By Robert Whyte
***
Manacles, a novel by Robert Whyte 1972–2020
Introduction by Robert Hanna
Table of Contents
Supporting Documents
***
3.8
It was time to visit Maria. I took the stairs to her low-rise pent-house flat in Margaret Street, not trusting the lift or the wizened old factotum who operated it. He looked older than time. I had never figured out whether he wanted payment in ancient Greek drachma or Roman denarii. Social catastrophe better avoided.
I wasn’t sure how much of the building she had written, or how much was pre-existing reality. It was very old and not in great condition. If she had written it, she ought to have written less dust. Hard to say. Dust was authentic. It looked like one of Brisbane’s earliest multi-storey jobs, panelled everywhere with black bean and red cedar, steps and railings worn deeply by generations of merchants, barristers, typists and cabin boys. It looked real but if she had written it would have looked seamlessly convincing anyway.
Fortunately, it was only five levels. Her flat was a small free-standing cottage on the roof, now in a shady canyon of more recent high-rise. The remainder of the roof space was half given over to a garden and half to a lawn where she had pitched a circus tent, her day-room, where she wrote and occasionally walked around upside down with suction boots, having managed to get hold of Eve Arden’s apparatus from the 1939 Marx Brothers film A Day at the Circus.
More generally, she spent her time on pro-bono geography and high-earning paid work writing Fortune 500 companies — the fees going up exponentially according to the age of the company when delivered. She was one of very few writers who could deliver a company with a complete 50-year history including pre-founding negotiations, deals, private correspondence, concealed affairs, borderline frauds, 50 years of Annual Reports, day-to-day business records and enough of the private lives of principals, staff and customers to stitch invisibly into the fabric of society.
These older, established blue-chip companies were her most popular. She could have taken on staff and a workload capable of crushing anti-matter but she preferred to work alone and not very much at all, leave plenty of time to do her pro-bono work writing islands. She was just finishing off Madagascar, her favourite so far, so much better than New Zealand which she considered dreary except for a few bits of the south island.
She was upside down when I arrived, the hem of a grey-green pleated crimpolene skirt with a form-fitting waist hanging down over her upper body to about her unshaven armpits and over most of her purple, bare-midriff tank top. She was wearing no underwear. Her curly pubic hair, like loose steel wool, contrasted rather strangely with the heavy boots and suction cups. I found the situation rather confronting, not knowing whether to stare at her revealed regions which in most people were normally covered up, or her breasts which upside down had assumed unusual shapes, not something you see every day.
“The eyes, arsehole, down here, not up there,” she said with the hint of a snarl. Her normal voice was soft. She was a low talker, refusing to speak loudly and clearly no matter how many people asked her to repeat herself or misunderstood what she said. She said it was better for the world to change the way they listened rather than keeping on shouting at each other, but no one ever changed.
“That’s because they are fuck-witted cunts,” she said.
“It is a bit discombobulating being the wrong way up from your point of view,” I said. “Not to mention vagina at eye level.”
“What are you worried about? You’ve seen me naked often enough,” she said. “There’s a spare pair of boots, you can climb up here to and get some blood to your brain, which might stimulate some actual thinking instead of the lascivious looks.”
“It’s not the nudity that worries me, it’s the thought of ventriloquism,” I said.
She laughed.
I started lacing the boots. She had cut the ends off so that my toes could poke out.
“This really will be like the Groucho Marx, Eve Arden scene,” I said. “Do you want me to take my shorts off?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “What are you thinking, that we might fuck upside down?”
“I confess my mind was wandering not far from the vicinity of a concept in that general territory.”
“I might consider it if I could extend my legs by 30 cm, and if I wanted to get pregnant, but no thanks.”
“No problem.” I finished lacing the boots onto my feet in place of the perennial Italian leather sandals and climbed the rope ladder. The suction cups were not the greatest upside-downism gadgets, requiring a rather ungainly stomping motion to get a good grip and only pealing off with a raucous trumpeting like an African waterhole in full feeding frenzy. My shirt didn’t fall all the way off my torso but did leave large parts between the waist of my baggy shorts and my unshaven chest rather exposed, not that there was anything to shave — a deforester would have to walk many a desert between the rare filaments growing from my pectoral follicles.
It took me six squelchy steps and ripping fart noises to be head to shoulder with Maria who stared into my upside down armpit as if there be vipers, then tilted her head, angling her face towards mine. I couldn’t raise my head relative to hers with a standard knee bend, her legs were too close, so with splayed feet, a style I always felt lacked couth, I bent my knees sideways until our lips were at the same altitude and able to kiss each other directly which they did. I cheated a little on the altitude maintenance, distracting my legs from releasing their angle of extension by puckering my bum and trying not to think of the erection in my shorts which felt like a dumbbell without the bells, just leaving the dumb part, heavy, obvious and protruding. Luckily it was inside my shorts and not somewhere likely to cause a riot.
Our lips detached. “There’s a riot in cell block number nine,” said Maria. “You can join the riot scene if you want to club someone to death with your nightstick.”
“How long do you reckon it would take to get to Boggo Road from here?”
“Oh shut up and kiss me, you fool,” she said and reattached our faces. I hugged her close, not for intimacy but because my legs were rapidly losing muscle tone. I couldn’t hang on forever or her legs would either stretch by the 30 cm required or all the joints would dislocate, so I let go and our lips parted like Spanish dancers, leaving Maria to talk to my breastbone.
“Is there any easy way to get down from here?” I asked.
She pushed me like a park swing out of the way then lifted herself into a squat, grabbed hold of the rails along the sides of the smooth upside-down surface, somehow released both suction cups, ending up hanging from the rails with her back to me, then dropped to the floor below, cushioning her fall with both the suction cups and a suspicion of athleticism. She had her boots off in a jiffy, her clothes smoothed into place. She sat down at her writing table to read my manuscript. I wasn’t sure I possessed even a suspicion of this type of athleticism, so I climbed backwards to the rope ladder and got down that way.
Maria could read at blinding speed with perfect recall, which came in handy for writing both businesses and geography. She was already half way through by the time I joined her at the table and took a shot of Baron de Sigognac Platinum Extra Old Armangac she had put in front of me and a nibble of Epoisses, one of her favourite stinky cheeses. It was either that or Munster whose smell alone could kill a black dog.
“It’s funny,” she said. “I like it.”
I could feel several layers of terror melt away, terror I hadn’t been aware of till that moment.
I reached in to the pocket of my shorts and pulled out a ripe avocado, and put it on the cheese platter.
“I had to avoid the police on the way over,” I said.
“You’re paranoid,” said Maria. “They’re harmless.”
I don’t think so,” I said. “They held up the traffic until I crossed the street. I did my thing.”
“Look left, look right, look innocent?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Which just proves they are harmless. No one could look guiltier than you do when you are trying to look innocent. It’s pathetic. You look like a meer cat with gonorrhoea.”
“I got that avocado from Woolworths. It was on a throw-out table. It was 49 c. Only slightly squashed.”
“A bargain,” said Maria. “You should have told me you were coming, I could have written lunch, with room service.”
“Does that mean you do want to have sex?” I asked.
She hit me across the back of the head with a handy caduceus, a short staff entwined by two serpents. It was the protector of merchants, shepherds, gamblers, liars and thieves, so it was unfair she was hitting me with it. I qualified as at least two of those.
“Smoke a cigar, or something,” she said. “Suck your brown smelly dick and watch as it burns away. Maybe it’ll help you get the message. Sorry. I didn’t mean to hit you that hard, are you all right?”
I rubbed the back of my head.
“Maybe you could kiss it better,” I said. “Starting here.” I put the tip of my index finger on my lips. “We could see where we go from there.”
She hit me again, harder.
“Be quiet,” she said. “Let me finish this.” She went back to reading while I now had two lumps on the back of my head to massage. I tossed down the rest of my Armagnac and grabbed the bottle to gargle from the neck, but paused as I saw her waving the caduceus in friendly warning. I refilled my glass instead.
Turning the last page she swivelled on her chair and smiled at me. All the stars in the universe shone more brightly.
“I don’t particularly like what you’ve done with Maria,” she said.
All the stars in the universe when dark.
“Why not?”
“Because it’s not at all like me and it makes me feel envious.”
“Envious of what?”
“Envious of what she writes. I wish I could write like that.”
“So you like it?”
“No I don’t like it, and I don’t like that you wrote it. It’s not fair. It’s like nothing I have ever read. It’s like nothing I could have imagined writing. It’s like it came from another universe.”
“So you don’t like it because it’s good?”
“It’s better than good, it’s magnificent. It’s not naive. It’s thoughtful, considered and precise. Whatever she is trying to say she’s right there, in it. It’s vulnerable, tortured and exultant. It’s about as shy as a sabre-toothed lioness protecting her cubs. It makes everything else look like shit, it makes me feel like a bumbling idiot, and yet I don’t have any idea what it means.”
“This is the second best day of my life,” I said.
“Oh yeah? What was the best one?”
“The day I met you.”
“You’re not thinking about sex again, are you?” she said, her hand straying towards the snake stick.
“No, no,” I said hastily. “James has sex.”
“I noticed. He’s a lucky man.”
“Do you have anything I could smear some avocado on, a fresh lime, fresh black pepper and a pinch of salt? I really can’t climb the north face of this cheese. I’m a competency five cheese climber and these are like competency 25.”
“You are piss weak,” she said. “Here.” She opened a wooden box on the table and took out a bone-handled knife, a loaf of black bread, a pepper grinder, salt cellar, wooden bread board, a lime, a lemon, the bells of St Clemens, and a corm of garlic, breaking off two cloves which she threw into her beautiful mouth and started chewing.
I fixed myself a couple of open avocado spreads and went off to search for something less pugnacious than Armagnac to have with them. I had stocked Maria’s wine cellar in the cottage, which was a series of racks under the stairs to the loft bedroom, and since she preferred stronger medicine I expected it still to be there. I chose a Henschke Malbec and a Penfolds Bin 333.
When I got back to Maria’s writing table she was hacking at a pomegranate with a penknife which reminded me of the one Voss had used to saw his own head off. It was unusual to see her eat any fruit other than apples, but there were a lot of things about Maria I did not know and probably never would.
“So how is working working out for you?” Maria asked when I was settled.
“Working is like being stored rolled up in a carpet for eight hours a day.”
“So why do you do it?”
“To survive.”
“Have you ever survived without work?”
“Yes in fact it’s not as difficult, since it’s just survival. Without the work factor it is easier.”
“You’re working because it’s a challenge?”
“A predictable challenge where it’s easier to know what to complain about.”
“Which is?”
“Work.”
“Sounds like a circular argument to me.”
“No, it’s bipolar.”
“That’s comforting.”
“What is?”
“Work.”
“Yes, that’s the idea. The whole thing is fucked but we have social evolution now which gives us something to aspire to.”
“Which is?”
“Winning.”
“How do you win?”
“Whatever it takes.”
“What happens if you don’t win?”
“Someone else does.”
“Where does that leave you?”
“Living.”
“The winner’s prize is unhappiness, always wanting more, and the losers get to just bumble along, surviving?”
“Pretty much.”
“Do the winners know this?”
“Not really. It’s pretty full on, winning. Not much time to reflect.”
“So what do the winners get out of it?”
“Awards. We give them awards. Someone gives them awards. I don’t personally.”
“How do you get time to write?”
“I get up in the mornings at sunrise and try to write for a couple of hours before going into work.”
“And how is that working for you?”
“It’s hard. It’s not enough time. But it’s regular.”
“Thank Darwin for small mercies.”
“What about you?”
“What about me?”
“How’s Madagascar going?”
“Oh that. I have to lay off the Armagnac to do that kind of work. It’s fiddly. But fun. Worthwhile, I suppose. It was convenient I had done Borneo. Quite a few migrations came from Borneo on outrigger canoes.”
“Should I go there?”
“The locals have a slight tendency to lynch westerners. Not statistically significant, compared to the fridge falling on you, but more likely to ring alarm bells. If you’re a lemur or a chameleon you’d be safe from lynching, but extinction is a problem. About 90 per cent of forest has been cleared. It’ll all be gone by 2025 except for a few pockets along the cliffs on the east coast.”
“Why do you let them do it?
“Do what?”
“Fuck up places.”
“I don’t have a say in it. It just happens.”
“That’s a shame.”
“That’s life. It’s like that everywhere. Humans are fucked. They make good chocolate, though.”
“That’s a consolation. Why do they lynch westerners?
“There’s kind of an obscure lynch mob tradition. The cops are in on it.”
“I told you they were bad juju.”
“In Madagascar they are. They helped a lynch mob on Nosy Be torture a couple of tourists for three hours, necklace them with car tires and throw them alive into a beach bonfire. Another one was burned alive the next day outside a mosque.”
“Lovely,” I said.
“It’s still pretty in places and has lots of weird animals. You might like it.”
AGAINST PROFESSIONAL PHILOSOPHY REDUX 339
Mr Nemo, W, X, Y, & Z, Sunday 27 October 2019
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