painting the home out?’

‘I’m painting,’ he answered.

‘You no take care, Jack, you spoil your good clothes.’ The Greek offered his piece of advice with indifference: he respected material virtues and wasn’t responsible for his employees’ habits.

About one-thirty that morning Duffield left with the standard parcel of left-over fish. It was only twenty-four hours since his meeting with Nance beside the bay. On and off during his daylight freedom he had considered returning to her room after he knocked off at the Greek’s; but now he hurried back towards his own, as though to a meeting with a lover. From this distance he couldn’t believe in himself as ponce, in the prostitute as mistress: he could only believe in his vision of her, which already that day he had translated into concrete forms. Hence all those dribbles and flecks Nick the Greek had noticed on his ‘good clothes’, the hardened scales of paint he hadn’t had time to scrape off his skin.

Though in a different locality, the house where he lodged was not unlike the one in which Nance Lightfoot lived. In spite of the hour a quarrel was still in progress the other side of a closed door; on the landings lingered smells of gas, and of food recently grilled and fried; the cold was beginning to encroach. He caught the sole of his shoe on a stair, and wrenched himself free for the last lap, the sole applauding or deriding.

He couldn’t break quick enough into his room, and on yanking at the cord which provided light, there stood the three studies of Nance propped on a converted balcony after the style of Nance’s own. Two of the versions had gone so cold he dropped the parcel of fish scraps. He rushed, mumbling moaning for his own shortcomings, and kicked the boards into a corner. Then he got down, and tried to help the abortive paint with his fingers, but already it had hardened. Only the black-and-white drawing of the spreadeagled female form coaxing fire out of a grate led him to hope; though he kicked that too, more gently, up the arse. He threw himself on the floor, and lay there functionless, till the abrasive carpet began to grow meaningful, under his cheek, and in his mind.

It seemed to him that he loved this woman he hardly knew as a person: at least he loved and needed her form. Whether he desired her sexually was a matter of how far art is dependent on sexuality. He remembered with repulsion, if also recurring fascination, the stormy tones of a large bruise on one of her thighs. He had kissed, but could he have loved the bruise? Could this coarse, not exactly old, but lust-worn, prostitute, love her new ponce after one drunken encounter? He couldn’t believe it. She needed him, though, for some reason she kept hidden behind the forearm shielding her eyes after the throaty confessions of love.

He fell asleep on the floor realizing how he could convey the shadow from one of her sprawled breasts.

That morning he worked austerely and perhaps got somewhere with the spreadeagled Nance; but it was only one aspect of him in her. He would have liked to splash amongst the gasping, sucking, tropical colours which had flooded them both in their struggle towards a climax. He tried to concentrate, but couldn’t. He began fiddling, rubbing, masturbating in nervous paint on a narrow board.