Patrick White - The Vivisector

He found his way back to the bed and slept several ages in hells. Or was it awake in life? In which Nance was slucking at some brandy. She was standing at a narrow, untrue table. But he couldn’t properly see Nance: the hair was hanging over her face. Of all those who came and went, none was more terrible than Maman. Surely you don’t mean you can’t you didn’t forget to insure? Her sapphires were incredulous. After all we’ve paid for your education! He was insured against none of the calamities. At least they had taught him not to cry, or only in deepest privacy.

The sun delivered him by waking him. Stupid bloody Nance must be at it still, by raw sunlight. She had brought back the lamp: it was standing on the table, blacked out. She had been at the brandy again, he noticed.

He swallowed her dregs for company, and went out shivering into the raw red morning. The glitter, and all the brandy he had swilled, made his eyes ache, his mind function only furtively. He was glad he could see no sign of Nance: it gave him the chance to get down, bitterly, achingly, on his knees, and have a look for the lost ring. He worked very quickly, full of irony and disgust, turning over dead leaves, scuffling sand and pebbles, but quickly, and quicker, in case Nance showed up. In more assured privacy, in less harried circumstances, he might have settled down to enjoy a spate of self-pity.

Now there was no time. He stank. He hated himself. He hated Nance, who didn’t show up, however, to receive his hate in person.

Supposing she had left him? He raised his head, listening to the possibility of that.

He called: ‘Nance? Nance! ’

Perhaps it was the early morning air, but his call was returned to him, clear and youthful, out of the mouths of rocks normally heavy and sullen with heat. He continued calling, not yet begging; in fact he darkened his voice with anger: and it kept floating lightly back. He who was a man had been reduced, it seemed.

‘Naa — aance!’ his voice nancied back to him.

He more or less, no, he wasn’t running, but got back as quickly as he could, to the house, to find some reason for assurance.

The old draw-neck leather bag with metallic sheen and choker of embossed waratahs was lying where it had been left, and the handbag, stuffed with credentials and the tools of her trade. Nance hadn’t left him — or had she? The shoes. She hadn’t. Nance’s soul, such as it was, might have drifted loose, but her professional body couldn’t have walked off without the shoes.

He would have liked to celebrate his relief in some of the awful brandy, but the three bottles were stone-dry.

There had been a fourth, he remembered. He went out very quickly. He no longer called, but looked, with an intensity which cured his aching eyes and head. A curtain of cold sweat gathered on his eyelids waiting to fall.

In the meantime the sunlight had sharpened. Its glass teeth met with glass. Along the ironstone ledge directly below the house an explosion had taken place, he realized: of glass, and less spectacularly, flesh. The splintered glass almost rose from the rock to slash his conscience, but the flesh made no move to accuse. Nance in her black dress was lying like an old bashed umbrella on a dump. There was nothing of the curious sinewiness of nervous inquiry and recall which had distinguished her body the night before. The fall had rucked her skirt high up her big white legs, now heaped like left-over trimmings of dough or marzipan. One big white breast had squeezed its way to freedom. If it still suggested life it was of the very passive kind: of some variety of great polyp plastered to a rock. He couldn’t look at her face: the sun had golded it with too savage a brilliance.

He began climbing slithering crashing grazing sideways down his ribs snapping the wire of plants his nails tearing at finally torn.

On arrival, he stalked round her, hoping something he had experienced before this encounter with the full stop of suffering might help him deal with it; but nothing in his life or art did. He got down at last beside her, on his knees, and laid his forehead on a rock, the corrugations of which didn’t fit with his; as he hung there, sweating and trembling, groaning aloud for the inspiration withheld from him.

All through the nightmare of police and ambulance which Nance’s death brought on, there was something real pricking at his mind, something he had forgotten to do, until, finding the axe in his hand, he began to hack. But the board on which the self-portrait was painted, turned the blade. The axe too blunt? Or was he too weak in his present condition? He scraped a while ineffectually at the board, its surface still encrusted with his own faeces as well as paint. Then he took the scarred monster, eyeing him to the end, and threw it out as far as he could over the gorge, his lungs straining. It clapped and clattered at first, before bowling rather tamely down, only occasionally whamming against the side of a tree, then drowning in total silence.

At least in this instance nobody would inquire whether it was murder or suicide or accidental death.

Most evenings toward sunset, the bench the council had fastened to the pavement was fully occupied by neighbourhood acquaintances. Although they would sit staring out over the wasteland, with its deep swell of lantana and sudden chasms of ash-coloured rock, the landscape meant less to the rate-payers than their glimpses into one another’s lives. Even a total stranger could be persuaded to ignore landscape while exchanging the snapshots of experience, particularly as the sun was going down. But on this occasion, as the blind sockets of the white-faced houses squeezed together on the opposite cliff, reflected their evening illusion of gold, a solitary figure had possession of the bench.

It was too good to last, however: a second form was bellying towards it, down the street which sloped along the vacant land. The man on the bench averted his face, and from sitting somewhere about the middle, immediately moved to the far end.

The new arrival looked only fairly expectant: what he hoped for was a yarn, and so many people nowadays were surly. A large man, he advanced at a deliberate pace, breaking every now and again into a somewhat less calculated toddle; but his confidence appeared immense in planting his broad buttocks on the bench for nothing short of a long stay.

‘Well,’ he began almost at once, ‘nobody can complain about the weather, can they? I’d say it’s set good.’ He laughed slightly as encouragement.

Then he looked towards the one he hoped he might persuade to become his temporary companion; but the other shifted where he sat, and made what was neither an answer nor a groan.

The large man waited. The other was younger than he had estimated from a distance; he took a quick look around to see if there was anyone who might suspect him of wrong intentions. Then he laughed again, louder than before, his fat-chinned laugh. Of course this stranger wasn’t all that young: not young at all, in fact.

‘I like to take a constitutional,’ the large man confessed, ‘after I’ve shut up shop. Got to think of your health, eh? Business isn’t everything.’

Again the other didn’t come good with an answer, but made a noise which he seemed to hope might pass for one, while settling deeper in his overcoat.

The fat man would have liked to stare at what he had found. He did glance deeper than at first, but quickly away, and grunting it off.

‘Never seen you around before. Get to know the local faces from running a grocery business. I lead a very normal life. It’s the right way, isn’t it? Plain food, regular evacuation, and fresh air. So I come down ’ere every night while the wife’s preparing somethun for tea.’ He coughed, and his teeth made a pebbled sound. ‘Don’t live in these parts, do yer?’