Peter Carey - The Chemistry of Tears

“Hang on.”

The music was turned down. He was slow in returning.

“I interrupted you. I’m sorry.”

“My darling,” he said, “there is nothing to interrupt.” I remembered that he had once been part of a couple too.

From my open window I could see two men support a very drunk young girl, a poor wobbly creature with silly shoes, plump legs, short skirt. Jesus help her. I could not watch.

“Where are you? Not still at that bloody pub?”

“It’s what they call Happy Hour.”

There was a pause. Crofty said, “Would you like me to come and sit with you?”

It would have been such a great relief. But of course I could not.

“How is your Latin?” I asked.

“Rusty.”

“But probably serviceable?”

“Possibly.”

“What does this mean: Illud aspicis non vides ?”

“Where is the beak?” he asked and I realized he was slightly squiffy.

“You know where the beak is,” I said. “And I would be astonished if you had not read it.”

“Do you know, my dear,” he said, and it was clear to me that he was topping up his glass. “Do you know, I find the notion that mysteries must be solved to be very problematic. You know what I mean? Every curator finally learns that the mysteries are the point.”

“Please don’t tease me.”

“No, I am serious. Why do we always wish to remove ambiguity?”

I thought, why do you always want to polish silver half to death?

“Without ambiguity you have Agatha Christie, a sort of aesthetic whodunnit. But look at any Rothko. You can look and look but you never get past the vacillations and ambiguities of colour, and form, and surface. This is so much ahead of the ‘analytical clarities’ of your Josef Albers.”

“He is not my Albers.”

“He was Matthew’s Albers.”

“He was, yes.”

There was another pause.

“This is my project,” I said. “You gave it to me.”

“Indeed I did. I hope I was not too meddlesome?”

“Eric, I lost everything I lived for. You gave me this. If it is a mystery, that’s fine with me. But you gave it to me.”

“Yes, dear girl, I did.”

“Then why give it to her?” I hadn’t meant to say that, but I had. The swan was mine. Henry was mine.

Eric gave himself a splash. “What do you mean?” he asked wetly.

“This is mine.”

“Indeed,” he said, “but what is ‘it’ exactly?”

“The Latin.”

“So you wish to know how it translates?”

“Yes I do.”

“You want to know what it says?”

“Yes.”

“ Illud aspicis non vides . It means, You cannot see what you can see.”

“Oh shut up,” I cried.

“It means, You cannot see what you can see.”

“No,” I said. “No it doesn’t.”

“Sweet Cat,” he said. “Call me whenever you wish.”

The phone went dead.

The marrow of my bones was filled with hurt, envy, rage that this mad rich girl was stealing everything from me, including Angus, that is, the carrier of that same spiralled mechanism that made my beloved’s upper lip, that wry funny taut muscle in the shadow of his famous nose.

You cannot see what you can see, said Sumper. What a load of rubbish.

WHEN I WAS AWOKEN it did not occur to me that such an enormous noise might be made by rain. But rain it was, the most unimaginable torrent cascading off the roof and falling, backlit, like Victoria Falls, deep and blue.

I had told Eric to shut up.

There was a sort of banging on the wall outside. Was it a hurricane? Should I shelter in the bathroom?

I saw the shadow of a ladder, waving, slamming against the wall. I thought they will break the glass and I have no slippers to protect my feet. Then there was a very wide white man in shorts, crawling up against the weight of water, his body flat against my glass. I saw his belly button and the black hair on his skin, as if some creature of the unconscious was breaking through the membrane of a dream. I could hear thunder through the rain. I sat holding my sheets across my breasts.

The water roared. I thought, I am totally alone in some hellish place; of all the people on the earth, Eric Croft has been the kindest, the most forbearing, bending when he had no requirement to bend, giving without expecting thanks.

Shut up, I had said.

The world will end like everything must. I think the ladder fell off the roof. The rain kept pouring. Men were shouting. There was nothing I could do that was not ridiculous.

There were now flashing yellow lights in the streets. Then another ladder. Men in bright blue waterproofs climbed past my window. Who in London wore blue waterproofs? I did not know the stigmata of disaster.

At two o’clock I was alone at my window, observing the empty flooded street. Next morning I departed, with a light soft bag of clothes on one shoulder and my handbag underneath my arm. My clothes were no longer clean, and if I selected a white linen shirt it was only because I knew I could use hydrogen peroxide to remove the sweat stains once I was at work.

A greater olfactory challenge was presented outside the pub where I found surface water rushing down the road. Basements had been flooded. The drains in the street were bubbling with very nasty-smelling water.

The old pharmacist had his doors open and I caught a glimpse of him, standing on a high and dangerous ladder. He had thrown sodden cardboard boxes into the street and from them rose what was, I suppose, sulphur dioxide, although there was ammonia as on the day before, and I was forcibly reminded of all those rich sulphur compounds that accompany human decay. I thought of the bacteria, fungi, the protozoa, the way our bodies attack themselves when we die. I did not like this idea, not at all. I preferred to think of us as something dry and crumbly, with no relation to the moisture-laden sheen of our decay.

Security inspected my dirty laundry, bastards. Later, in the fume cupboard I removed my shirt, applied the hydrogen peroxide and finished the job with a hairdryer. Done. Fresh, not really.

Amanda had not logged off. Her big screen was filled with spewing spill and a chain of protesting voices. Were they children or adults? Dessgirl, Mankind40, Miss Katz, Ardiva, Clozaril—who would know? To read their comments was to live inside a howl. Was this Amanda’s underworld?

Clorazil wrote, Who made the machine that kills the ocean? Whose interest did that serve? Not humans, that’s for sure. Ardiva believed that flames were coming out together with the oil. Sheread2 conjectured that there was a volcano involved. Much is not being told to us, she wrote. Mankind40 thought we should just nuke it shut. Below, the lowest circle, the voices of the damned continued. I didn’t know it had affected me. I didn’t even know that all this saline was washing down my cheeks, but when Amanda’s arms came around me, hugging from behind, I began to cry in earnest. There was no point in disguising it.

“Miss Gehrig, I’m so sorry.”

I accepted her clean white handkerchief. I blew my snotty nose and went to my computer to generate the work orders for a busy day.

OF COURSE THE PR people have been “psyched” about our project all along and I have driven them nuts with my postponements and delays. Yes, they must have the website ready, but they are museum people too, and surely they must know that completion always takes longer than one expects or, to be more honest, longer than Publicity anticipates.

Finally we agree to announce the swan in two stages, one public, one more private. The restoration does not need to be totally complete before we show it to the “loots and suits” as Eric quaintly calls them.

I have been required to sign off a “safe date” with the publicity director and the prickly website manager, but when the day arrives it is not safe at all. Later, on the morning of the appointed day, the music box refuses to stop playing when the swan’s cycle of performance is at an end.