My Life as a Fake Page 7

  The doorman was waiting, ready for us. Memsahib, he said, I am so sorry, this man cannot come into the hotel.

  He is my guest.

  Yes, I am sorry. It is forbidden.

  I was not ignorant of the role of Sikhs as warriors, but I am English and it is sometimes forgotten that we are fearsome warriors as well. Please get out of my way, I said.

  If need be I would have struck his testicles with my umbrella and doubtless he saw my face, which has always, so my father said, betrayed my intentions as clearly as a traffic light.

  It is forbidden, he said, but I was a hateful imperialist with an angry, goaty face. He stepped aside to let us in.

  As Chubb and I crossed the foyer, both of us literally dripping wet, we had similar encounters with three other members of staff, each of whom retreated before my obvious resolve. So it was with no small sense of triumph that I brought my guest to the sixth floor and escorted him into my room.

  I had barely closed the door behind us when the phone rang.

  You are being very foolish, said John Slater.

  I hung up but he called right back.

  Don’t you think you should listen to my story, Micks?

  No.

  Darling, you do expect me to pay for your room?

  That really did anger me and I was quickly on the brink of that dizzy precipice from which I might launch into delicious actions I would later regret. However, I had learned a thing or two since I slapped my father’s face in the Café Royal. John, I said, I will meet you in The Pub at five o’clock.

  I then took the phone off the hook and double-locked and chained the door. With that achieved I could consider my wretched guest: a monk hunched inside his hairy suit.

  I’m so pleased you could come, I said, but even while escorting him to the window, where two chairs faced each other across the breakfast trolley, I became aware of an odour. It was reminiscent of cabbage, cheese, apricot jam, and something unidentifiable but decidedly local. It was, not to be too polite about it, a repulsive smell, produced by adding water to a well-loved suit. A dab of Vicks at the nostrils might have masked it, but I had nothing mentholated, merely a slightly hysterical response to alien smells.

  I’m so sorry about your suit, I said.

  Been through worse, Mem.

  Then I recalled the batik I’d bought on Batu Road. I had intended it as a gift for my friend Annabelle but now donated it to Christopher Chubb. Give me your suit, I said.

  He backed away, holding out his palms as if to keep me away. No, no, so old already.

  I suppose I wrinkled my nose. I do believe I may have opened the window. Whatever I did, it is hardly to my credit that he was made to understand.

  Very, very sorry, he said.

  I was mortified on his behalf but there was no choice but to fill out the dry-cleaning list.

  It stinks, isn’t it?

  I’m sorry the batik isn’t nicer, I said, signing my name to the chit.

  My suit smells, he demanded. That’s what you mean?

  It’s hardly your fault it got soaked, I said, but we need it picked up by ten o’clock if you are to have it back before you leave.

  Nodding bitterly, he took the batik and the laundry bag into the bathroom.

  15

  He sat very stiffly at my breakfast trolley, silently displaying what I assumed to be the complete ‘McCorkle’ manuscript. It was wrapped like poor man’s luggage, in two quite different plastic bags, one blue, the other white, then sealed with three broad bands of black electrical tape.

  He blinked. Slater says I will hurt you?

  No, I said.

  I had intended to ask to read the poems, but when he moved his package skittishly to one side I changed my mind. I opened my notebook and asked after the facts of the handsome young editor’s death.

  Ask his friends, he said brusquely. They say Weiss hanged himself, no doubt about it. Ask the police, in which case he fell off a kitchen chair. He paused. You have your pen?

  Only when my biro was uncapped did he begin to explain how, on a grim and rainy afternoon, he had attended Weiss’s funeral. In this he felt he had no choice, for although he might expect rudeness or even injury, he would be put outside the pale forever if he stayed away.

  It is hard to imagine why this would be worth his bother, for he was not, as I was later to discover in Australia, a popular figure to begin with. In the correspondence of the Contemporary Art Society, for instance, he is described more than once as a fascist. This should not be taken to accurately describe his political position—which was more libertarian than anything else—but does show him to be out of temper with the surrealists, imagists, anarchists, and communists in the funeral party.

  In the Melbourne General Cemetery Weiss’s parents accepted his condolences with dignity while other mourners were not reluctant to offer threats. The nicest of them cut him dead.

  As the Weiss family was not religious, the burial took place within sight of the tomb of a billiard player named Lindsay Waltzer. In Melbourne a billiard player will always outrank a poet, so this is still the best way to ask directions to the grave. If one sights along the marble cue laid on Waltzer’s final table, the eye is led directly to the black marble tombstone on which is inscribed:

  Set this down too:

  I have pursued rhyme, image, and metre,

  Known all the clefts in which the foot may stick,

  Stumbled often, stammered,

  But in time the fading voice grows wise

  And seizing the co-ordinates of all existence

  Traces the inevitable graph.

  These were the lines—from Bob McCorkle’s ‘Petit Testament’—that Weiss’s mother and father recited in their heartrending accented voices. Did they mean to insist on the worth of the poetry or mark the tombstone with the instrument of their son’s destruction? It was not clear.

  To Chubb it seemed that these words he’d written in such savage jest had been chiseled into granite much as the crime of Kafka’s warden in ‘The Penal Colony’ is tattooed into his living skin.

  Once the plain pine coffin had been lowered into the ground, he knew, the crowd would drift back to the Café Latin to recite poetry and weep and finally become pugnacious on their dead friend’s behalf. A part of him wished to go with them, to take his punishment and have it done with, but it would have taken a thicker skin than he possessed and so he withdrew deeper into the cemetery.

  It had rained in the morning and the air smelled of mud and smoke from the cottages of Carlton, and he headed at a brisk pace towards the very northern end of the cemetery near the so-called children’s graveyard which dates from the influenza epidemic of 1921. Later, when he was a father, he could not have endured the place, but now he sought it out in order to find peace of mind.

  He heard his pursuer before he saw him. He recognised the noise—shoes fitted with those parsimonious little metal plates, the hallmark of the petit bourgeois and therefore as vile to Chubb as they had been beloved by his mother. This sound came nearer and nearer and it soon became clear that he would not be able to escape his pursuer without running, and he had already suffered humiliation enough. After rounding a bend in the path he stopped and turned, ready to face whatever punishment awaited him.

  When the figure appeared at the corner of a cypress hedge, Chubb saw the lunatic who had provided such embarrassment in court. Although not technically a giant, he was very close to seven feet in height. Chubb had noted his strong Australian accent and had formed an impression of someone working-class, not well educated. He was therefore surprised that the man was dressed expensively, in black. His long-flowing hair, being also dark, served to accentuate his pale skin and his striking features, all of them distinguished by their individual size: strong chin, large prowed nose, prominent cheekbones, high forehead from which the mane of hair was brushed straight back. It was a powerful face—masculine, intelligent, and rather angry.

  When he reached out his hand Chubb thought he
intended to shake, but instead found his right hand swiftly seized and held. No matter how he struggled he could not disengage, so when the stranger started up the bitumen path his only recourse would have been to cry for help.

  What do you want of me, he asked.

  There is no other bugger I can tell apart from you, the stranger said, for there is no-one but you who is as bad as me.

  Saying this, he wrenched Chubb roughly after him. As they stumbled together along the uneven path, his captor continued speaking.

  I could not bear that fucking detective, he said. I loathed him. Vogelesang! What a bloody name for the enemy of poetry. It means ‘birdsong,’ I hope you know that. If the bugger was a bird then he was a vulture, ripping the liver from a living man. I could not stand it.

  I did not like it either, said Chubb.

  His captor paused and blinked but was not diverted from his speech. After I was evicted from the so-called court, he said, I hung around in William Street to see where Mr Bird-sing would go, for I wished him punished in the court of Art. He was not difficult to follow with his big square head and his duck-leg march. He headed down the hill to Swanston Street, past all the homo newsboys screaming, HERALD, HERALD, DIRTY POEMS, READ ALL ABOUT IT. If he’d had a car or a taxi I might not have tracked him half so bloody easy, but he was just a bloody copper, so he got the 15 tram and I had him from that moment on. Birdsing bought a ticket to Glen Iris and stood scratching his balls amongst all the men in the open centre bit of the tram. I also bought a ticket to Glen Iris and sat myself up in the glassed compartment with the women. The old biddies did not like me being in their little chook yard, but no matter how they swayed and muttered I would not give up my seat. I hated them, you know, their prim little mouths, their closed purses in their laps.

  At this stage, I really had no plan except to prevent all further insult to my publisher. I was determined it would not continue a second day.

  Chubb asked him was he McCorkle and, in the answering gaze, was reminded not merely of an eagle’s fierceness but also its dire unknowability.

  I am he.

  By now McCorkle had dragged him quite far north, and what had seemed safe refuge had become something altogether different. Not unnaturally, Chubb began to have concerns for his safety and these were not lessened by his captor’s passionate address as they left the path and set off squelching rapidly across a sodden lawn.

  Have you ever looked up ‘Publisher’ in the Oxford dictionary? the giant demanded. It will surprise you if you ever do. ‘One whose business is the issuing of books … one who undertakes the printing or production of copies of such works, and their distribution to the booksellers and other dealers, or to the public.’ Who could write a bloody thing like that? he shouted, his voice echoing amongst the mausoleums. A cypress hedge blocked out the yellow sky.

  It was, the madman continued, as if no-one at Oxford had ever met a bloody publisher. You know what a publisher is? I bloody hope so.

  This, Chubb told me, was not a casual question. He feared he might be strangled if he answered wrongly. A friend, he suggested. A defender of the work?

  Bloody right, a friend. A defender of the work. And here was this flat-footed policeman intent on jailing him. How could we let that be? How could any of us stand there and let that crime be done? Would the French do this? he demanded as he stamped across the undrained ground where the old graves were sunken and neglected and thistles choked the rusting fences. Would any civilised nation do such a thing? They have made me hate my country. I tried to speak up, but the fascists evicted me, so I hid in the tram, crouching amongst the boilers like an old goanna in the chookhouse. Vogelesang stayed in the middle, reading about himself in The Herald all the way to the terminus.

  When he got off I followed. You would not know Vogelesang’s reputation in St Kilda. The working girls all call him Basher, but I was not afraid and followed, not three yards behind, until he stopped at a garden gate. As he opened the latch he turned and looked me in the eye.

  He thought he marked me, but he’d never tangled with a poet before. He could not guess what lay ahead.

  I continued strolling until I found a café run by a little reffo fellow in a dirty singlet. I got him to make me a chicken-and-lettuce sandwich and a chocolate malted milk. At dusk I returned to Birdsing’s residence. I pushed down the side, past the lemon tree. From the middle of his iris beds I could clearly see the accused through his window. He had a bottle of Victoria Bitter and a meat pie for his dinner. I also live alone and know what it is to spend these hours of solitude when I would rather have a wife and baby and the smell of stew bubbling in the pot. But what civilised person can sit down to a meal like this and not pick up a book to read? Detective Birdshit read nothing and the table he ate from was as bare and shiny as a bloody war memorial.

  I was very soon bored by his miserable life so I gave a little wee tap on the window with a shilling and he came out fast enough. It was now too dark for him to see properly but he’d had sufficient chance when I passed him at the gate. He said he would give me a hiding if I did not get off his irises straight away. I said he could make me if he liked.

  He rushed back into the house and came out with handcuffs which he was in an awful bloody hurry to apply I forced him to trample up and down his flowers and made him lose his temper badly the result being I had no great difficulty in throwing him down. Don’t hurt the irises, he cried. I dragged him back into his pathetic little kitchen. Irises were all he could think about until I got him sitting on his chair and there I officially informed him that he had no right to hurt a publisher.

  If he had agreed to leave Melbourne or simply take a holiday then nothing bad would have happened. He was a little roughed up. Some mud on his face and dirt and bits of iris hanging off his daks. He should’ve known it could get worse but failed to understand the authority given me as a poet. He told me it did not matter what I did. I could not prevent David Weiss being found guilty.

  Then I went too far. I wish I hadn’t now, but you also went too far, Mr Chubb, so you must have some sympathy for me in this. I found an old yellow-handled carving knife in his drawer and then I chased him round the table until I got his blockhead in a grip and I took a good piece of scalp and hair, no more than two inches square, certainly not enough to damage him, although there are a great many vessels in the scalp and so blood did stream down his face and into his eyes. I don’t know if he could see enough to be frightened by his reflection in the dresser mirror.

  Now at least I had his attention and he suddenly had no trouble swearing to desist from attacking my publisher in court. Then he also went too far, promising he could get the prosecutor’s house burgled and his car set alight. I told him his life was at stake and if he thought to make any promises lightly then I would come back while he slept and break his neck. All this I did not just for the sake of David Weiss but of art itself, and for a country where we seldom understand that we must be prepared to fight for issues bigger than an umpire’s decision at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. If what I did sounds cruel it will only be to people with no appreciation of art. I would take any amount of skin and hair for the cause of poetry.

  Chubb asked him if he was referring to ‘The Darkening Ecliptic.’

  I mean all poetry, he said, even yours.

  It was hard to know what the creature meant by this, for of course Chubb had written Bob McCorkle’s ‘The Darkening Ecliptic.’

  I did not leave Vogelesang with his injury unattended, he continued. I swabbed him with Mercurochrome and made a bandage from a pillowcase. As you would expect of a bully Birdshit was very meek by now and went directly to his bed when I ordered him.

  Now all this doctoring, said the creature as he led Chubb into a place where last summer’s weeds had fallen in a matted brown tangle, had taken more time than anyone could imagine. The trams had stopped running, which means it was after midnight and I had been out at Glen Iris for five hours. I therefore was forced to take shank’s pony to t
he city but I am used to walking, which is why I have these metal caps on my toes and heels—they save a great deal of leather. I would cover as much as thirty miles in an average day.

  Now I was off to see David Weiss, to give him the good news that the prosecution had been nobbled. I went to Mrs O’Brien’s in Grattan Street and bought a bottle of sparkling Burgundy at the back door. I was by then in a great excitement. You must understand that David Weiss was like a mother, for he had brought me into the world, had given me life, had stood by me no matter what my enemies had said. When they called me a fake, he never once doubted me.

  Yet here is the strange thing—we had not met personally. All he had were letters from my so-called sister. I have no sister but these were written by someone who claimed that I was dead. Certain of the allegations were fair enough. I had been a bicycle mechanic and I still work for Mass Mutual, where I happen to be a very successful salesman. But I had not died and the person who wrote those letters was a liar many times over.

  And here, said Chubb, he glared at me. Choy! God save me. What eyes he had.

  In Kuala Lumpur, Christopher Chubb rose and, for perhaps the tenth time, retied that brown and yellow sarong. Of course, he said, I was that liar, but I couldn’t be sure how much he knew. Was this anger all for me? Nothing was clear except that he was mad as a bloody hatter. I did not try to argue, I held my breath. Sarung tebuan jangan dijolok, mati kena ketubung Do not stir up a hornets’ nest, as we say, you’ll only be stung to death.

  Yet there was no escaping either the teller or the tale. He was held like a cow in a crush. My first disappointment, his captor continued relentlessly, was to discover Weiss was not in his bed, and it was only after hours of wandering from Café Latin to Molina’s and back to Café Latin that I found him, saying good night to you at the top of Collins Street. It was by then almost five in the morning, but my bottle of wine was still ready in my coat pocket and there he was, my publisher. I could not have been more well disposed towards another soul on earth.