Patrick White - The Vivisector

In fact it was Nance who clubbed him. ‘That night in Rushcutters bloody Park when I got caught up with Duffield it was that old digger’s coat you was wearun I got a sight of it it had the green look of old pennies as I’d always imagined and nothun you did nor said would ’uv thrown me off though it wasn’t hairy like I’d always imagined the overcoat would be.’

He began to belch. ‘God, this brandy — it’s filth, Nance!’ he heard the educated part of him bleat. ‘It’s going to rot us.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it’s crook. But that isn’t what rots a person.’

She remembered and went back to the table, and resumed guzzling and slopping the brandy till she was sucked under again.

‘Not what I imagined,’ she said. ‘Nothun is ever what you expect. Some big thug who comes upstairs lookin for a stretch you wait for ’im to knock the wind out of yer or rip you up when ’e starts tellun you about ’is bloody pigeons you can’t coo enough to please the pigeon fancier it’s more often the little ones some little mingy watchmaker or book-keeper who snaps at yer nipples with ’is wobbly dentures or tries to hamstring yer with a penknife.’

‘You’re obsessed,’ he maintained, because by now he had got up and helped himself again, and his head was rolling, and recovering, and leaping, at the length of his neck. ‘Obsessed!’ The word looked magnificent.

‘Yes,’ she grumbled. ‘I’m obsessed. Like you’re obsessed — by what you like to think is the truth.’

She let out a long, uncontrollable burp.

‘Nuthin is ever what you expect. I never thought I would ’uv taken up with a so-called artist I was lookun for somethun else I would ’uv done better to ’uv got fixed up with some bloke who expects ’is chop at five-thirty ’is regular root Saturday because you’re married to ’im anyway he thinks you are you aren’t inside you are free but with an artist you’re never free he’s makun use of yer in the name of the Holy Mother of Truth. He thinks. The Truth!’

She spat it out on the floor.

‘When the only brand of truth ’e recognizes is ’is own it is inside ’im ’e reckons and as ’e digs inter poor fucker you ’e hopes you’ll help ’im let it out.’

No less metallic than the brandy he was drinking, the lamp’s narrow dagger of light had found its mark.

‘By turnun yer into a shambles,’ she trumpeted.

‘A shambles all right!’ he lunged back.

‘Out of the shambles ’e paints what ’e calls ’is bloody work of art!’

Suddenly she grabbed the lamp, and the light, from being restricted and austere, blazed at the self-portrait which he was hoping she wouldn’t notice, or intended to ignore. She had only been saving it up, it appeared. She made it look devilish: furtive, ingrown, all that he had persuaded himself it wasn’t, and worse than anything else — bad, not morally, but aesthetically.

‘There,’ she said, holding her torch. ‘That’s Duffield. Not bad. True. Lovun ’imself.’

She returned the lamp comparatively soberly to the table; while he continued flickering and fluctuating inside. The brandy threatened to choke him, uncoiling down his throat like a rope of burning light. All his past was splintering; he had never been able to catch it in its true prismatic colours: the colours of truth — as he saw it. His only true achievement was his failure. The self-portrait, though toned down by the shadow to which it had been withdrawn, was sprouting jagged diagonal teeth, womanly gyrating breasts, the holes for titivation by lipstick and tongue and prick.

Of course this isn’t real; soon we shall soothe each other back into our actual bodies.

He heard himself, like the worst of captions at the flicks: ‘We still have each other, Nance.’

‘Like shit we have!’

She made it spatter brown across his forehead. And now he did begin to resent to accuse if not appreciate the situation. Anyway, took the tip. He was beginning running out along the short instinctive track over the same fallen leaves. A rock almost shocked him back but not. He ran. Or shambled on.

Flies die in the dunny at night on yellow squares of the Truth you wipe your arse on.

When he lumbered splurging back it was the sandshoes he was wearing she shouted: ‘What you have got!’ not a question: a proclamation.

‘What you told me.’

‘I told yer you should ’uv dug it deeper,’ she shrieked. ‘It wouldn’t ’uv stank. Not so many blowies. An’ no one would ’uv been tempted.’

‘You can’t dig through rock. Not humanly possible.’

He began very patiently and seriously to smear all that he repudiated in himself. He had thought he knew every inch of that painted board, till working over it now. With enlightened fingertips. As he worked, he bubbled at the mouth, wondering wondering what would be left.

Nance watched for a bit. Then she turned away. She got down, inside her dress, on the rusty bed. She was shrivelling. The lamp pointed at her old shammy-leather breasts.

‘Leave it!’ she moaned in the end. ‘For Chrissake leave ut!’

‘But I stink!’

He knew he smelled loathsome. By now they had both reached the depths.

In between, bursts of exquisite purity, of rubbed leaves, of sprinkled dew, made them writhe.

He comforted her rags of flesh, but it was no more than comfort. He kissed her hare-lip, her disgusting john. Once she rose above him, and he thought she said: ‘My darling darling you are what I have lost.’

Again, she was ticking off an inventory: the eyelids she suspected; the hair between her breasts; his slack, his slender, his humbled balls.

Then stopped.

‘That ring,’ she was mumbling and fumbling.

‘What about it?’

‘What’s it for? ’

He couldn’t have explained to Nance it was for poor bloody Pa Duffield. ‘It’s just a ring. A family ring.’ She couldn’t have understood it was connected with the Adam’s apple of your incredible, but true, father.

‘But a ring! ’

‘All right,’ he shouted back, ‘we know it’s a ring ’; there was nothing he didn’t know without her harping on it.

It was his worst perversion: to have hung on to a ring, long after the money was spent, the five hundred they sold him for. Or pretension: worse than anything Harry and Alfreda Courtney had tried to put across, blazing with brilliantine and diamonds under the chandelier.

‘You’re right!’ He supposed it was one of his selves still shouting at this whore beside him. ‘What’s in a ring?’

He could tell Nance was frightened: he could hear, he could feel her, gibbering, blubbering, her fingers dithering, when all he wanted was to get up off the shuddering bed not to harm anybody but reach the door to fling the ring.

‘There!’ he croaked, after his moment of triumph.

‘Wadderyerdone?’ Seemed to need confirmation of what she had been watching.

‘Nothing to hurt anyone living.’ It was a lie of course: he could feel the wound deepening in himself. ‘I just wanted—’ he sighed it—‘what I should’ve done long — ago — got rid of the ring.’

He could hear the shock in Nance: it hissed between her teeth. ‘Throwun away a valuable ring yer grandad solid gold!’

As he fell down beside her but apart she began moaning for all the abominations ever committed by man or woman: sometimes she blamed herself, sometimes him.

Presently he fell asleep. When he woke he seemed to be alone in a dark room. A light, not of the sun, was moving faintly amongst the trees. At one stage he got as far as the door. Holding her smoking torch, Nance was stirring the fallen leaves with her foot. It looked feebly done, but if she had acted more forcefully she might have overbalanced. Then she got down, very methodically, on all fours, the better to look, but the lamp gave only the feeblest light: black smoke was pouring out of the slanted chimney.