Manacles 5–2.6 CHARLES, 2.7 JAMES, 2.8 CHARLES, 2.9 MARIA, & 2.10 CHARLES.

By Robert Whyte

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Manacles, a novel by Robert Whyte 1972–2020

Introduction by Robert Hanna

Table of Contents

Supporting Documents

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2.6 Charles

Charles had been experimenting with the effect of magnetism on his paintings. Magnets attached to his head had failed to do anything. He was now experimenting with iron filings in the pigment itself, with movable magnets attached to the back of the canvas.

There had been rain during the night. The air on the roof studio smelt fresh and clean as though the breeze was being pumped by a gigantic bellows from the place of all oxygen.

Charles, while his brush hand was completing the background of the painting, was using his mind to direct questions into the bowl of his pipe, in the absence of tobacco. Does nature really abhor a vacuum? What sort of nature, the waterfalls and sand dunes kind, or nature as in personality, for example, the sweet nature of a laborador? If nature really abhorred a vacuum, why is there so much space between the planets and the stars, or even between the particles inside an atom? Unless the abhorrence was keeping nature away from vacuums and in other words maintaining the space between things.

He scowled, knocked the smouldering thoughts out of his pipe and went downstairs to get some money from the fridge to buy petrol. Also in the fridge, he observed, but on a higher plane, was James’s typewriter. Charles pulled out the typewritten page.

Her bright hair, smelling of eucalyptus, smiled at him as he approached. She was scribbling poems on her leg, to avoid hurting the air. His footsteps hurried away behind him like a retreating mirror, as he approached. At the moment he sat down she looked up. She drew her grey-green skirt down over her knees, hunched forward doing so and grinned.

“Are you writing your book?” she asked him.

“Not right now,” he answered.

For some time nothing moved in the room, not even the light in the fridge. Charles stood immobile, the typewritten page in his hand. He replaced it carefully, winding the paper through by turning the platen. He took a small pile of low-denomination bills from the shelf below, shoved them into his pocket and went downstairs to the car.

2.7 James

James looked over Maria’s hunched back at the clock which was about to strike midday. Her brown hair hung in a dense shell about her head with a shorter fringe at the front, her face apparently unable to frown between the two edges of this curtain. Her square-ended fingers were dexterous but rarely visible. Her teeth were chalk-white and wide. Her eyes were pale blue and saw much more than she revealed.

A gigantic potato, red and blistered, walked along the devastated main street of the city. Pockets of existence had survived, but by far the greater part of the city was destroyed and now overrun with owls, driven out of the burnt forests nearby, hooting non-stop in search of sleep. The crisp smell of death blackened the air. George, a manalive, paused, deciding which path to take, to thread his way through…

“I thought you said you weren’t writing your book,” said Maria.

“How can you tell?”

“You get a furry look on your face.”

James laughed and stood up. A premonition had crossed his mind, coinciding with a sharp pain in the small of his back. The nearby traffic was very loud. It felt like something was being repeated. Something nudged him from behind. He turned around.

“You’re in my book already,” he said.

It was Charles, nudging forward over the city square in his Volkswagen. Normally an area reserved for pedestrians, the square had not remained placid while the Volkswagen drove through the flowerbeds. Angry crowds were squealing in its wake. Charles was signalling to James from the car. Maria was laughing, already heading towards the car. James followed. Ominous blue figures with long arms would not be long in appearing.

James clambered past Maria to the back seat. Maria got in and pulled the door closed. They sped away across the square through the midday crowd.

James felt distantly but not unhappily excluded on the back seat alone, but decided to pass the time catching up on his internal monologue on the subject of George McIntyre. The potato thing had legs. But can a potato have legs? It has plenty of eyes, but legs were going to be a challenge. If the girth of the man mountain was sufficient perhaps no one would notice.

The car rose and fell over the inner-city suburban streets, Charles and Maria deep in conversation. A leaf blew in and caught in James’s hair as he was trying to refresh his mind in the draught from the open window on Maria’s side of the car. Charles turned.

“Look out,” said Charles, slowing down as he approached the crest of a hill and was about to turn left. “A grasshopper has blown in the window.” He turned to the road then back again. “It’s caught in your hair.”

“I felt something,” said James. “I thought it was a leaf.”

Maria turned. Her eyes were exceptionally blue and pale in the bright afternoon light. “It’s a grasshopper,” she said.

They drove on through the streets. Charles and Maria returned to their silent conversation. James put his hand to his head. He pulled a struggling grey-green-brown body and strong, kicking, spiky legs away from his hair.

2.8 CHARLES

A dark green pillow crept towards the floor. Far away, he heard the distant clang of a bell. It rang for a while then stopped. There was a hiss, like traffic on the road, or the sound of remorse. Fifteen minutes passed, slowly, each second making its way through his mind like a grain of sand struggling through an hourglass. Was it hot in the room? His hair was damp, covered with fingerprints. His eyes flickered.

He woke, got to his feet and rubbed his eyes, his feet carrying him to the bathroom. His eyes felt sore, really sore. He saw his face glowering at him from the bathroom mirror, a crooked nose against a thick, dark face, cheeks hanging like curtains, drawn against a shapeless mouth. A forehead, or the nape of his neck, he didn’t know which. He sat down on a low, padded stool in front of the mirror.

Tough horse hair jabbed into his thighs. He draped a towel over his neck, head and chest, leaving one half of his chest exposed. Water flowed beneath the mirror, into the washbasin.

His left eye was all right, but the other one looked dangerously swollen. That face of his, he thought. His features modelled themselves on the hindquarters of a cheap American paperback.

He looked away, but failed to adjust to the darkness. The chair beneath his buttocks was embroidered with a scene from the bible, a palm tree, a sacrifice and a furious goat. A camel groaned and the smell wrinkled his nostrils. He waited a moment.

The smell passed. His eyes gradually reclaimed their arid, alluring amazement. He was used to looking at eyes, he thought. He wondered whether this was an exaggeration. Other people’s eyes, sure, not eyes like this one, his left eye looked like it had lumbago. It just wasn’t right. He laughed. It made no sound. He wondered if there was anyone else in the room. He turned to check. There was no one.

His face, like a raincoat, looked wet, with an unhealthy look he associated with magazines in a dentist’s waiting room. Never mind, it’s only a figure of speech. It’s bad enough climbing out of sleep looking like the ocean with slugs and whelks zigzagging around a gigantic set of blubbering purple lips, munching on barbaric spinach, without having the kiss of some unknown thug’s knuckles seeming to hover about his forehead, looking for a place to land.

In front of him the dressing table was spread-eagled in the half light. A pile of stones was scattered beneath the mirror. Next to it was a tube of stark red lipstick and a pad of ice-blue makeup. With his free hand he adjusted the towel and at the same time dropped his head between his knees and breathed out harshly.

He straightened up once more and peered into his eye, pulling down the eyelid with his fingertip by stretching the skin over his cheekbone. He could smell damp potatoes in the cellar, a thin, whitish grey-green, cold smell. Last night, he remembered, he had been happily going numb in a garden full of blue and white tablecloths, candles and dark green seats under sprawling trees. He couldn’t remember why. He could only remember feeling there was something horribly inevitable about everything.

All this looking into his eye was getting to him. He hadn’t seen anything yet, only the black surface of the pupil, whichseemed restless. He blinked, his eyelashes brushing against the glass. He saw something, a figure, in the depths of his eye. He peered and blinked again. It was still there. It was his reflection, shrugging its shoulders. Now there’s two of us, he thought.

Steady on, he told himself, you’re just anthropomorphising the first-person pupil relationship. He began to draw back from the mirror, allowing the reflection within his eye to dwindle out of sight. Having done this, he found his face had become feasible again. Only just, he thought.

Meanwhile, something was nudging at his bum. His body, he realised, was being pressed irresistibly against the edge of the washbasin. A peculiarly insistent force was pressing against his buttocks. He looked over his shoulder, twisting his body.

A piano was in the bathroom, pushing at him from behind. It was an unusually small piano, or so it seemed. It wasn’t a relative, it was a complete stranger. Not that he expected kinship with a piano. He was about average height, maybe what you would call thick set, though he preferred the term ‘raw-boned’. The piano leaned menacingly towards him, upright but on a tilt, no more than a metre high. What’s a piano doing here? he wondered. What’s it trying to do?

The piano was trying to push him into the toilet.

He looked back at the mirror again. His black eyebrows were moist, due no doubt to a loose liver and too much wine. His eyes, too far away from the mirror to reveal the reflection of his tiny self, rustled with a vague emotion.

The piano was pushed at him even harder, oscillating like a Leslie speaker, shoving and biffing and thumping him against the ceramic tiles of the wash basin. He neatly moved to one side, clipped on a white coat and strode out of the bathroom. Behind him, the piano thudded into the toilet with a jangle of strings and the fractured sound of splintered wood. On his way through the cramped hallway outside the bathroom he caught sight of his reflection in the wall mirror. That was weird. Evidently, he had been smearing yoghurt over his neck and chest, though he couldn’t remember doing so. He rushed through the hallway, entering a large, dilapidated room he didn’t recognise at all.

A grey-black, badly stuffed sofa took up most of one wall. The windows were glazed with pebbled glass, allowing light but not vision to enter or exit the room. A number of orange metal and plastic chairs were lined up against two of the other walls. A counter, of sorts, thick with dust and inactivity was at the innermost end of the room, though what made it innermost was not clear. It was just a feeling. A central square column had mirrors on all sides. There didn’t seem to be anything particularly menacing in the room, no bearded men with bandannas or Russian automatic weapons, large jars marked with skulls and crossbones, hydraulic operating machinery equipped with circular saws, drills, gouges, hackers or bashers. Occasional magazines were scattered here and there, containing general interest articles concerning the use and misuse of high explosives, cooking without garlic and guides to scavenging demolition materials. Nothing capable of evoking hallucination.

He was staring at one of the flat mirrors. In it, his reflection stared insolently back at him. It was not a pretty sight. In one hand he held a large plastic container of natural set yoghurt and in the other a small white plastic spoon. On damp looking feet he was wearing bright red shoes. What he was wearing under the white coat? He hunched over to look between his legs. His eyes were unable to penetrate the darkness.

He became conscious he was moving again, towards the mirror. His reflection seemed to be smiling at him. His upwardly mobile lips seemed darker and younger than before. He tried to look more closely, but the insolence of his stare forced him to look away.

Why was he still moving towards the mirror? He managed to stop. His body was trying to make him to walk into the mirror. His feet, painful in his tight red shoes, squinted up at his sleek, ash-blond legs. The mirror had come closer.

He noticed a large, brightly patterned limpet-shell, stuck to his cheek, gripping the skin with a strong muscular foot. He moved closer to the mirror and reached out to touch the limpet shell with his fingertips.

His reflection shrank back, avoiding his extended hand. The shell tightened its muscle and nestled closer to his face.

“You’ll never get it off now,” his reflection said. “You’ve frightened it.”

“It would have come off if you hadn’t shrunk away,” he said.

“No it wouldn’t.”

It was a childish denial, but he felt hurt.

“Let me try again,” he pleaded.

His eyes jerked involuntarily downwards. His hand was stuck between his legs. He tried to extract it, but he was too weak. It was stuck. With a sudden rush it burst free. It was red. He brought his fingertips to his nostrils and sniffed at them. A happy sound filled the air. His reflection was laughing at him.

2.9 Maria

Maria ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. She adored thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs and fried hencods’ roes. Most of all she liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to her palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.

These substances were very rarely if ever available in her world, so she had to make do with what she could find in the cupboards. As a consequence the vast bulk of her diet was made up of raw garlic, eaten whole, and apples, including the seeds and stems. Her favourite tipple to wash this down was Calvados, an apple brandy from south of France, Kirschwasser or vintage Armagnac. She considered beer fit only for washing down pigs, wine barely better than plain tap water and Scotch Whisky of all kinds completely ruined by tourists squawking and hooting in its presence, especially the more expensive single malts.

Maria was wearing scuba gear, a tight-fitting wetsuit, rock-hopping sandals, a face mask, nose clip and a breathing apparatus attached to an air tank. She was upstairs in one of the rooms above the café. The room was sealed with tar and rubber airlocks, allowing her to ignite a tiny quantity of dmp, a substance invented by an eccentric scientist known as Brian or perhaps Pythagoras De Selby. dmp deoxgenated the air in sealed containers, leaving only nitrogen, argon, water vapour, carbon dioxide and trace amounts of neon, methane, helium, krypton, hydrogen, nitrous oxide, xenon and nitrogen dioxide plus the airborne molecules of particulate matter like human faeces which is what gets absorbed by the insides of your nose when you smell people’s farts.

The effect of igniting dmp and removing oxygen was to remove any constraints on time and place, allowing Maria to call up people she wished to consult. They appeared in spirit form, but otherwise whole and healthy, even if they had died. De Selby had used this process to discuss religion with Saint Augustine in the seaside holiday town of Dalkey in Ireland. The topic of religion did not interest Maria in the slightest.

De Selby had let people assume dmp was an acronym for Dublin Metropolitan Police. This was patently absurd and should never have been countenanced — the letters stood for Deoxygenating Magic Powder.

Maria struck a match, observing the abrasion of the red potassium chlorate against the powdered glass and red phosphorus mixture on the side of the box, the two substances mixing and causing a miniature explosion, igniting the match head which burst into flame. Maria applied the flame to a speck of dmp in an excavated glass block, or in the general area where the speck probably was, it being so small it was invisible to the naked eye. She had put it there with the help of a powerful hand lens.

The successful ignition of dmp was recorded on two dials showing on the screen of a black and white television which had served as the furniture upon which the excavated glass block was resting. One of the dials showed the percentage of oxygen in the room’s atmosphere had dropped from 21 per cent to zero. The other showed the number of extra-temporal presences which had gone from zero to one.

The extra temporal presence was Virginia Woolf.

“What’s it like living in the world?” Virginia said.

“You should know,” said Maria.

“Hardly,” said Virginia Woolf, “I’m unliving in the unworld and not that happy to be summoned. The only thing that stops me spewing into your eye is my feminist work ethic.”

“Is your hair a wig?” said Maria.

“Are you fucking kidding?” said Virginia Woolf. “This fucking wailing fettuccine, screaming like tangled sand dunes without end?”

“What are you saying?”

Virginia Woolf pulled off her hairpiece and showed Maria her tonsure, which was an octagonal dumbbell, carved from fresh drunkards.

“Have you got your family with you?” Virginia asked.

“No,” said Maria. “Even if I did, I don’t think they would recognise me, considering I am wearing a wet suit, a face mask and breathing air through a tube.”

“I remember when we got ours down they were covered with feathers.”

“Your family?”

“It was like plunging into a doona.”

“Was it a happy family reunion?”

“Hardly. I said to them. You are disgusting remnants of humanity. Go back to your squalid orange homes and your snarling dogs. Walk sideways, like a tern. Giant hands create craters of expectation at night and you are forever unable to repel the all-white glamour and big black hours of Sunday morning.”

“A bit wordy.”

“Don’t talk to me about the world. It’s too big, it gets stuck in your throat.”

“I said wordy, not worldly. You must be squamous. Speaking of which, did you die of skin cancer?” asked Maria.

“Holy fuck, are you some kind of ignorant moron? I drowned myself. I filled my pockets with stones and walked into the river.”

“What was that like?”

“It was very boring with the stones, because I wanted to be sure I had enough so that I couldn’t possibly get back if I had second thoughts. Eventually they were so heavy my pockets were on the point of ripping open and I could hardly walk. I should have thought it through, used a wheelbarrow to carry down a knapsack full of dumbbells. I hope you aren’t intending to tell anyone about this. A lot of rather proper and powerful people venerate me, you know. They would tend to be affronted by anyone skyving off about a matter so serious as my death. Not that I care, I couldn’t give a toss. In the water it was wet, cold, green and then dark in that order. Eventually I suppose it was fishy and not at all attractive because they didn’t find me until some time later.”

“Exactly three weeks.”

“Yes. At least you know something.”

“I know a lot of things,” said Maria.

“Do you now?” said Virginia Woolf. “I can’t really tell with Australians. You all look like kangaroos to me.”

“May I ask you a sensitive literary question concerning your opinion of the writings of James Joyce?”

“My dear, nothing is sensitive after you’ve been scraping along the bottom of a river and fetching up against a bridge at Southease to be found, bloated and rotting, by children. What do you want to know?”

“Did you really dislike Ulysses?”

“Not really, I was jealous. People say awful things when they are feeling bitter.”

“You said Ulysses was an ‘illiterate, underbred book of a self-taught working man.”

“I was an unbearable snob,” said Virginia Woolf, “Poor Jim, he was as far from being a working man as you could possibly get. He wouldn’t know which end of a hammer to hold. He would have blown all his gaskets if he had ever picked up a crow bar.”

“Did you meet him?”

“No, that’s just what Tom said.”

“Eliot?”

“Yes, he raved about Joyce at me, when he should have obeyed the cardinal rule of literary manners, which is to rave about the one you’re with.”

“You said Joyce wrote like the scratching of pimples on the body of the bootboy at Claridges’.”

“Well that’s true enough, that’s good stuff. Joycean even.”

“Did it influence you in writing Mrs Dalloway?”

“Heavens no. Did I make Clarissa piss like a dog? Or Septimus revel in his own defecation? I made up my mind to hate Ulysses so that it wouldn’t influence me.”

“So you didn’t hate it after all?”

“I hated the fact I couldn’t compete with it or outdo it, not then or ever.”

Why not?”

“It was the smut. I was a prude. I could no more write about piss, shit and cum than fly to the moon. I hated it was getting more attention than anything I did. He destroyed the whole 19th century with that book and me along with it. We both wanted to shake the tree but I only gave it a couple of feeble slaps. I was supposed to be the progressive one. He was a family man, a social conservative in what was the equivalent of a traditional marriage. I was mad, he was sane. He smashed literature, religion, class and morality. I complained about the Bloomsbury crowd eating too loudly. But he was a man, and I was a woman. So in the end I achieved more than him. All his revolutions unwound and people went back to sleep, while women kept climbing the north face of the Eiger, mostly falling off but some making progress.”

“My air is just about out,” said Maria. “Who is your favourite writer?”

“Who is yours?”

“Mine? You, I suppose.”

“You poor girl. I love Raymond Chandler. I have read all the stories, as well as The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely. My only regret about dying is not being able to read his entire output.”

“How do you cope with his attitude to women, blacks and homosexuals?”

“I just swap the genders and races in my head as I am reading. It makes no great difference though it can be unexpectedly amusing. His prose style is something I never would have imagined. Ageless. Not like my tired old period pieces.”

“I am going to undo the airlocks now,” said Maria.

“Whereupon time and space will reassert themselves and I will vanish.”

“I am afraid so.”

“Such is death,” said Virginia Woolf. “Goodbye.”

Maria took a deep breath of the canned air and removed her breathing apparatus and mask, moving to the wheel she had installed in the airlock door, equipped with a Brodie knob for faster one-handed operation. She gave the wheel a quick spin and the seal cracked, the air rushing in with a sound like a cunt fart, something which she imagined Virginia Woolf would have described differently, in her day.

An unpleasant low-frequency sound like bowing a slackened-off, out-of-tune cello was accompanied by a vague, out-of-focus cloud of light. When these faded, no sign remained of the spirit of Virginia Woolf or her conversation, some of which had surprised Maria. She certainly hadn’t expected her to be mostly lucid.

She passed through the airlock and closed it behind her, flicking on the auxiliary vent so air would circulate and dissipate any remaining dmp.

2.10 Charles

Charles was feeling rather strange. As he walked towards the café he felt an overpowering compulsion to strangle the further horizons and walk on, which he resisted not only because it would take him past his intended destination, but also because it sounded like a lame ’70s song lyric.

In order to ward off evil spirits, for which he had nothing but the most contemptuous disdain, he was obeying the litany of the church of the flying spaghetti monster, which instructed its parishioners, in the event of approaching a domicile, industrial tenement or built structure of any type, to walk like a shrieking ad, strap a canvas knapsack to your chest, and feel, as you walk, an invisible smile waiting at the edge of summer for the dawn.

He had been walking by the estuary to clear his head, a outcome ardently to be desired but one which had not been achieved. Instead the head which had hanging out in the breeze all this time was simply sunburnt. Crooked, buzzing clouds were drying to a shade of pale grey in the moonlight. Charles was hyperventilating. He knew he shouldn’t, but he was unable to stop his fingers hissing, which scared the crap out of him.

He entered the café. It was empty except for Maria in her customary position at the rear table in the dark. She was reading. As he approached Charles saw she had added, to the pages of The Waves and The Years, Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto, Vita Nuova by Dante Alighieri, Gargantua and Pantagruel by Rabelais, and The Satyricon by Gaius or Titus Petronius.

She looked up as Charles approached.

“Charles, you look terrible,” she said.

Charles sat down.

“Thanks,” he said.

“What’s that on your face?”

“A limpet,” said Charles. “Don’t touch it, it only makes it cling on harder.”

Maria opened her mouth wide and sent a stream of incandescent flame to envelop Charles, completely consuming his corporeal reality which burned to invisibility in microseconds. Charles then reappeared, nicely filling out his clothes before they had a chance to collapse, restoring his existence in its entirety but without the limpet.

Charles widened his eyes in a cartoon-but-authentic gesture of amazement.

“Hilarious,” he said, “and life-prolonging. How did you do that?”

“I have no idea,” said Maria. “Does it matter?”

She reached out and took Charles’s head in her hands and drew it towards hers, planting a kiss on his lips.

“You are my gingerbread man,” she said, licking her lips.

Charles almost blushed but wasn’t sure he knew how.

“I had a hideous dream, in which I woke up feeling strange. It turned into a nightmare with mirrors and yoghurt.”

“Doesn’t sound too bad,” said Maria. “Mirrors are scary, but yoghurt is usually harmless.”

“It wasn’t my dream.”

“Are you suggesting someone wrote the dream into your sleep?”

“Obviously,” said Charles.

“It can only be James,” said Maria.

“Yes, but why? Pre-emptive jealousy?”

“He’s not really like that,” said Maria. “It might be an unconscious, instinctive destabilisation, just to see what happens.”

“I don’t like the sound of that,” said Charles.

“It’s unenlightening to speculate on unknowables,” said Maria. “Let’s just fuck.”

***

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