Patrick White - The Vivisector

It was soothing to hear the sound of himself making water, or the black note of a stick breaking underfoot as he stumbled around in the grey dusk. A satin-sounding bird in abrupt flight might have burst from out of his eardrums. He couldn’t have pin-pointed where he was in the kindly formlessness which took his presence for granted. The house was no longer visible; he wished it had been swallowed up, together with Nance and the self-portrait, both no doubt prepared to accuse him on his return.

When here he was, almost barking his shins on the house. A plan, divine or not, seemed to reveal itself always when least desirable.

He went in and began striking matches. Surrounded by the dazzle of his own light he couldn’t see Nance at first, though he could hear her snuffling. She coughed once or twice.

‘Caught a cold,’ he suggested coldly, slipping the chimney off the lamp.

‘Not that I know of. It’s me occupational bronchial tubes.’

The room always looked stranger just after he had lit the lamp. It was the worst time to see it: he could never believe it belonged to him, perhaps because other people had recently owned the few bits of furniture; and now, here was Nance, not belonging either, squeezed by choice into an outer corner of the otherwise empty, derelict bed. She had plaited her arm into the ironwork at the foot as though to stabilize herself.

She looked even yellower by lamplight, her face, particularly the mouth, swollen with brandy and resentment as she sucked on a tumbler she had found and filled.

‘What are we going to quarrel about?’ he asked.

He came and sat down beside her because they were the official lovers.

She tossed back her hair, and sat, or hung by the ironwork of the bed, her chin raised, her throat haggard. ‘I don’t care about anythun enough tonight — not you or me or anythun — not enough to quarrel about.’

The strained physical attitude to which she was clinging made her words and her laugh sound colder, clearer, more truthful than they might have sounded if she had remained lumped in a heap of normal drunken disgust. He had never heard Nance sound so detached from a situation.

But she was involved, it began to appear; she was only nervous of the recitative she had to force out of her:

‘When I was a kid we was never so hard up we didn’t manage most years to get away from the place that killed my dad in the end — the bad seasons and the mortgages — we used to head for the coast and camp there for a couple of weeks it wasn’t much more than a hut that belonged to a Mrs Peabody I forget who she was who charged somethun but only a little. It was a small place not a town just a few match-boxes littered around off the road beside the sea the grass left off gradual where it was stitched on to the sand.’

She was speaking with her eyes shut, and the hairs at the nape of her neck glistened with the strain of narration and hanging on to the iron of the bed.

‘. . the air so soft it used to get inside of yer clothes and make yer feel downright naked. I never feel such water as the sea milky pearly round yer ankles. Dadda would catch fish. We used to live off fish — and scones. And sweet pertaters. I was skinny then. I was frightened of most things. A crab comin’ at me sideways with its claws raised. Blood. I got me first blood at Brinkwater. It scared me out of me knickers, and Mother too ladylike to tell. Then I got used to being scared or you couldn’t keep it up or it felt too good lyun in the sun on the sand where it began to get firm watchun yer bubs grow you could sometimes you could see they’d grown since the night before. After the hair begun and I got over it I was proud it was so black it was shiny like most of the sea things seemed to be.’

Her voice had grown monotonous. She choked at times: the words must have tasted glutinous.

‘I would ’uv liked somethun ter happen I didn’t know what. I had some idea of some man I’d never met not young perhaps as old as Dadda but bigger I could see the dark hairs on his wrists wearun a big old green rather hairy overcoat come walkun up the sand with that sound yer feet makes in the sand. It was most often cold early. I’d be shiverun with cold or praps it was from waitun. Till we lay together inside of ’is coat. I never had much idea of what happened with this strange man. I think we put our mouths together and it was like we was drinkun each other the sound of the sea pourun over and into us. The rough sand and hairy coat. I can’t remember if we ever spoke. I remember the whites of ’is eyes were unusually white, and the white sky at the back of ’is head.’

She opened her eyes, and the words came clicking hiccuping out from between her bare lips.

‘This man I never met I hoped could ’uv taught me somethun I mightn’t ’uv otherwise understood. Not about sex. Well, about sex as well. I used to stick me fist in me mouth and bit it and rub me arms on the dry seaweed till they looked like they had a rash. Sometimes the birds flew so low I could feel the noise of their wings and got the idea my head might be split open and would swallow up one of those white birds then when the wound had closed I would see things as they’re supposed to be. Eh? D’you think I’m a nut? I’m not. There was a girl I knew her name was Eileen Gilchrist Sister Scolastica they called her after she’d been shaved. I often wonder if she found what she was lookun for when she went whoorun after those bally saints.’

Nance’s arm was so eaten by the iron flowers he tried to free it from its discipline of memory and the brutal bed; but she wouldn’t let him.

‘I learned about it but it was Dadda who taught me. It was the hooks he taught me with at first. As he dragged ’em out of their pink gills. “They don’t feel nothun,” he said, “not if you’re quick, fish is made for us to eat.” Course I loved fish. I was always hungry. I loved that fresh fish tastun of the sea after the rancid salt mutton at home. But the hook frightened me,’ she said, ‘ all ways. Dadda said: “All you gotter do is not to think about it. If you start blubberun it’s no good you’re lost I’ll give yer a bloody good beltun.” I hated it. I hated the look of ’is dirty-lookun old man’s john. He wasn’t old I suppose, or not any older than the man in the green overcoat.’

She had begun to shiver: all the old ironwork was rattling.

‘’E had a scraggy neck. I used to watch ’im pickun the last bit of flesh from the fish’s backbones in the shack we rented from Mrs Peabody at Brinkwater. I thought you bloody old bastard you dirty bastard I’ll never ever like you any more but oh God I waited for ’um to do it to me again but ’e didn’t ’e might never ’uv done it ’e seemed to ’uv taken a great dislike to me. Mother was always lovun, but disappointed. She had a hare-lip they’d sewed up badly. She’d been a teacher and because the kids had tormented her she used to say: “I thank God Nancy you was born whole and will lead a happy life.”’

Nance suddenly got up and went racketing towards the table to fill her glass. She took a good swig of brandy. The silence made it as though she hadn’t told anything of what she had been telling. Then she seemed to remember.

‘For Chrissake!’ She tore the foil off a fresh bottle, and found an old cracked cup. Holding the cup waist high, she came to him where he had been left stranded on the bed.

‘Here,’ she said, not urgently. ‘Take it. You need a drink. It’s my life, but you had a share in it.’

So he accepted the cup, and drank, not with the sacramental reverence her voice of a moment before had seemed to invite, but by burning gulps. He sat guzzling the bad brandy. He wanted to participate in Nance’s life as he hadn’t before, although he had been her lover. He knew every possible movement of her ribs, every reflection of her skin. He had torn the hook out of her gills; he had disembowelled her while still alive; he had watched her no less cruel dissection by the knives of light. You couldn’t call an experience an experiment, but he had profited by whatever it was. His centrifugal rocks suggested something of her numb throbbing; but he hadn’t till now entered into her life as he had into her body. Now she had given him the last bubble the sea trails along the firm sand: he lay with the stranger, or Nance, or the stranger, inside the hairy overcoat; her old man’s dribbling dick threatened to club him.