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unfaithfulness, and I won t pretend I have maintained a kind
of absolute zero. My mind has a mind of its own. But my body
my hands, my mouth, my nose, even my knees and toes has
always been pure as the driven snow. I was faithful to her before
I met her. Even when Mick spent so many years trying to break me
down, bit by bit, I stayed as true as a nun. Even when he gave
me the strongest of motives and the most tempting of opportunities,
I resisted.
Mick thought I was gutless. My strength, he said, was actually a
weakness. And for more than a decade I let him entrench this idea
between us: his lusty appetite for life was superior to my puritani-
cal withdrawal from it. He was saying Yes to life. I was saying No.
It s only now that I can put into words why I never touched
another woman. It s the same reason I cannot kill a man with my
bare hands. It is because your own body will not go away, will not
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leave you in peace. I could not even let myself weigh a voluptuous
woman s breasts in my hands not even for a second, not even a paid
woman, no strings attached (Mick s words, tempting and taunting),
not for an instant. Why? I ve learnt why. The woman might dis-
appear, but my hands won t. The same hands that have fondled a
strange woman s body would remain attached to my arms. Every
time I touched Sheena, it would be with those same hands. They
could not be washed clean.
Brock McCabe taught me the truth about hands. The hands with
which I picked up my children would, for the rest of my days, be
the same hands that had taken a good man s life. The Bible tells you
to cut them off. It might be preferable.
But I learnt another thing from Brock. It s not only the hands.
It can be the eyes that are polluted too. The eyes through which I
looked at my children would be the same eyes that had seen Brock
chewed up by his six-car Wondadoor. Why should the eyes be priv-
ileged? Why would the sense of sight be subject to different rules
from the sense of touch? Or the other senses? The ears with which
I d heard Brock s last disbelieving grunts, the nose through
which I d smelt the beginnings of the s. squirting out of his uncov-
ered a.hole. (You know, when it comes out in that death panic, it
doesn t plop in nice fully formed chunks. It turns instantly to liquid,
like the hair can turn instantly to grey. Your bowels literally turn
to water. It happens to animals too.)
My mouth and hands, my senses of taste and touch, hadn t been
implicated. I d tried to quarantine my hands by killing him at a
distance. But the senses are all equal, and three out of five had regis-
tered that man s death. Three out of five senses I d be lumped with
for the rest of my life. Polluting my marriage, my family.
* * *
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Brock s death hit me in a delayed reaction. The light of the morning
after brought out all my warts and pimples, so to speak. I was
cleaning up in my bathroom at the Twin Towns RSL hotel with the
radio on in the background. On the morning news they announced
it: Brock McCabe, famous crocodile guy, had been found dead last
night at his home. His wife had found him in their garage. The
actual cause of death was not being revealed as yet, but the police
were treating it as accidental. Foul play had been ruled out.
As I was listening, I caught a glimpse of my raddled face in the
mirror and I fell apart. That face it wasn t mine. It was somebody
else, listening to the radio news, getting off the hook. Was it me?
No. Or yes. This was me. I was an unfriendly man, malevolent
and hateful. Face it: that was why I hadn t been very success-
ful in life. I d lived in the shadows, grim and grizzled, wishing
nothing but the worst for others. A misanthrope. That was why I
hadn t risen to get my own show. Others recognised it. Phil saw
it, the Pioneer Americans saw it, even Ranger Lamington saw it.
It was obvious to every single person except me. I was a nasty grey
shadowy piece of work. I was unable to sell. I couldn t sell myself,
I couldn t sell a show, I couldn t sell a bottle of water to a dying man
in the desert. With a product in my hands, I wasn t credible. This
world is built for salesmen and saleswomen. If you have that skill,
to convince others that they want what you have, then the sky s
the limit. Who was a better example of that than Mick himself? He
could sell anything. He just happened to sell wildlife, and himself.
But me, I could never do it. I didn t like people. How could you sell
a product if you didn t like people? I only liked animals and my
wife and kids. But that was all, that was the limit of my humanity.
I ought to get out of this racket, get myself a new job. Just move on
from it all. I was no salesman. Face it. There was still time for me
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to go back to my training and get some quiet job in a zoo or a lab
or a wildlife park, just quietly take care of the animals and study
them and pass on my knowledge. That was what I was, what I am:
a student and a teacher. Not a salesman. What was I doing trying to
fit into a salesman s world?
I was so exhausted I could hardly move. I slumped to the floor
and had a good cry. Croc Brock McCabe! How could I have done
this? All right, I didn t actually shoot him or kill him with my own
hands, but the radio was wrong, the police were wrong: foul play, it
was. How? Who was this devil in my skin? Brock and I should have
been allies, shoulder to shoulder in the protection of our wilder-
ness and wildlife. We were. It was us against the Americans Brock
had rejected them by staying in Australia. He wasn t part of the
problem, any more than Sharpie Phelps was. So what was I doing
killing them? What sort of unnatural monster had I become?
Everything around me was swimming in my tears. I felt as
heavy as if lead weights were hanging off my wrists, my ankles,
around my neck. My nose was thick and full. I gulped air in convul-
sions through my mouth. Brock s death kept replaying itself in my
mind. I saw his eyes like candles in hollows of wax, staring out at
me from his first intimations. Frosty? Frosty Westlake? But it was his
attention to detail that got me, his confidence that he would fix this
problem and then he d be fine. He wasn t screaming for his life; he
was attempting to solve a problem. He died doing what he loved.
I crawled into the shower-bath, took the hot jets sitting in the
tub. Eventually I stopped weeping, got out, dried myself off and
lay on the bed. There was Keno on the television set, as impersonal
as a test pattern. I watched it through glazed eyes. Something about
the inevitable procession of random numbers calmed me mathe-
matics was like the universe, like nature. Every number was a life
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extinguished. Your number came up today, or tomorrow, but it [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]