Also by the same author
Don't Drink The Water: A Year in Asia
The Republic
The Halcyon Trilogy
THE LUNATIC MESSIAH
SIMON CUTTING
1
JOE FINCH DOES NOT EXIST
The latest note was very concise, there was no doubt about that, but it was also the most verifiably false, as it was Joe Finch himself who was reading it. Like all the others it was written on a plain sheet of paper in a thick black marker, like the kind used on a whiteboard. Joe frowned and folded it in half, before placing it in the top drawer of his desk. There were five other notes in the drawer already, all equally mysterious and all anonymous. They had begun appearing a few days earlier, usually slipped under the door of his office before he arrived at work, but once he had found one underneath the windscreen wiper of his Volvo in the parking lot. That had been the oddest one so far.
THE MULE IS A VEHICLE
He wasn't sure that the mule would like its entire worth as a living creature reduced to its ability to be exploited as a vehicle, but it didn't really keep him up at night. It was most likely students playing some kind of elaborate practical joke on him, and from the nature of the messages, they were probably philosophy students. There were a lot of those where Joe worked at The Finchwood Academy for Creative Arts and Dramatics Education. An academy for higher education in the creative fields of life in name, it was in fact more of a dumping ground for those students that had neither the desire nor the academic aptitude required to attend one of the more recognised universities in the Sydney metropolitan area. The similarity of his own surname and that of the Finchwood Academy was entirely coincidental but it had become something of a joke amongst his colleagues who had gone on to more illustrious careers. At any reunion he was foolish enough to attend he could be sure of hearing the following dialogue:
'Who on earth would choose to work at Finchwood?'
'Joe Finch would!'
Needless to say, Joe didn't attend the reunions any more. He reached back into the drawer and removed another of the notes. This one had arrived the previous morning and had an even more cryptic message.
THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH MAKES LIES OF US ALL
Joe could have sworn that he had read that somewhere back in his own days as a student but where exactly it was from he couldn't recall. It could have come from the inside of a fortune cookie for all he knew, but it had given him an idea. Gabriel Armaita was the only one of his students who was not a complete imbecile and for that reason, she was the most annoying. The daughter of a psychiatrist, she insisted on analysing everything in a clinical manner. Her diagnosis was rarely limited to the text itself and it frequently extended to a full psychological profile of the author as well. This made his European Literature tutorial a complete nightmare, but now he had come up with a possible solution. Suddenly there was a knock on the door, which shook him from his thoughts.
‘Enter,’ he said, in the authoritative voice that he reserved for his students.
The door opened slowly, banging on the corner of the desk (his office would have made a wardrobe feel spacious) and Harry Tudor poked his head in. Harry was the Faculty Head and had an office just opposite Joe's. His title was not as impressive as it sounded, as there were only two of them in the European Literature Faculty but, technically speaking, Harry was his boss. Being his only departmental colleague, he had also become Joe's de facto best friend.
‘Sorry,’ said Harry. ‘I was just checking that we’re still on for dinner tonight. I know you have a class to get to.’
'Tell me, Harry, do you memorise everybody's timetable or is it just mine? Don't answer that,' Joe said when it appeared that Harry hadn't grasped the rhetorical nature of the question. 'So are you bringing your latest elbow accessory? What's her name again?'
'Zoe, and no, I'm not. I told her it was over.'
Joe nodded knowingly. This sort of news from anyone else might have provoked at least the pretence of sympathy, but coming from Harry it was such a regular event that Joe didn't even bother.
'Tell me, Harry, do you think your fear of intimacy stems from a series of unsatisfying relationships or your series of unsatisfying relationships stems from a fear of intimacy?'
Harry smiled boyishly, and Joe shuddered. It was that boyish smile that allowed him to attract so many younger women in the first place, but Joe had always felt that it simply looked wrong on an unmarried man in his late forties.
'There's no answer to that. You may as well ask what came first, the chicken or the egg.'
'It was neither. The rooster came first and then made some feeble excuse about having to work in the morning and left the chicken feeling deeply unsatisfied.'
'That's great, Joe. I'll see you at lunch, okay?'
Joe nodded again, but then suddenly called Harry back, scrambling on his desk for a sheet of paper.
'Wait, wait, wait. Harry, while you’re here I have something to show you.’
Harry glanced at his watch.
‘Joe, I think you’d better get going. You’re supposed to be there in five minutes.’
Joe waved aside his concerns and snatched up the sheet of paper from his desk. He handed it to Harry who reluctantly began to look over it.
‘Well they can wait. They’re only students anyway. They come and go…’
‘While we are the rocks that the waves of ignorance crash against,’ Harry said, reading from the page.
He turned the paper over to see if the other side was blank and, noting that it was, turned it back again.
‘Well, read it,’ said Joe.
‘My slowly healing temperament is scarcely substantial enough to contain the depths of mindless oblivion that permeate the very fabric of my being…’ Harry murmured, before looking up from the page again. ‘What is this nonsense?’
‘I wrote it,’ replied Joe proudly, and he smiled when Harry immediately looked apologetic.
‘Don’t worry. I know it’s terrible. That is in fact the very point of it. Who could possibly write the words, the very serenity of disposition is the root of rage within the breast of others. The very lack of feeling creates such emotive response, and take themselves seriously? It’s a little trap for a student of mine, that’s all.’
Harry looked confused and handed the page back to Joe, again glancing at his watch. Joe sighed. Harry’s obsession with punctuality, especially when it was not even his class, was very tiring but he had chosen to ignore it. Harry could probably tell him, down to the nearest second, exactly how long he had been ignoring it for.
‘Look. There’s a girl in my class, Gabriel Armaita, whose father is the Head Psychiatrist at the local hospital as she is so fond of reminding us all. She’s obsessed with it. Every time we discuss any novel she uses the text to make some sort of diagnosis of the author.’
‘Well, what’s wrong with that? It sounds like an interesting approach to literary criticism, to be honest.’
‘Interesting? It’s ridiculous. She claimed that Frankenstein was only written due to penis envy and that Oscar Wilde was a repressed heterosexual.'
'So?'
‘So? We’re supposed to be discussing the literature. Not whether or not Jane Austen just really needed to get over it and have sex with something.’
‘Fine. So she takes it too far. What’s your point?’
‘My point is that she reads too much into everything. Psychiatry in general is an inexact science, and having some nineteen year old spouting her textbook diagnoses in my classes is something I can do without. That’s why I wrote this.’
Joe gestured at the piece of paper on the table in front of him.
‘So what does it mean?’
‘Nothing. That’s the whole point. It’s completely random. Every single thing I’ve written on that page is just the result of some random word association. It means absolutely nothing. It’s rubbish.’
‘So you want her to make a fool of herself?’
‘The search for meaning makes lies of us all, Harry. But I want her to realise it. I’m going to tell them it’s a short fragment from a diary written by Tolstoy. That should invoke a nice long-winded answer from our Ms Armaita.’
‘Fine, fine. But you really should be getting to class.’
Joe got to his feet rapidly and snatched the paper from Harry’s hand.
'Tick, tock, Harry. For a man with such loose morals, you certainly run a tight ship.'
'Sure, Joe. I'll see you tonight.'
Joe was already some way down the corridor at this point but he stopped and smiled manically at his friend.
'Perhaps, but there's a growing amount of evidence suggesting that I don't actually exist, so let's play it by ear!' he called back, leaving Harry to wander, bemused, back to his own office.
When Joe arrived in his tutorial his students were all waiting for him in the grubby little room. There was Gabriel Armaita, sitting front row centre as she always did, her folder lined up on the desk at perfect right angles and her pen in hand. Behind her were John Smith and Richard Jones, two boys whose personalities were as bland as their names. Joe barely even thought of them as real people. Whenever he tried to picture them their faces seemed so nondescript it was if they had been blurred our for security reasons. As for their personalities, Joe strongly doubted that either one of them could pass a Turing Test. Naturally, they always sat together, but they barely said a word. The two girls, Tess and Leah, were next to them on the right, chatting away to each other about the most recent party they had been to and who had done what to whom in the upstairs bedroom. There was one other student signed on for the course, a Mohammed Ashhab, but since the start of the semester, Joe had not seen him once. Gabriel Armaita pointed at her watch as he entered.
‘The tutorial started at half past three, Mr Finch.’
Joe placed his tattered leather briefcase on the desk.
‘Really. Can I copy someone's notes then?’ he replied, without looking up.
'Mr Finch...'
‘Right,' interrupted Joe, 'now before we begin I have something here that I think you all may find of interest. It’s not exactly related to what we’re doing but it’s a nice diversion.’
Gabriel raised her hand to speak, but it was only a token gesture, because she began to speak without waiting for a response.
‘With all due respect,’ she began, in a voice that suggested she didn’t believe much respect was due, ‘we're already late. Do we really have time to waste on curiosities? Our exams are only eighteen weeks away.’
Eighteen weeks, Joe thought incredulously. He pushed his tongue against his teeth. This was not what he really wanted to do. What he really wanted to do was push his fist against Gabriel’s teeth, but this smaller action would have to suffice for the time being. He would have his revenge soon enough.
‘Yes, Ms Armaita, we do have time to waste on curiosities. I am here not just to teach you about literature as defined by the current fashionable curriculum. I am also here to teach you how to think. What I have in my hand here is a fragment from a diary written by Tolstoy in his last days. He was on his way to a monastery with one of his daughters at the time, but he still kept fairly extensive records of his state of mind. This particular fragment has never been published outside of academic texts so I thought you might like to hear it.'
Now Gabriel did look interested. She was always interested in anything to do with Tolstoy and Joe knew exactly why. The man was clearly mad. A genius maybe, but mad nonetheless, and he smiled to himself at the thought that Gabriel had taken the bait so easily. Joe began to read the gibberish on the page in front of him. Even as he read it, it was hard to keep a straight face. It was just such blatant rubbish. When he had read it in private it hadn’t seemed quite so obvious, but now in front of the class he was almost certain that someone would see through it immediately. But they didn’t. He read all the way to the end. The bland boys made a pretence of listening, and the chatty girls stopped chatting long enough for him to finish, but Gabriel was transfixed. He could see the gears in her brain working overtime as he read, analysing each sentence as she heard it. When he had finished he placed it down on the desk reverently.
'A trifle overblown perhaps, but you must remember that this is not from any published work and as such lacks the professionalism and polish of his other writing. Although as anybody who's read Tolstoy will tell you, the man might have benefited from a more aggressive editing process,' Joe laughed, not because he thought his comment was funny, but because he was well aware that the only one of his students who had ever read any Tolstoy was Gabriel.
'Does anybody want to offer any of their insights into the text?'
Joe made a show of looking around the room, first at the two boys who, even now when they were trying so hard to look thoughtful, were still very reminiscent of furniture. The two girls weren't even trying to look thoughtful. Their facial muscles weren't aware of that configuration. It was Gabriel who spoke. It was only ever Gabriel who spoke.
‘I don’t know what he was trying to say. He was ranting by the sound of it, but I think we can deduce a lot of things from it that maybe he didn’t mean to say.’
Here we go, thought Joe with a growing sense of delight.
‘This doesn’t read like other works of Tolstoy. You say he was on his way to a monastery at the time? But as we know, he didn’t make it. He died before he got there, and I think he knew. This reads like a man who is about to die and knows it. It reads like a man at the end of his life. Hopeless. I think that the man who wrote this diary was ready for death but too much of a coward to take that last step of total acceptance. He felt that everything was worthless, but just kept on going through the mechanical motions of the world because he didn’t know what else to do.’
'Is that so? You can tell all of this from that one little fragment?' Joe said, smirking, but he was beginning to feel a pain in his temples.
'Mr Finch, people give away far more than they intend to all the time. Just from their body language or the intonation of their voice. This was from a man's private diary, and it was something he probably never intended anybody else to read. It lays out his psychological state like a road map.'
Joe was trying to savour the moment, but the throbbing in his temples seemed to have come out of nowhere. He had never suffered a migraine before, but he would have been willing to bet that they felt exactly like this.
‘Anyway, as I was saying,' continued Gabriel, 'the man who wrote this has lost the ability to love, and to be loved. He is sexually and emotionally unfulfilled. Some of the lines are petty, like the very serenity of disposition is the root of rage within the breast of others. The very lack of feeling creates such emotive response. It screams of failure, despite the convoluted use of language. He’s saying he hates that other people aren’t as desperate and hopeless as he is. It enrages him that others can feel serenity within their own lives while he is nothing more than a worthless, impotent, hate-filled failure.’
Joe looked back and forth from Gabriel to the two boys behind her. Their faces now did look blurred out, quite literally. He struggled to form their features in a cohesive form but they were nothing but faceless entities, staring from the blurred outlines of their eye sockets. By contrast, Gabriel looked as though her skin was aflame. It was glowing with an almost ethereal white light.
‘Wait. What are you saying? That Tolstoy was a worthless failure?’ Joe struggled to say, wondering if he looked as bad as he felt.
‘No. But he obviously thought he was towards the end of his life. The man who wrote this is not the Tolstoy who wrote "Anna Karenina". The man who wrote this was a hopelessly bitter wreck of a man. He writes in a smugly superior way, but that just further underlines his own inadequacies. He tells so much more about himself than he ever meant to with this… this tantrum.’
Joe rubbed his head. He could feel himself sweating. It was actually rolling down his forehead as Gabriel spoke. Her brow furrowed in something akin to concern.
'Are you okay, Mr Finch?'
Joe sat down on the corner of the desk heavily, forcing himself to look up. He pointed a finger at Gabriel accusingly.
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. You can’t work out a psychological profile based on a few paragraphs of writing.’
‘In a very broad sense, you can, if this is genuine,’ she replied indignantly. ‘I doubt it is, anyway. Tolstoy was a great man, despite his faults. Whoever wrote this was a pathetic excuse for one.'
Joe wiped the sweat from his brow and stood up but he almost fell to the floor. Gabriel was shining so brightly that the rest of the room seemed shrouded by darkness. She was the voice of truth from above, and he was the subject of that horrible light. He snatched the paper from the desk and jammed it into his briefcase, tearing it as he did so.
‘I have to go. You’re dismissed. I’ll see you next week.’
His head was pounding now but he could barely feel it. It was a dull roar in the background of his more immediate concerns. The thought that kept running through his mind again and again. The thought that he was nothing more than a worthless, impotent, hate-filled failure.
'Mr Finch...'
The voices and the light faded away and Joe fell to the floor, hitting his head on the desk on the way down. The last words to go through his mind before he lost consciousness entirely were written in thick black pen across his mind.
The search for truth makes lies of us all.
2
The smell is terrible. As my eyes adjust to the light I can see that I'm in a bathroom, and one that has not been cleaned in quite some time. It has a squat toilet, stained almost black, with a shower directly above it. The door is closed, but I can hear voices on the other side. It occurs to me that I should probably feel confused by my new surroundings, but somehow I feel nothing but calm. Wherever I am, it doesn't look very much like Australia. My hand is tingling as if I have pins and needles, and my back is also very sore. I pull up my shirt and run my hand across the skin. It's coarse, and it stings as it makes contact with my fingertips. I force myself to feel again, and to my surprise I can run my index finger down the long ridge of a scar on my lower back, several inches long, and raised from the skin in a jagged mountain range of puckered flesh. That's certainly new, but then again, so are my surroundings. I push the door open, noticing an increase in the tingling sensation in my hand. The door yields easily. A little too easily. It almost feels like it would come off the hinges if I gave it a more forceful nudge. Behind the door is an equally dingy hotel room. The curtains are drawn shut and the room is lit by a very dim bulb, hanging by a chain from the roof. There is a lumpy bed in the centre of the room, upon which sits a young man with dark hair. His pants are around his ankles, and he looks very uncomfortable. Nearby an equally young woman is going through a suitcase. Neither one of them looks at me when I enter the room and I feel somewhat disconnected from the whole scene, as though watching it through a screen.
'Let's just get on with it, Ada,' says the man irritably.
The woman, Ada, does not pause in what she is doing.
'There should be some alcohol wipes in here somewhere.'
I walk over and stand between them, hoping to make my presence known quickly, but neither one of them pays me the slightest bit of attention. I wave a hand in front of the man, but his eyes look straight through me.
'Alcohol wipes? I'm about to stick a catheter bag containing a deadly anthrax variant into the eye of my penis. I'm not too concerned about alcohol wipes right now.'
Ada turns, holding up a small white sachet triumphantly. In her other hand she holds the aforementioned catheter bag, which contains a pale yellow liquid.
'It's all sealed, Evan. But who knows where they got their medical equipment? It's best that we sterilise it.'
Evan, the man's name is Evan.
'Hello, Evan,' I say experimentally.
To my unending lack of surprise, he doesn't look at me. Ada comes over to the bed, tearing open the alcohol wipe with her teeth and swabbing the end of the catheter with it. She sidesteps me to get to Evan, but that is her only concession to acknowledging my existence.
It's hard to know what to think in situations like this because I've never been in a situation like this. My first thought is the most obvious. I'm dreaming. What else can this be, except a dream? I open the door to the hotel room and step out into the hallway, just as Ada kneels down to begin her unpleasant task.
'Shit, shut that door,' cries Evan, and I turn back just in time to see Ada kicking the door closed in my face.
'Oh Christ that's cold!'
The hallway is as stained and disgusting as the room, with a series of nondescript doors lining it on either side. I walk to the far end of the hall, where some light is streaming in from between some shutters, and throw them open. The scene that greets me is at once unexpected and also quite familiar. In the street below, sounds of a foreign language waft up towards me. Cars and motorcycles are jammed into the narrow space, which is flanked by small hole-in-the-wall shops and makeshift food stands. A large throng of people push their way forward, moving slowly, like a river, washing around the vehicles which can move no faster than the flow of pedestrians allows. The odd cow, with crimson horns, meanders its way through the flow, and most of the people give them a wide berth. There is a man on a small wooden cart dragging himself through the crowd with hands wrapped in filthy rags. His legs are missing, and the stumps of his thighs end in small, undeveloped toes. I have been here before. I know exactly where I am. In fact, I have stayed in this very hotel before, in the very room in which Evan and Ada are now performing an unpleasant act. This is Par Ganj, the main bazaar, in New Delhi, India.
I was twenty two when I first came to India. I came with a girl I was dating at the time, a bird-like creature of nineteen who already had the sort of miserable attitude to life that it took me another thirty years to develop. From the moment we stepped off the plane to the moment that I left her in a ashram in Kerala she did very little but complain. I was the opposite. Everything I saw amazed me and I’d felt that this was the first moment of my life. Everything before had just been leading up to this experience. My education, and my string of menial jobs in bland office environments had all been leading to this. I would travel for the rest of my life, I believed, although this turned out to be far from correct. I was back in Australia within six months and had my teaching degree three years later. The only other time I left the country was on my honeymoon to Fiji on a package tour, where Mary and I stayed in a resort and tried to avoid being seated at the same table as the loud Americans. This hotel was the first place that I had ever felt any kind of freedom. It felt like the first choice that I had ever made entirely on my own, and I wasn't about to let the whinging of my then-girlfriend take that away from me.
'Ow!' screams Evan from down the hallway, his voice cutting through the sound of the street below, which is quite an achievement.
A door opens just behind me, and a concerned looking Israeli backpacker sticks his head out, glancing up the corridor towards the sound of agonised screaming. He looks at me quizzically. I shrug, and he goes back into his room, bolting the door behind him. The very slight tingling in my hand that I noticed in the bathroom seems to intensify and when I look down I am shocked to see a large scar on my palm, pink and rough. Turning my hand over, I can see that it is on the other side as well, about four centimetres long, as if something has pierced me. Like the scar on my lower back, this is not something that I have normally and I've never seen anything like it before. I can think of nothing I've done to sustain such injuries. I walk back down the corridor and push the door to the room open again. It's not locked, but once inside I shut it behind me and pulled the bolt across. There's something quite enjoyable about this whole situation. It must be a lucid dream, but it feels so real that it's almost like reliving that experience from so long ago; that time when I felt my life was just beginning. Evan is lying on the bed, his head resting on the mattress, as Ada straps the bag to the side of his stomach. He's dripping with sweat.
'There's a bit of blood, nothing to worry about,' Ada says, but Evan just rolls his eyes, looking ready to pass out from the pain.
As much as it feels like reliving the past, I don't actually recall sharing my room with a young couple who appear to be trying to smuggle an anthrax variant inside a catheter bag. I didn't keep a diary of my trip (I believe life is meant to be lived, not documented), but I'm fairly sure I would remember something like this.
'Now I need to piss,' Evan says miserably.
Ada shakes her head.
'You can't. The bag's not functional. It's just the pressure on your urethra that's causing that sensation, you don't really need to.'
'Oh well that's good to know. As long as I only desperately feel like I need to piss and don't actually have to then that's fine.'
Despite recognising Par Ganj instantly, a lot has changed. When I had first come to India there were far fewer tourists and things had a more dangerous feel to them. Now it looks more like a theme park, the beggars and cows being nothing more than novelties for backpackers to gawk at. But of course, this isn't real. It’s simply an amalgamation of memories from my past, all brought together because I passed out during my tutorial.
My tutorial! The memory of it comes flooding back to me now. Gabriel's whole body glowing like some terrible angel as she poured judgement down on me. Was that real, or was it just some sort of illusion brought on by lack of oxygen? I need to wake up. If I'm still lying on the floor having a heart attack, or whatever it is I'm having, then surely the longer I stay here the more damage I'll do. Evan sits up and slowly eases his pants up around his hips, being careful not to jiggle the bag too much, but he still winces as his belt catches on it. Ada pats his shoulder sympathetically, but she can't quite conceal a smile on her face, which Evan notices immediately.
'Go on, laugh if you want to. But the next time we do this we're smuggling plutonium out of China using breast implants.'
Ada does laugh, and gives Evan a hug, causing him to wince in pain once again.
'Oh, I'm sorry. I'm not laughing at you, Evan, I'm just laughing near you. About what's happening to you.'
Evan pushes her away, and she laughs again. I like her already. There's something about Evan that instantly annoys me, but I'm not sure what it is. I focus on his face for a while. It could be something to do with the fact that he clearly spends at least half an hour a day doing his hair, or the fact that he wears jeans with a huge silver belt buckle in the middle of the Indian summer. Then I decide that it has nothing to do with the way he looks but more to do with the way he acts. He has a cold arrogance about him. Even when he's lying on his back with his pants around his ankles he radiates a sense of undeserved confidence. Just like I used to at his age.
'Listen. I have to get back. There's a fairly good chance that my brain is being damaged as we speak and if I don't wake up soon then I don't know what will happen. Is there any chance at all that we could speed this up?'
I'm almost certain that Ada looks at me now, but then I see that behind me on a small wooden table there are two passports, and she again steps past me to pick them up.
'We'd better get going, the flight leaves in three hours.'
She hands Evan a blue Australian passport.
'So your name is Joe Finch. You're a European Literature lecturer and you need a catheter because you're waiting for a kidney transplant.'
'Wait, did you say Joe Finch?' I demand, snatching the passport from Evan's unresisting hand.
I look over the passport, and sure enough, there's my name printed right alongside Evan's smug face, which in turn sits right underneath his carefully styled I-just-got-out-of-bed hair. The date of birth is the 23rd of August, 1988, exactly thirty years after my own. That would make Evan twenty two years old.
'There's a section for special medical needs stapled inside listing your condition, so the customs officers shouldn't give us too much trouble.'
I flip through the passport trying to find it, but Evan takes it from my hand. He doesn't snatch it, but just takes it from me as if I'm not even there. As if I hadn't even taken it in the first place. He folds out the piece of paper that lists his false condition and looks it over.
'I have no idea what this is supposed to look like, but it all seems official enough.'
'The only thing that worries me is that we didn't leave the country on the same passport. These have false entry stamps and they assure me it won't be a problem but I'm not so sure.'
I don't have a catheter, and I don't need a kidney transplant, as far as I know. Not yet at least, but who knows what might develop? Could this be a lucid and prescient dream combined? Are those formats even compatible?
'Get going. You're not even real people and as soon as I wake up it won't matter if you get through customs or not. Just get out of here and let me wake up before I lose the ability to catch a ball with my right hand.'
'Let's go,' says Evan, sliding the passport into his pocket and zipping up the suitcase.
He throws the wrapper from the alcohol wipe into the bin underneath the table and with one last glance around the room to make sure they have everything they step into the hallway. I stand watching them leave, but nothing happens.
'Oh wait, better turn out the light,' I hear Ada say from down the hall and she skips back up and reaches her hand in, extinguishing the dim bulb hanging from the ceiling.
3
Joe arrived home at the usual time, despite having taken the rest of the day off at Harry's insistence. Joe in turn insisted that dinner was not cancelled, as Mary had been up quite early preparing a roast and she would be absolutely infuriated if he cancelled dinner over something as minor as a violent seizure. He had only one further lecture that day in any case, and although there were fifty seven people supposed to show up for it, rarely more than twenty actually made it, so Joe hardly felt that its cancellation would send shockwaves through the student body. He had driven his very sensible Volvo at a not very sensible speed, but to his absolute dismay he had not been stopped by the police. This, despite the fact that he spent at least twenty minutes weaving quite erratically at high speeds along major arterial roads. It was an anticlimax not to find himself pulled over, because at least then he would have been forced to try and explain his actions. As it was, he couldn't. He had simply felt the sudden and uncontrollable impulse to do something incredibly dangerous and his middle-aged mind could come up with nothing more serious than violating the speed limit. It was something. It meant he was alive if it meant he could have died. It was better than whatever had happened to him during the tutorial which was too much of an unknown to be life affirming. It was a random neurological spasm, nothing like the simple laws of physics that would kill him when an irresistible Volvo met an immovable object. Mary and Joe's house was a modest two bedroom affair in a suburb of Sydney that had yet to become inundated with cafes, but it was only a matter of time. The front door opened almost immediately onto the kitchen and a staircase led upstairs to the bedroom and the study, although it had been a long time since it was used as a study. Mary looked up, when he entered, from where she was chopping up a pumpkin on the kitchen bench.
'Hi, Joe, how was work?'
Joe considered the question. Work had been a revelation of his own mortality. Work had been a reminder that there are things that the human brain cannot hope to understand. He had discovered that one of his students was a facade of divine light concealing the blackness of his own psyche; a bleak mirror of the void that consumed him from within.
'Fine,' he replied, kissing her lightly on the cheek and placing his briefcase on the kitchen table.
'The beef only has another hour or so, so I'm starting to prepare the vegetables now,' Mary said, explaining what he could clearly see her doing.
It was as if she was hosting a cooking show.
'Uh huh.'
She handed him a jar of mustard, which he took without question.
'Can you open that? I ran it under the tap but it won't budge.'
Joe turned the lid of the mustard and it popped almost instantly. He handed it back to her without even looking at her exaggerated expression of annoyance. The cliché of a man opening a jar was simply too banal for him to devote any thought to. His life was a series of cliché's of course. Everybody's was, which was why they became clichés in the first place, but that didn't make them any easier to live through. He left the room without saying a word and Mary looked at him oddly, but quickly went back to chopping the pumpkin as he ascended the stairs.
'You'd better get ready. Have a shower and, for God's sake, shave. You skipped it this morning again, didn't you? You look a mess.'
'Uh huh,' Joe replied.
The water pattered against his forehead like fragments of truth trying to burrow into his brain. He stood facing the wall, letting it rain down on him for many minutes, so that the entire bathroom was soon filled with a veil of steam. It felt good to be so disconnected, even if just for a moment. Completely naked and entirely unselfconscious. Eventually, and reluctantly, he switched off the tap and stepped out of the shower. The mirror, which was heated so as to prevent misting, confronted him as he emerged. All of a sudden, the unselfconscious nudity disappeared. His body looked saggy, pale and bloated. He looked like a corpse that had been dragged out of a river. His eyes were sunken and purple bags had formed underneath them. Had they always been there, he wondered? Were they always so pronounced, or had some blood vessel popped in his head during the seizure? Mary was right, he needed to shave so he carefully applied shaving cream to his face and picked up the razor. He always used disposable razors, and rarely changed the blade. There was something cathartic about having to hack away forcefully at his own face to remove the stubble. The advertising promoting the smoothest shave ever had little effect on him. Some parts of life were meant to be rough. As he shaved he considered his options. Harry was coming for dinner and would almost certainly ask him how he was feeling, which would lead Mary to ask why Harry was asking how he was feeling, which in turn would make him feel bad for not telling her what had happened. He contemplated pre-empting it, but Mary was so prone to dramatics in private that he decided against it. Perhaps with Harry present as some kind of buffer, her natural sense of 'not wanting to creating a scene' would soften her reaction. He finished shaving and combed his hair, which was thinning and greying at about the same rate. Once his hair had turned completely white, there would be none of it left. He kept it cut quite short, refusing to cling to hope by attempting to comb it over. It must have seemed natural to those men who did it at first, and the change was probably so gradual that they never knew when to admit defeat but Joe liked to think that he was not so vain. He dressed in a suit and tie, which felt somewhat ridiculous considering it was only Harry coming over, and the suit and tie he changed into were only marginally different from the suit and tie he had been wearing at work that day anyway. Harry was not even bringing a date, unless he met one at the bottle shop whilst selecting a bottle of wine, something that had in fact happened before. He tucked in his shirt and gave himself the once over in the mirror before descending the stairs.
'What took you so long? He'll be here any minute. He's not bringing anybody, you said? Are you sure? I've made enough anyway. You can always take it...'
Mary trailed off as Joe entered the kitchen, her eyes wide with astonishment. Her look that quickly gave way to annoyance.
'Very funny, Joe. Get upstairs and fix it right now. It's almost seven thirty.'
Joe looked down at his suit and shrugged, running the tie through his fingers.
'What? Is the tie too loud?'
None of Joe's ties could be described as loud. They were largely unpatterned and he chose them to match the colour of his shirt. Joe's ties whispered, if anything. Mary fussed over to him and rubbed her hand across the left side of his face, an action that produced a gentle rasping sound.
'What is this? And this?' she said, flicking the left side of his shirt, which was not tucked into his trousers.
She looked down and shook her head when she saw that his left shoe and sock were missing as well.
'It's not funny, Joe. We have company coming in less than ten minutes, I've been preparing this meal all day and all you can do is play your stupid little games.’
Joe was perplexed, and he went over to the mirror in the hallway to examine his reflection again.
'What? What's the problem? It's just Harry. I'm not going to wear a tuxedo.'
Mary appeared in the reflection behind him and pointed at the design flaws in his appearance.
'You've only shaved the right side of your face. You're missing a shoe, you've tucked in only one side of your shirt. What's wrong with you?'
Joe was suddenly struck by his appearance. It all came into focus so quickly that he almost took a step backwards. Mary was right. He had neglected the entire left side of his body in getting ready. He hadn't even noticed.
'I don't know... I must have forgotten.'
'Forgotten? You forgot to shave half of your face? Really, Joe, I'm not in the mood. Would you please just go upstairs and fix it.'
Joe's vision drifted to the reflection of the kitchen in the hall mirror. On the table was a wicker basket, filled with dried pinecones. It had always been there as far as Joe could remember, but for the life of him he couldn't remember why. The curtains were a red and white checked pattern, yet another cliché to add to his home life, and on the wall was a framed watercolour of a duck in a raincoat walking down an English country lane carrying some bags of shopping.
'What is that?'
'What's what?' Mary said, trying to follow his gaze.
'It makes no sense. It's an aquatic bird. It spends most of its time in the water...'
Mary let out a little screech of frustration and threw up her arms before going back to check on the meat in the oven. Joe couldn't tear himself away from the duck, with its odd smile and its little yellow hat. It was even wearing tiny orange gumboots, but it was the eyes that held his focus. It was the eyes that held the mystery and it was the eyes that told him nothing.
'Why would a duck wear a raincoat?' whispered Joe to himself, in a voice riddled with profound confusion.
Harry arrived at precisely seven thirty, which was no surprise. Joe had once found him standing just outside the front gate looking at his watch, five minutes before he was due to arrive. It had amused and irritated him in equal measure. Harry kissed Mary on the cheek and handed her a bottle of wine, a fairly good mid-priced chardonnay. It was at precisely that moment that Joe was struck by the very sure and certain knowledge that Harry was having an affair with his wife. He had never noticed it before, but there was something about the casual manner of the kiss that told him instantly that there was something going on. He decided to keep it to himself for the time being, but he had never been so certain of anything in his entire life.
'Harry, it's good to see you,' Mary said.
'You too, Mary. Say, something smells good.'
Mary blushed, and Joe felt his hands clench into tight little fists. Harry offered Joe his hand, but he shook it without enthusiasm.
'Shall we go through?' Mary suggested, taking the bottle of wine into the kitchen and fumbling around in the drawer for a bottle opener.
Harry leant in conspiratorially towards Joe and took his forearm.
'Are you feeling better?'
'I'm feeling fantastic. Never been better.'
Harry seemed convinced, or at least decided not to push any further and, smiling, he followed Mary into the kitchen. She handed him a glass of wine and took one herself.
'A toast,' she said, 'to old friends.'
Joe picked up the glass Mary had poured and clinked the glasses of his wife and her lover, before downing the whole glass in one go. Both of them stared at him as he refilled his glass from the bottle and went through into the living room.
'Dinner's nearly ready. We eat in ten minutes,' Mary said, as she sat down on the lounge, glancing sideways at Joe as she did so.
Harry nodded agreeably.
'So Joe, do you think you'll be coming in to work tomorrow?'
'Why wouldn't he?' Mary said.
'Oh, Joe didn't tell you?'
Joe raised his glass to Harry and smiled.
'I was saving the honour for you.'
'Tell me what? What's going on?'
'It's just that there was an incident at work today. Nothing serious, I'm sure, but I just thought that Joe might take a few days off.'
'An incident?'
Harry was floundering, and he looked at Joe to give him some kind of reassurance, but there was none to be had. Harry turned back to Mary and shrugged.
'Joe fainted during a tutorial today.'
'Fainted?' echoed Mary.
'Well let's not beat around the bush. I had a seizure. Some kind of neurological episode.'
'I can't believe you didn't tell your wife about this, Joe.'
'It didn't seem important.'
'Not important? How can you say that...' Mary trailed off for a second. 'Is that why you only shaved half of your face? Oh my God, Joe, what if it was a stroke or something?'
Joe had already finished his second glass of wine and was standing up to go and get another, but Mary took the glass forcefully out of his hand and placed it on the table.
'You're not a young man any more. You can't just ignore things like this and hope for the best.'
'I'm only fifty two, Mary.'
'You still have to think about your health. First thing tomorrow I'm taking you to the hospital for a check-up. This could be something serious. And no more wine for you tonight.'
Joe shrugged and left his glass where she had put it. He went back to the kitchen and could hear Harry apologising in hushed tones to his wife in the other room, but he tried not to pay an attention to it. The duck stared at him from the wall opposite accusingly. Joe stared straight back at it, just daring it to speak. After losing the staring contest something on the kitchen table caught his eye. It was a little folded piece of white paper, peeking out from underneath the basket of pinecones. He stepped across and pulled it loose, turning it over in his hands, almost afraid to open it. When he finally got the courage to do so, there was a short note, written in the same handwriting as all the others, in thick black marker. It was not a cryptic message, as the others had all been. This one was far more direct.
TRY AND REMEMBER YOUR CHILDHOOD
Joe flipped the note over to see if there was anything written on the other side, but of course there was not. He found that, despite himself, he did as the note asked. He tried to remember his childhood. His parents and his upbringing, the first house he had lived in, the first pet he had owned, who his friends were at school. He could remember it all, but it didn't feel particularly real to him. It felt like he was simply regurgitating a list of facts and figures that he had memorised. He couldn't actually remember the places and events, although he could recount them to himself in great detail. Somehow though, he felt completely disconnected from all of them.
'Mary, what is this?' he demanded suddenly, and he heard the whispering from the next room stop abruptly.
'What?'
'Wait a second. I need to check something.'
Joe slid the note into his pocket and took the pad of paper from next to the telephone. It was ostensibly to write messages from callers, but it rarely got used for that as Mary frequently took the pen to write her shopping list and didn’t return it. Today, by some stroke of luck it was there. A thick black pen, much as the new note and all the previous ones had been written in.
'What are you doing, Joe?' Mary asked, entering the room looking flushed.
He handed her the pad and the pen.
'I need you to write something for me.'
'What do you want me to write?'
'Write the words, try and remember your childhood.'
'Why would I write that?'
'Just write the words!'
Harry came into the room cautiously.
'Hey, calm down, Joe. There's no reason to get upset.'
'You're wrong. There are thousands of reasons to get upset. Every single day there are thousands of things that happen that people should get upset about and every single day people passively sit back and say to themselves that there's no reason to get upset. There's no reason not to. Please. Just write the words, Mary.'
She reluctantly began to write the words and then handed him the pad. He took it, and checked it against the note in his pocket. The writing was not the same. It was not even close. Mary had girlish writing, all loops and curls, nothing like the authoritative handwriting of the note. Joe, satisfied that she was not the author, smiled broadly and put the pad and the note back in his pocket.
'Thank you. Well is anyone else hungry? Let's eat!'
Dinner began as a sombre affair but after Joe had apologised for his odd behaviour, using the usual excuses about it having been a long day and being tired, things picked up. He even agreed to go with Mary to the hospital in the morning, which seemed to calm her down. Within twenty minutes or so the incident was, if not forgotten, then repressed enough that normal banality could be resumed.
'Anyone for dessert?' Mary said, proudly carrying in a homemade cheesecake on a glass platter.
'It looks wonderful,' Harry said, and offered up his plate as she cut a slice.
She cut Joe a slice without even waiting for his approval, and he didn't object. It was fine to fume over Mary and Harry's infidelity, but that was no reason to deny himself homemade cheesecake. It was something that only ever materialised when they had company and Mary sat back in her chair contentedly. Feeding people was a sort of opiate for her.
'Are you not having any?' Harry asked.
'Oh I'm trying to watch my weight. I've put on a bit recently.'
'Oh nonsense! You look fantastic and you can't slave all day and make something this spectacular and not even try any.'
Mary, happy that her fishing for compliments had landed such a whopper, picked up the knife and cut a thin slice.
'Oh, I suppose just a little bit. After all, it's not going to kill me, is it?'
Joe snorted at the comment.
'No it's not going to kill you, Mary. It's a cake. You're thinking of hired assassins.'
Mary scowled, but Harry was unable to suppress a smile. Joe smiled back, but then he remembered that Harry was sleeping with his wife and it was gone again. After an awkward pause, which didn't make Joe feel awkward in the slightest, Mary felt the urge to keep the conversation going, at whatever cost. The best she could come up with was,
'I like your suit, Harry.'
'Thank you. I decided to treat myself. It cost me a pretty penny I can tell you, but I think it was worth it. You know what they say, clothes maketh the man.'
'Common misapprehension, Harry. It is in fact men who maketh the clothes or, in the case of certain designer labels, children in third world countries,' Joe argued.
'Droll. Very droll. This suit was actually made by an elderly Italian man, so I wear it with a clear conscience.'
Joe, who had been refused a further glass of wine, took a sip on his lemon and soda. It was certainly a nice suit, and he knew exactly why Harry had bought it. In the type of establishment that Harry frequented, namely cover-charge meat-market nightclubs, everything was about perception. Although Harry was several years younger than Joe, he was still past his prime as far as the singles scene went. It was therefore important to make the vacuous young women believe that he was interesting and sophisticated, and not an ageing literature professor who preyed on young women with a Daddy complex. The suit did that far better than any amount of normal human interaction ever could. Joe was just about to say as much but Mary spoke first.
'Well I'm just saying that you look very nice. So you should. The Board of Education made you the Faculty Head, after all.'
Joe was always amazed at the way Mary managed to compliment one person whilst demeaning another. It was a very difficult skill for most people, but she did it with a practised ease. Harry looked uncomfortable.
'That's not strictly...'
'Do you know how we selected who would be the Faculty Head, Mary? It wasn't a board decision. It was a homonym. It was a bored decision. They told us to choose which of us they should write down on the forms for the Board of Education and we flipped a coin. A coin! It's a position in name only, with no pay benefits and slightly more administrative headaches. I was glad I chose tails.'
'No one's saying otherwise, Joe.'
'She is! She's saying that I'm an impotent hate-filled failure!'
For the briefest of moments it wasn't Mary sitting opposite him, it was a glowing Gabriel Armaita, her hair radiating from her head like serpents, but the illusion disappeared almost as quickly as it appeared.
'I'm not suggesting anything of the sort,' protested Mary. 'And if you think otherwise then it's in your head.'
Joe nodded.
'It is in my head. There's something in my head. We all know it. We're all sitting here talking about cheesecake and suits and all the while there's something in my head. With any luck it will kill me and you two won't have to sneak around any more.'
Mary and Harry both looked at each other with a mixture of horror and disbelief. His-belief.
'Joe, I'm going to go home now. I knew I shouldn't have come. You're not well, and I know you're scared, but just wait and see what the test results show. It may be nothing. Maybe a dietary problem or something. Perhaps you've been working too hard.'
'We both know that there's no chance of that at Finchwood,'
Harry grinned.
'Right!'
He was only humouring the crazy man who'd just made a joke. His eyes told the real story. Don't make any sudden movements and never, EVER, get out of your vehicle. Harry's vehicle of choice was an over-confident misogynist in a tailor-made suit and he wasn't budging. He'd locked the doors. Harry had stood up now, and he went to kiss Mary again but, seeing Joe's expression, he thought better of it.
'Well, goodnight, Mary. Thank you for a lovely meal.'
'Thanks, Harry.'
'And don't worry, Joe can take as much time as he needs. I'm sure it'll be fine.'
Harry patted Joe on the shoulder as he left the room, in that rough heterosexual way. Joe nodded a polite farewell, but he didn't get up, so it was up to Mary to see him out. As soon as the door was closed behind him, Mary stormed back into the room.
'How dare you!' she snapped.
Joe looked at her passively.
'How dare you!' she repeated.
'I'm going to bed.'
'Not in our bed you're not. Not after what you insinuated. I've never been so embarrassed in my entire life!'
'You wet yourself on stage in front of the whole school when you were twelve years old...'
Mary looked about to speak but then bit her tongue.
'We're going to the hospital in the morning, but tonight, you're sleeping in the spare room.'
She left the room with sound and fury signifying nothing, and Joe lay down heavily on the lounge, not even bothering to take off his coat.
4
'Yeah well the problem is, they're deregulating the whole industry,' says the surly-looking taxi driver leaning against the open door of my car.
'Tell me about it,' I reply, without really knowing why.
'It just means longer hours for us, and a smaller pay packet at the end of the week as we struggle to keep up. I'm thinking of getting out of the game all together,' he continues.
I look up at the departures gate, where my taxi is sitting idle. I'm finally at the front of the queue, after a wait of about twenty minutes.
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