KATOOMBA

Winter, 1978

(A misty rain is falling.

It smears the glass like somebody's spit. Somebody talking too loud, too fast.

It is cold, but not cold enough. Not yet. In the late afternoon when it is almost dark there will be rumours of snow. Perhaps one of the last snowfalls here for all time. The eucalypts brood in the chasms, as black as the shelf of rocks worn and wet on the other side. Far better than trying to outrun fires roaring up the gorges in those mad summers. Wet black rocks fired from the bowels of another millennium.

This used to be a coal siding. 'The Crushers' it was called then, subsiding escarpments and waterfalls crushing the breath out of you a thousand metres above sea level on an uplifted plateau outside of Sydney. Nowadays Katoomba is littered with hotels, hospitals, mental institutions.

The mist drifts into old boarding houses, finds the damp courses, settles into rotting floorboards, drips into the stew of vegetation underneath. It's so cold you can no longer smell anything. Your urine steams, traces a line of pain from kidneys to bladder, makes patterns of blood in the snow. But you'll have to wait until it snows for that morsel of creativity. If it happens then you'll have to go out in it ... purge everything. The indistinction of the valleys, happily, guards against the possibility of romance and sentiment. You get tired of views.

There is a house here in Katoomba worth visiting. Nobody knows about it. Tourists visit it by chance, perhaps as an afterthought, nostalgically trying to recover the twenties or the thirties, searching for stories. They wouldn't believe what you tell them ... that a wolf once escaped from somebody's private menagerie and roams these ridges and plateaux ... or that the imagination held in check might gnaw itself to death. True, in the valley below they keep wolves. It's illegal, not a Southern Hemisphere thing to do, un-neighbourly, what with sheep and deer farms nearby.

If you stand still now, among the low, smoky cottages you will hear somebody playing Satie's 'Monotones', pausing, plunging onto what sounds like wrong notes, wrong moods, like the houses about to tumble into chasms, weatherboard, low-roofed, pitched between escarpments and valleys, out of joint even in summer when the paper petals of bougainvillea cling gaudily to their walls in a brief climax of colour.

Many years ago you stood not far from here and said: This is a place for neurotics. Katoomba is libidinal, pleasurable, exciting, depressing. They used to come up here for cures, the mentally ill, the pulmonary, the artistic. Entrepreneurs made it sound as though the place was spuming with spas instead of mudbaths. The sick unknowingly drank artesian water. They come up now to eat ... displaced, cosmopolitan, wealthy, buying their illnesses. Sniff. They wear furs flavoured with mothballs. Leather still stinking of carcasses. Up the street, in the plush hotel known as the Alpine Lodge, you can hear a palm court orchestra playing 'The Dying Swan'. They are really straining. You stand here in one of the last decaying boarding houses, hungry, naked, with only a handful of memories. Ah! Here's a butt someone's dropped. You roll flaky, cheap cigar tobacco in cigarette paper. When you smoke it the ash is black. That guarantees poor quality.

'I'll tell you a dark story,' you say to those who are peering in at the door, at the sight of a whitebeard from whom they expected felicitations, prophecies, a Yuletide greeting at least ... a popular thing up here ... but what is popular is, well, a matter of bad taste and overstatement ... 'I'll tell you the story of a life lived and not lived,' you say.

They move about. Maybe you're one of those buskers. Not even an instrument for accompaniment. A voice like a scratched recording of an ancient poet. They never permit an old man his long-windedness. That's because he knows that life is short. It can be summed up in a paragraph. They know that if they allow him to go on they will not stop him and there will be implacable malevolence ... etc. Some are already dropping coins into the beanie you're about to put on. But while there is breath ... they have to allow at least this cheap sentiment ... breath smelling of garlic, rough port, stinking tobacco ... there is a chance of some truth.

You begin to tell. The listeners shuffle and nod. 'It must have been a hell of a life,' they say, wanting to get on their way.

'His name was Sergei,' you sigh, and as you utter his name, betrayal enters backstage like an opportunist, and a dark rain begins to fall on Katoomba.

Falls upon your head.

Vienna

1972

Shreee. A north wind. From about three-thirty in the afternoon these places become tombs. Something about the sun. A solitary child, singing and skipping, marks time. A deserted car park. The wind, unwanted, springs up and stirs the trees. Leaves. All those deaths. The hour of our death. The English prayers of his Russian childhood repeated in the way history hums. If you walk up the path to the Steinhof you will hear the coughs from the pulmonary pavilion and the screams from the mental pavilion. Coughing and screaming. Sometimes screaming and coughing. From the other direction. If these sounds are any guide to the layout of the hospital, then it's pretty disorienting.

Behind is the crematorium. You'd think they'd have more taste. But there's no smoke. Modern technology. Business. The families get a discount because they don't need a hearse. Just a short walk along a ramp lined with flowers. 'We are gathered here today ...,' someone says to the flowers. Today. Tomorrow. As if time were that important. The lilies in the field don't know about time. They bloom; they die. The number of women named after flowers. Sergei knew a Lily once, or was it a Loulou? She went mad. Totalled. Used to pull books off his shelf and flip them with a finger. Said she read them that way. Flowers. Put petals in pages. They stank. Marriage, kids. Maybe that's the way to go. A woman said to him once: 'Now that I've had these children, my life is over.' A stone is rolled over the crypt. The kids don't give thanks. They double the emptiness. Then her body goes ... goodbye sweet hysteria. Merciful menopause puts a stop to the travelling womb. Rock a bye baby. An empty cradle. It must have been like swinging on a giant pendulum. He had a menopausal governess called Ovens. A British nanny. A tyrant. Years later there were ovens all over Europe. Women plagued him. First because he was rich, then because he became poor and famous. It was in his nature to be a pauper with style. He gave away his money and then regretted it. For him, fame and fortune have never gone together. Women burrowed in like ticks, sucked him dry, abandoned him. His wife was the only one he could trust. Even then ...

Standing here like Rodin's statue of Balzac. A favourite author since his cure. He's robust now. Likes to watch old movies. Humphrey Bogart. He has on a long dark green Bavarian greatcoat which reaches to his ankles, fashionable again now, with a flap over the shoulders. His pockets are cut so he can reach the essentials. In his hand he holds a terracotta penis. A lucky charm.

Life sometimes is like one of those little priapic Greek statuettes ... unbalanced ... out of proportion. He's just attended a conference. He said to them: All writers are wankers. His advice to writers? Get a proper job. He wanted to discourage the herd. You can only speak the truth once. After that, all is paradox.

Later a middle-aged woman came up to him. 'Mr Wespe,' she exclaimed, 'I really didn't think that was necessary.' She took off her spectacles. 'What about your audience?' she scolded. 'You never think of them.'

'Let them eat words,' said Wespe.

He was tired of being a curiosity and was in a particularly bad mood, thinking of his ThŽrse in the hospital mortuary, turning blue, her lungs still filled with gas.

In the Steinhof the clock says four. He does not go up yet. At this hour they patrol the corridors and watch the rooms carefully. Suicides are common, doing the rounds like a shadow in the afternoon. The tea trolley clanks like the coffin cart. The nurses turn frivolous. 'Permit me to be frivolous.' No. They don't talk that way anymore. This is the twentieth century. But they joke because it is the hour of death. They are coming off their shift, the fag end of the day, with death folded in their sleeves. Through their starched uniforms he can make out their underwear.

'Give me a shot, baby,' he says. A hypodermic you know where. It catapults out like a cuckoo. Numbing sleep. The somnolence of overheated pipes. Settle back. Soporifia. Damn. The warmth makes him erect, watchful. Not bad for a man of eighty-five.

'Gin or whisky?' they joke.

Blood. A wave of blood. The unconscious surfaces out of the black liquid. It is the hour of the telephone, its ring cleaving the world in two, brooding, black. Afternoons and evenings of another place. A dog barks. Interminable waiting. He is waiting for his father to die. His father lingers on. Outside, the railcars rumble.

But he is no longer a child skipping in memory. He is a grown man, reaching the age of crisis. He's waiting for the cold war to begin in his loins. His hair is thinning. When he passes his hands over it his palm sprouts greyish tendrils. The first sign of madness. A child's joke. A harvest of hair. Leaves fall from his head. I don't want to be here, in this world of afternoon sun and yellowing trees, he says. The child, skipping, has yellow hair. Once it was possible to make this hour happy. So he won't go up. She's up there, he thinks, his wife Thérèse, lying on a slab. They want to do tests. If she could speak, she would ask him about his trip. Fine thing, asking him that at a time like this. He'd have to tell her he's free. Like a bird, flying. The nurses will clap. Then he will go hnnng, hnnnng, and she will know he can't say it. Constipated. Fucked. Unable to write. Then she will smile. He travels to avoid himself. He tells her of his latest successes and excesses. But the truth is that nothing comes, not even from his latest trip, from that old flat shore upon which the waves are pounding, pounding, beyond which it is impossible to go.

There is an open window somewhere. I can feel the draught, and I'm pounding my head on the walls looking for it, and I think: What a damned waste of a life. But what am I saying? Thérèse can't talk. She's been dead for thirty-three years.

Looks kind of funny, strapped to a slanting stainless steel tray with tubes feeding and sucking and machines making sounds like submarines on a death dive and everything smells funny. Sort of sickly. The television I bought her duty-free is by her side. Already it, too, smells funny. They told me to take it home, because she won't be watching TV. I'm not so sure ... about taking it home I mean. It's got that smell of wounded flesh. Drips. Here, open a vein; let my life-blood flow out. Thérèse is dead, they shout at me. Thérèse, your wife, died a long time ago! They are horrified that I've somehow slipped into the autopsy room. It's not your wife, they shout, somewhat obscenely. After all, I have a white coat and an identification card clipped over my pocket. I took it off the stand in the scrub-up room.

Let me tell you about my Grandad. That's my grandfather on Mother's side.

Grandad was huge. All six feet seven of him. He was tough. He used to knock his sons around. My Uncle Nicholas has been deaf all these years in one ear because Grandad cuffed him a good one. Can't remember what Nicholas had said to him many, many years ago, a shell to his ear, listening for eternity. They were competing for the same woman. It was straight out of The Brothers Karamazov. In the end she married my uncle, who was then promptly disinherited. That was when Grandad drank himself to death, and lost his memory on the way.

KATOOMBA

1978

You wake up in a guesthouse in Katoomba. The air is bracing when you open the window. They don't encourage you to open the windows because the heating bill soars. Sometimes, on the rare days when it snows, you open all the windows of your room, simply to defy. Simply to let the dark day drift into yourself. And if it snows you will walk into the bush forever, afraid to be silent you will marry silence, never to be heard of, from, again, in order to understand something, you don't know what, perhaps the beginning, the idea of freedom without hope.

You've been in the Aeneas guesthouse for five years. Mrs Harris, the concierge ... although concierge is a bit French and pretentious ... Mrs Harris, the old slut that runs this place, eyes you off in mock flirtatiousness every morning before your walk, eyes you off as she runs her hand lasciviously over the tea cozy. 'Professor Catacomb,' she purrs, 'are you taking your morning constitutional then?' 'Yes,' you say, accompanied regularly with dissonance from your nether end. Then, as though guilt flapped by on batwings, you tell her to call you Artie. You're very regular. You take the morning paper with you ... just in case.

Yesterday, for the first time in five years, you went into a bookshop. It was a small second-hand bookshop on the main street. A wind so cold it cracked the ironlace on old verandahs. It raced up the street and tore at you. But the shop, so you thought, might have been a refuge. The perfumed past and its seductions. Old phobias. You sighed. The girl at the counter looked suspiciously at you. What she saw you saw too. Grizzled, muffled, you could have passed for any old tramp; alcoholic, mentally deficient. On cold days in Katoomba the tramps stayed tucked up in bed, in guesthouses that were guesthouses in the twenties. Old women emitting clouds of garlic vapour, old women crackling with infirm hips run them now. Not all for profit. Something to be said for old women. That's where you found a home, spending the last of your savings.

Now you finally get up. Put on your greatcoat. You take the top blanket off your bed, fold it neatly in two then fold it in half again. From the pocket of your pyjama coat, from the pocket closest to your heart, you take out a pocket knife. It is a Swiss Army knife which you found in a garbage can a long time ago. The cross on it is no longer visible. It's had cruel usage. But the blades are still sharp. You sharpen them on the step near the back door. Spitting and sharpening, spitting and sharpening. The mind gets honed that way too. It cuts into the years, cuts into the heart, into the blanket. You cut a neat segment from the corner. There. Now put it over your head. A poncho. A priest. Introibo ... never mind. Scratch a bit. Into the fray.

You stand in the small bookshop, studying your double. You can see that the girl wants to kick you out. But she can't quite recognise you from yesterday, and even if she did and said something nasty you might kick up a stink, vomit on the floor, break things, tear books. She cannot make up her mind because you are clean. Spotless. You make a habit of spending at least two hours at your toilette. You patch, mend, clean, soak, scrub. This has nothing to do with dignity. You cannot stand filth. Your nose is too sensitive. For example, beneath her perfume the girl smells of stale love-making. She shifts her weight from one foot to another. She knows you aren't going to buy anything. You stamp one foot, then the other. She clears her throat. She sighs. You hawk into your hanky. Clean out filth. She clucks her tongue. These are all the sounds you make as well. Only for real. Involuntary noises from the soul. A kind of anamnesis. And when things get really bad, a howling.

Books. For five years they lay in wait for you, circling, watching, alert to your drifting. You weren't going to keep in step, and the girl knows that too. She, though, is frightened of books, and of people who read. For a brief moment she turns her back. You see her turn down the heater. You might go, experiencing the draught from the glass door, which she leaves lightly ajar, to funnel up the wind. But you have provisioned for this. You have on three jumpers and an old tweed you found at St Vincent de Paul's and on top of all this an old greatcoat with a slit in the chest received in a bayonet charge circa 1915. Then the poncho to add flair. Apart from the greying hair, you're of indeterminate age. She positively hates you now, tapping her nails on the counter. Her buttocks, you can tell, are shimmering, roasted on the heater, which she has to turn on again, because, well, an alcoholic doesn't experience the cold immediately. Somebody should tell her that ...

You open the cabinet. Finger a book. It's been such a long time. Feel the paper. Feel your heart kicking over, firing and failing, firing and failing. Years ago, your whole life served an apprenticeship to knowledge and then you discovered you were waiting to die. Even wisdom was a wisecrack. Your colleagues played with the notion of death but they could not have known that you smelled it on them, this stink of decay. You smelled everything that came from the abyss, the emptiness, the breath of the void ... the foetid cesspool stink of grand and abstract notions. But here. You finger the paper. It folds easily. Creases. Doubles under your scaly hands and broken fingernails. Smudges under lickspittle. Scratch it. The hair rises on the back of your neck. The girl edges over. Stands behind you. Outside the glass door Katoomba is roaring.

Have to be secretive. Freud himself specified that this art had to be protected like fire from the gods:

You can believe me when I tell you that we do not enjoy giving an impression of being members of a secret society and of practising a mystical science.