Patrick White - The Vivisector

Her experience slowly released her limbs: they unlocked and she turned her face towards him. Her lips, he saw, were almost as pale as those of the postmistress at Ironside.

‘That’s the trouble, Hurtle,’ she slowly said. ‘That’s what you aren’t. You aren’t a ’uman being.’

‘I’m an artist.’ It sounded a shifty claim.

‘You’re a kind of perv — perving on people — even on bloody rocks!’

After erecting what appeared to be this impassable barrier, she asked where was the dunny, and he showed her.

When she returned, she said: ‘Pe-ooh! It pongs! You ought ’uv dug it deeper.’

‘Couldn’t. Too much rock.’

So they were up against it immediately. He no longer knew whether he was an artist, an ascetic, or a prig, as Nance Lightfoot’s conversation lurched like iron trams through the afternoon. But occasionally, as she allowed what she would have condemned as silence, to creep out of the gorge, he detected a changed key: birds sat longer on branches, their eyes brilliant in stuffed bodies, while little liquid tremors exerted the hitherto listless leaves.

Till Nance jumped up. ‘Better get you yer tea, hadn’t I? Like I was your girl — not the Woolcott Street pross that ponced you.’ Throwing the rope of saveloys around her throat, as though it were a fur, or feather boa, she cackled at such a pitch every arrested bird was at once transformed into a shadow in motion.

He let her do what she had to do. She boiled some of the saveloys, and they sat down and ate them after they had picked the skins off. The thick, rubbery skin toned in with the dress Nance was wearing for the country.

Afterwards they continued sitting amongst the crumbs. At least he had his thoughts, and she presumably hers, as she tried to force a lump of gristle from between her teeth, first with her tongue, then with a peeled twig. What if he and Nance stuck for ever in the enamel of daylight and their own separate entities? He didn’t like to imagine. Didn’t have to, anyway; for the ashes of light had begun to fill the gorge, and as the red-hot ironstone cooled off along the ridges, and the heaped branches of the uppermost trees blazed in the last of the bonfire, a wind rushed in to douse: there was a hissing, and spitting, and clapping, and lapping, as the stream poured over live rocks and reviving leaves, the engulfed trees swaying, and tugging at their roots like submerged weeds, the gorge moaning its fulfilment.

When the flood burst in through the windows and down their throats, Nance held the helmet of hair to her head; he was afraid she might be going to say: ‘Gee, it was a hot day, but now the change has come, and it was worth waiting.’

She didn’t.

Though they recognized each other’s bodies with delighted shivers and confirming touches, and though they staggered outside, holding hands, towards some intention unnamed by either of them, the cold floods of air and whirlpools of darkness divested them of their clothes of flesh. They couldn’t have entwined so closely if they hadn’t been so disintegrated, as part of the formless lunging and heaving, bitter-tasting lashed leaves, scabbards of flying bark, sand giving to the fingers, and stones which bruised, but barely bruised, the consciousness: they rushed into each other as the gusts of wind had entered the skeleton of the house.

He woke as usual on the rucked layers of bags he still used as a bed. Nance was sitting up, in that very early light he took for granted: she was sagging horribly; her short, half-trained hair was hanging down around her grey face. Though they were dead sober in that there hadn’t been anything to drink, she looked like someone willing herself not to vomit.

She was swaying and saying: ‘I’ve gotter get out of here — Hurtle.’

‘Why, Nance?’ He tried to soothe her with the palm of his hand; she didn’t respond. ‘I thought you were here for a holiday.’ He could hear something inside himself padding and squelching at thought of her departure as it had for her threatened arrival.

He said: ‘I want you to stay, Nancy.’ It was a form of her name he hadn’t used at any point in their relationship.

He fastened his mouth on the target of a breast while listening for an answer.

She flipped him off.

One of the oranges which had rolled off the table the afternoon before was lying almost at the edge of their ‘bed’. She took it up, and threw it, not exactly vindictively, at a canvas the other end of the room.

‘You an’ yer old rocks! There’s too much I don’t understand.’

Then she turned to him and said: ‘You’ve got as much out of me as you want for the present.’

He heard himself try to contradict, but it sounded mumbled, disconnected: to make it more convincing, he returned to stroking her arm.

‘Go on!’ she said, pulling away. ‘You’re such a one for lookin’ for the truth in everything, you oughter recognize it now.’

‘What’s true of one of us can be true of the other. You mightn’t have hit on it otherwise, Nance.’

‘Oh golly, yes!’ Her throat tautened as she tossed back her hair, holding up her face, not for his pleasure, but in a purely self-centred gesture, snorting down her suddenly finer nose, laughing through her blunt, wide-spaced teeth. ‘I’ll smell the pavement tonight! I’ll hear the bloody trams! None of that prick prick — of insects, or leaves, or whatever it is.’

Now she allowed him to stroke her arm, which was bent back almost double-jointed in support of her arched body.

‘It’s funny,’ she said, ‘you go on the job and know more or less what you’ll get. It’s what you never find that keeps you at it.’

Then, realizing the extent of her confession, she collapsed whimpering: ‘I dunno what made me say that.’

They fell upon each other, on the bags, in the tenderest demonstrations either of them could make: their mouths had become the softest, the most accommodating funnels of love.

‘You’re my real steady bloody permanent lover that I need and can’t do without,’ she cried, and rubbed against him, and cried.

He was reminded of an old face-washer, often grubby, one of the maids had crocheted for him, in wide mesh, comforting in warm, soapy water: the opalescent shallows of childhood.

He could feel that Nance too, had been comforted: their eyelashes were scratching the same message.

While she pulled her stockings on, snapping the elastic a couple of times to make certain, she said: ‘Now you’ll be able to get back to yer rocks — because that’s what you want. But next time I come up,’ he was genuinely happy to know there would be a next time, ‘you’ll have ter paint me sittun on a rock showun me Louisa and everything. Praps I’ll wear a string of pearls. I know a girl that might give me the loan of an ostrich fan. I bet it’ll make your name, Hurt.’

After she had run her finger round what had been the potted pig’s-cheek, she went. He watched her salmon buttocks swinging through the scrub. Once or twice the sateen caught on spikes, and for a moment opened into a pink parasol.

He was both exhausted and rejuvenated by what she had drained out of him. In the slippery light and pricking silence, the pink rocks were still drowsing and exhaling: they hadn’t been fired yet.

For several weeks he remained shut up in himself, that is to say: in his painting, while living off Caldicott’s gratuitous cheque, or guilt money, and the energy generated by Nance’s visit. If it occurred to him that Nance was prostituting herself to his art, or that Caldicott was his own blackmailer, he guessed each was perverse enough to enjoy the voluptuousness of any suffering involved.

Whatever the moral climate, the painter continued perving on and painting Nance’s hated rocks. He stood each new version where he could catch sight of it the moment he woke. He saw most clearly by that light, and would jump up and sharpen a cutting edge, or intensify the reflections of his thinking sun.