Chapter 4
Dali awakened first. She dressed in jeans and a close-fitting cashmere pullover. Her bra she left hanging over the end of her bed. ‘No need for you anymore.’ she decided somewhere in the rough passages of her mind. She tossed her sheets and blankets, damp from the perspiration of a restless dream, into a bundle and left them in a corner of her room. The mirror on her dressing table reflected her movements and from the corner of her eye she espied the image of herself, a disconcerting parody of what she longed to be.
She left her room and moved around the house like a phantom, with an instinctive consideration for her sleeping family. She slid the lounge doors open and stepped out onto the verandah. The day was a dark hangover from the night before. Black clouds sat above the peninsular and the air had that electric stillness before a storm. Through the sight zones she saw the lake was dark and grey and smooth, as if the bream had sunk to the deep.
‘Oh shit! Saturday again.’ she sighed as she collected the stained coffee cups and ashtrays and carried them through to the kitchen. The plates of dinner were submerged in fetid water. For years, since her thirteenth birthday she had lived her weekends in seclusion. Withdrawn and myopic, she was passing her teenage years without the comfort of her peers. There were few means by which she could compare her own life, her own standards, her own desires and her own needs to give.
During the lonely years she had ripened. Each time she had exchanged a bra for a newer, larger kind, she had asked herself: ‘What for?’ Each time the monthly flow from her body caused her discomfort, there was the same perplexity. No one had asked her to a dance or to a movie or to anything. There was no one to hope for, to fantasise about when she rubbed herself at night. Her only lover was her finger.
Dali knew her face defined her destiny. There were some out there who thought they knew her because of her face.
She had always trudged her future with dread, putting on a brave front for her family, living a life of pretence, practising the art of forbearance.
Conversation with others was limited. They tended to shout and use broken English. They were confused with her presence and did not know how to behave. So they shunned her.
Rane seemed to have carried his strangeness well. So why couldn’t she?
The moment she left the comfort of her house she had tried to make the best of it. She gave her all and received resentment for her troubles. She even dropped answers in exams at school to ward off the hysteria of those whom she bested. She had tried her utmost to give them no cause for hating her, but still it went on. Most of them really hated her; especially the boys on the bus who held her and pulled down her pants to check the truth of the graffiti.
The signs had been scrawled everywhere.
And the women with their children, sitting at the front of the bus, their faces far away and fixed, while the boys poked their rude fingers at her.
She remembered last summer when Max had taken her to the tennis. Australia was playing Italy in the Davis Cup and at one end of the stadium a big crowd of supporters was waving the colours of Italy. She remembered her contempt for those Australian accents calling out ‘ITALIA’!!! She had spoken of it at school the following Monday and was met with a constrained silence until one cynic asked, ‘Oh! Do you barrack for Australia?’
Christ! Why wouldn’t they acknowledge her?
The storm began as she stepped out of her reverie. She raced around the house, closing all the windows and fastening latches. Hail! And the washing still on the line!
She tore through the kitchen and out the back where the clothesline draped from the cliff to the house. The line was full and she grabbed one lot at a time and hurried back into the house and then out again for the next lot. She was crying all the while.
*
Philip Morris did not smoke; nor did he socialise. He was the archetypal reprobate who, as a student gained notoriety as a masturbator. He would sit in the calcimined toilets at the back of the schoolyard and, as his detractors would say, frantically whip his joy at every opportunity.
He transferred from one school to the next; his parents avoided the shame of his infamy by leaving it behind at one place or another. He had stood before the principal’s reproval and had suffered the indignity of public canings with his peers the witnesses to his ignominious punishment.
Undeterred, he habitually gravitated to the public toilets in the park after school, just behind the swings and monkey bars. Standing on the seat, his view was the kiddies’ playground. As the little girls jumped and played, he relieved his sex against the wall.
Philip Morris entered his first suburban adult bookshop when he was eighteen and found enlightenment. He no longer was alone with his obsession. A world of sexual refreshment was his to travel. He spirited home torrid magazines and spent himself through their pages. His mother condoned his interests as pure boyhood development and said nothing. The father merely borrowed them to arouse himself for his wife.
Four years passed before Philip Morris caught a bus to Kings Cross, and along the street where everybody goes he found a shop beneath the ground. He surveyed other customers who were browsing. Then he saw the movie machines. He collected a heap of coins from the man at the counter and dropped a bunch into the slot at the front of a machine. After a whirr the film flickered, and behind the scratches and age, two girls were playing with the unwieldy organ of a donkey.
The machine stopped. He was distraught as he banged the machine. Then he raced back to the counter for more change. Frenziedly he poured more coins down the slot. The film moved on again. As the girls were sprayed with donkey semen Philip Morris groaned and slumped against the machine. Within seconds he rushed to the toilet out the back where he sponged his wet trousers with the towel that hung by the sink. His face was red as a boil. His breath came in short laboured gasps.
‘Oh God! This is fucking beautiful.’ he almost cried at his reflection above the sink.
‘What the fuck d’ya think ya doin’, egghead?’
The tone threatened as an upraised hammer.
A small thin man, about twenty years of age, stood in the doorway. An evil grin showed through the decay of his teeth. A thin moustache spilled over the corners of his lipless mouth. His hair was greased and longish and parted in the middle. In his hand was a dildo the colour of ebony.
‘I beg your pardon!’ Philip Morris recognised his fear. His nausea was rising.
‘The towel, mug!?’ The thin man approached behind his extended dildo. ‘You used the fuckin’ towel! Ya got no fuckin’ manners, ya fuckin’ mug!’
‘Oh, excuse me. I must be going.’ Philip Morris tried to by-pass the man but was roughly prodded in the face with the dildo. ‘What do you mean by this? You’ve no right to ... ’
The man’s fist burrowed into the soft flesh of Philip Morris’ stomach. ‘Come here, mug!’ The man held Philip Morris by the ear and led him back to the sink. ‘Drop your gear and grab hold of the fuckin’ basin or I’ll leave your balls in a bloody mess on the floor. Now fuckin’ hurry it up, mug!’
Philip Morris was sodomised at the age of twenty-two in a toilet at the back of a pornographic bookshop at The Cross.
On his thirtieth birthday Philip Morris inherited wealth, a legacy from his recently departed parents. Their death had been a mystery and the coroner could not determine beyond doubt that there were no suspicious circumstances surrounding their death. Nevertheless, part of the legacy insisted he change his name, so in the office of the registrar he formally became a new man. He walked out as Maurice Murphy, changed his employment to that of a broker with a firm at the Quay and moved from the western suburbs to the house he had bought at the base of the cliffs.
He kept to himself. Each day he drove his Japanese sedan to his office, parking in his allotted space beneath the building. He ate his shop-made sandwiches in the park across from work and, after throwing the wrappings in the bin, made his way quickly to the small basement theatre uptown. As the images of carnality sparked on the screen, Maurice Murphy removed his handkerchief from his coat pocket and with a deftness acquired from daily practice spread it on his lap. As the film reached its conclusion he exhausted himself into the cloth and then hurried back to the hubbub of office routine where no one gave him a second thought.
He was an ordinary man with a face you didn’t remember. There was a sense of hopelessness about his eyes that made people look away when he spoke to them. Of medium build Maurice Murphy sought anonymity with his blandness of manner and inconspicuousness of appearance. He could stand at a corner and remain unobserved. The introverted stance he adopted avoided contact and he kept his abnormally large hands in his pockets.
He had no friends and he lived his private life in the house next to Max. It lay well back from the track and hugged the swell of the ground as it rose into the cliff. Built three years before the tide of new fashionable dwellings flooded the quiet bush avenue, yet an eternity since Max had walked the dusty track and selected his piece of turf for a home, it was an awful looking building. From thirty metres its baleful windows stared down on Max’s tiny rear lawn beneath the washing line. The curtains remained closed behind unkempt window frames and rusted broken fly screen. A piece of guttering hung rejected from the roof and poured rain in a single column past the windows.
He watched her as she reached for the washing. The hail had ceased and a steady light rain fell on the girl. Her long black hair tapered like treacle down to her buttocks. Maurice Murphy sat on a chair in the darkness of his room. His eyes were close to the curtain and his hand, covered in oil, rubbed his bulging flesh slowly, noisily. When she spread her legs to pick up washing, he quickened his hand and wept as his semen spurted down his legs.
*
Dali dumped the washing in the laundry and cursed as she wiped her eyes. She ran to the bathroom beside the kitchen and cupped hot water over her face. The soft eyes of a little girl were no longer there; a wicked spike had etched her soul and she became lost to the heat inside herself. Last night, at The Cross, she knew Lamont was the restless spirit she must have before she retired to her destiny. She had wanted him to puncture her and pump her full of his life.
Dali turned from the mirror and quietly locked the bathroom door. She took the towel from behind the door and dried her hair until she was warm from rubbing. She let the towel drop to the floor then unfastened the zipper of her jeans and lowered them to her ankles. Her pullover came off over her head and dropped onto the towel. Standing on her toes, she stepped out of her jeans and went back to the mirror.
There, behind the mirror was the tragedy of her birth, standing slim as a waif. Her shock of ruffled hair hung over her reddened eyes. She pushed it from her face and forced a smile. Her teeth were white and even. She watched her hand slide down her body until it went from sight, below the mirror’s reflection. She noticed her face flush as her fingers found the crease beneath the hair. Only when her hand crept into herself did she close her eyes and think the thoughts of night time.
*
The storm had lasted an hour and the rain had stopped flowing from the guttering above the window. Maurice Murphy stripped himself of his pyjamas and stood. He opened the cupboard and selected his clothes for the day. He dressed then put on his thick lumber jacket and wandered about the house for a while. He was about to pocket his car keys for a drive to the basement theatre in the city when he suddenly changed his mind. He opened the front door and looked out over the lake. A rainbow shimmered over the hills and came to rest among the mangroves to the west of the reserve. He started down the stairs and out onto the muddy track, past Max’s house. Finally he disappeared around the corner.
The reserve behind the school glistened in the aftermath of the rain and it offered sanctuary to his dilemma. He squelched his shoes as he walked along the grass to the toilet near the boatshed. The sun shone weakly through the grey of the morning. There was no one about in the reserve and Maurice Murphy relished the abandonment of its emptiness.
He sought his favourite drawing against the wall near the urinal and as he leered at someone’s imagination, his eyes caught hold of a new, bold figure drawn in green above the urinal cistern. The artist must have carried a stepladder to sketch this graphic high on the wall. There was the unmistakeable nakedness of the girl he had watched this morning, her legs wide open and the bespectacled man licking her like a dog at its bowl.
Maurice Murphy glanced quickly about the toilet and then stepped up to the urinal and opened his fly. A short moment later he was finished and he watched the white globs floating on top of the mess in the drain. He then left the toilet and took the path to where the rainbow had come to rest.
