The Slip, page 12
Hannah snorted. ‘I’m sorry – yes – I suppose it did.’
Jack was suddenly offended. Her dismissiveness – the way she emphasised the past tense.
He retaliated. ‘I assume that’s why you chose to work with me.’
‘Why I chose to work with you … hmm. We’re not here to talk about me. Let’s talk about you.’
Jack was flustered. ‘If you remember, your contract had expired.’
‘I’m not interested in what you believe did or didn’t happen. Let’s stay on track – we haven’t got much time.’
‘Look, I think you have the wrong impression. I never dismissed you. Actually, I’m pretty sure I tried to convince Vivienne to let you stay.’
Hannah looked past him, out the window. The situation had gotten out of control and neither party seemed to know how to move on. When at last she spoke, she said, ‘Would you mind if we took this elsewhere? It’s stifling in this room.’
They walked across campus and then toward Lygon Street. It was the start of semester and the plane trees were just on the brink of losing their leaves; some flitted past them as they walked.
They sat down at a café. It was warm and many other couples dined out on the footpath. The street had an air of easy sociability, even flirtation. He wondered why she’d brought him here. It was not exactly the right way to establish professional boundaries.
‘Shall we order drinks?’ he asked, just as Hannah said, ‘Sorry about this. I felt we needed a change of scenery.’
‘No, no. It makes sense. I’m sorry our history has been … fraught.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And no, I don’t think I’ll drink. I have to work after this.’
Again, the way she said it irritated him. Her comment was designed to establish dominance – anyone could see that. Rage surged through him and he let it push aside his feelings of inadequacy. He had genuinely wanted to make amends, but now he imagined wrenching her arm and pinning her against a wall to kiss her forcefully, like a man in the movies.
‘No worries,’ he said. ‘I hope you don’t mind if I order something.’
‘Go ahead.’
They studied their menus in silence. When it was time to order, Jack went up to the counter and asked for two negronis and a bottle of their second-cheapest white, telling the waiter not to bring out their food until both the aperitifs and bottle had been drunk. It was an act of deception that surprised even himself, but he sensed that Hannah was playing with him and he was determined to regain the upper hand. He would get her drunk, he decided. Then they would see if she didn’t warm to him.
Back at the table Hannah looked surprised, but seeing Jack’s determination seemed to resign herself to being sportive. It was as if she said, alright – have it your way. Wearily, she drew the negroni toward herself across the table.
‘You guessed my favourite drink,’ she said.
So she’d begrudge him that. Jack smiled, feeling like he’d won a point. ‘Now do you believe me when I say I have my talents?’
Despite herself, amusement flickered on her face. She sat back and sipped.
‘I didn’t mean to be too personal before,’ she began. ‘Believe me, that’s all in the past. In fact, my failure with you and Vivienne led me to Goldilocks, which as you know is an all-woman company, where I was determined to prove myself and was eventually made associate producer. In a way, that wouldn’t have happened without you. So thanks.’
She clinked his class.
‘Cheers,’ he said.
Things appeared to be turning round. Their food came out and steamed between them. Jack was chatty, voluble with the wine. Hannah smiled at appropriate times and he allowed himself to picture what it would be like to have her in bed. He had been distracted by his pride, but now he was determined to be charming. He refilled his wine. Hannah hadn’t touched her glass. They finished their meal and then their plates were cleared away.
‘Well,’ said Hannah. ‘That’s about the end of my lunch break. I should get back.’
‘This has been nice,’ said Jack. ‘Really lovely.’ He fought the urge to reach for her hand, settling instead on a look which conveyed his desire, or so he thought, in a completely non-threatening way. ‘We should do this again.’
‘No, I don’t think so,’ she said firmly. ‘You must know this sort of thing doesn’t happen all the time.’
‘Okay. Right. I wasn’t trying to suggest—’
‘Suggestions aside, I am here to supervise your thesis. I agreed because I’m fascinated by your proposal – you said you want to interrogate the resonances between Beckett’s Theatre of the Absurd and current breakdowns in political speech. If that’s true, I want to work with you. I want us to work together.’
‘So do I,’ he stammered, knowing he had been caught out.
‘Good,’ she said. ‘See you next time, at my office.’ Her full glass of wine sat on the table, untouched. ‘You have that – I already said I didn’t want it.’
Humiliated, Jack paid the bill and left. It was far more than he could afford. At home that afternoon, he continued getting drunk. He smoked a spliff and let his feelings of dejection and frustration morph into full-blown paranoia. Hannah thought he was pathetic, Hannah thought he was an idiot, old, an ageing lothario. Hannah was herself an arrogant bitch and also, most likely, frigid.
In the morning he woke to several missed calls from Elizabeth and one from his daughter Liv. He pushed his phone aside and drank some water. In the unforgiving light of morning, it was clear that not only had his seduction failed, but his behaviour at lunch was completely unacceptable. The realisation crushed him. He had been so sure of his plan to seduce her. But it seemed those days were over – how had he not noticed?
Feeling contrite, Jack threw himself into his research. By the time his confirmation came around, he and Hannah had struck upon a tentative peace. Over the next year, it hesitatingly developed into sympathy. He remembered a time when it was possible to be excited by your own ideas, such as he had been in the early days of his career, working on devised theatre with a bunch of artists, actors and eccentrics. Forgetting his singular desire to possess her, Jack decided he liked working with her instead.
But every so often she’d withdraw her favour, and he would perceive something chilly and unknowable in Hannah, something he longed to master. Always, then, the fervour came upon him – changed in nature, though just as strong as before.
ACT III
Jack’s favourite part of writing plays is the preliminary read-through. He likes sitting with the actors in a circle, listening as they stumble through his script. Only then, while the play exists as both text and performance, as both more and less than he imagined, does he sense the intense potential of dramatic art.
He has always been attracted to ideas in the subjunctive. The women he pursues, the books he hasn’t read, future projects, burgeoning themes. In reality, he is often disappointed. By now, he is drunk. The bottle stands empty on the table. He longs to speak with someone, but there is no one he can reach. Somewhere in the house, that door is still banging. He drinks his wine and smokes and ruminates.
In the bathroom, he stares into the mirror. His eyes are bloodshot and his silver hair and face have taken on a scary pallor. The man he sees is hardly recognisable. Around nine, the wind dies down and leaves the whole place still. Jack rolls himself a spliff and smokes it on the verandah, craving lightness, but the drug makes him uneasy and compounds his loneliness.
Just three months ago, he was in Paris. He was on his own then too, although it never crossed his mind to be lonely. Some French theorists from Université PSL were putting on a Beckett Symposium and Hannah had helped him secure funding to attend. She even insisted that he stay in her late father’s apartment, which had been vacant since his death.
When he arrived in June, it was warm and the Seine was flat and green like a paint swatch. Jack had been to Paris in the 1980s and besides some cosmetic details he found the city had not changed; Europe, he thought, was reassuringly settled in its ways.
The apartment was large and cluttered with her father’s things. Feeling slightly pervy, Jack studied the framed pictures, records and CDs, some jackets in the wardrobe and a shelf full of books. He was pleased to see many that he liked. It was the same with the music collection – Talking Heads, Brian Eno, Chick Corea, Billie Holiday – all the artists he admired. He remembered something Hannah said about her father. ‘You’re actually quite similar. How old are you? You’re probably about the same age. I think he would have liked you. You remind me of him, sometimes.’
It was a weird thing to say and now it seemed quite pointed, suggesting she wanted something from Jack that he had always longed to give her. Platonic love or an Electra complex – it was stirring either way.
Buoyed by this supposition, his fortnight in Paris passed in a haze of summer light, optimism and very good wine. On the last night of the symposium he got drunk with some people he had met and walked home in the rain. Back at the apartment, his gaze fell unsteadily upon a large, heavy book splayed seductively between the bookcase and the desk. It was a lovely object, a massive hardback tome with creamy, deckled edges. Retrieving it from where it lay, he saw it was an anthology of critical writings on Beckett.
Again he was struck by a sense of strange plotting. Leafing through, he discovered a section devoted to some grainy black and white photographs of Beckett’s earliest productions, including spectacular shots of the premiere of Waiting for Godot at the Théâtre de Babylone in Paris in the winter of 1953. Studying the photos, Jack noticed something wedged against the spine. At first he thought it was attached, but when he cracked it open further, a polaroid fell into his lap. It was a picture of someone’s feet. He tingled. It felt as it had when, aged eleven, he followed Graham down to the foreshore and watched him fuck a girl beneath the pier. He had sensed that Graham knew that he was there and still he loitered, breathless with wrongdoing.
The feet were pale and slender, elegant, but the toes were short and stubby with broad, hard-looking nails. The combination of those ugly toes with such an intelligent foot was incredibly sensuous. It suggested something dark and cryptic about their owner; some clever, hidden quick.
Bewildered, Jack shoved the polaroid back inside the book and slammed it shut. A minute or so elapsed and then, feeling bolder, he fished it out again. His mind went back to all those years ago when Hannah wore red lipstick to opening night; how it had looked so slutty on her pure, anxious face. He realised this was what he meant when he said, ‘It suits you,’ and why she must have run to the toilets and taken it off. He had thought, back then, that he had frightened her. But with the picture in his hands he saw, quite suddenly, that she was frightened of herself.
A wave of nausea overcomes him and he retches off the verandah. Once he is finished, he rinses out his mouth with wine. He knows he should drink some water and lie down, but instead he finishes the spliff in two long drags. His head spins and spins, but this time he doesn’t spew.
Returning to the bedroom, Jack rifles around in his bag, tossing clothes and shaving gear aside until he finds the book he carried home from Paris. Technically he stole it, although there is no one to berate him for it now. He opens the book at the fingered page, cracking it all the way down to the binding. There is the polaroid, just as it had been when he first found it.
He takes it out and holds it in his lap. Emotion leaps into his throat, but he cannot distinguish whether it is grief or lust, regret or rage. He thinks of his final day in Paris, how he went to the Louvre, leaving the polaroid in its book beside the bed. He had felt confused and out of sorts, his mind racing. Were they Hannah’s feet and did she mean to leave it there, and was he meant to see it? In the museum, the crowds were oppressive. He locked himself inside a toilet stall, sat on the seat and tried to clear his head.
An email from the coordinator of his graduate program popped up on his phone, marked urgent. It did not say how Hannah died – only that it had been unexpected. He read the email twice and then deleted it, convinced that it was a mistake. Then he washed his hands, left the toilets and wandered through the galleries, looking at the treasures of his culture for a while.
Even now, he does not know many of the details. He does not know who to ask. He does not know where he stands and feels himself to be in limbo, worried that he has no right to mourn her. Who is he, in the end, but her student? And who was she, ultimately, but the woman assigned to supervise his PhD?
How many times in the intervening months has he asked himself these questions?
Desperately, he reaches for the bottle, knocking it to the ground. It rolls and bounces, the wine spreading in a violent, bloody stain across the carpet. He swears and pelts it against the wall.
Feeling reckless, he rolls and starts to smoke another joint until his limbs are jelly and his tongue is large and livid in his mouth. He has an urge to remove his shirt and jumper, which he does, throwing them over the door. He opens the Beckett book and finds the polaroid. Hannah’s feet are as he left them: mysterious and slightly obscene. Sitting on the bed, he takes his cock out of his pants and strokes the head and shaft until he’s hard. Placing the polaroid where he can see it, Jack pumps his cock – slowly at first, then faster and faster and with mounting fury, faster and faster and faster until he suddenly comes and with a ragged moan that’s closer to a sob he shudders, curling into himself, feeling all the uncertainty and grief he has been holding explode richly over his hands and belly, and as the semen starts to cool he stays there gripping his wet deflating cock and moaning, listening to the long, unbearable cries of a wounded animal emitting from his mouth, cries which waver and then pale, and eventually die out.
Then he jams the polaroid against the spine and snaps the creamy pages shut.
ACT IV
Towelling off, Jack feels like a monster. He feels worse than he has ever felt. He is a sick old man – yes – a sick, lonely old perv rattling around this haunted house writing himself off and wanking over failed conquests. The door is still banging and its ceaseless rhythm jangles his nerves. Possessed by a recklessness bred of self-loathing, he smokes the rest of the joint.
The paranoia sets in for good when he’s in bed, willing himself to sleep, and it is not long before he reaches a state of pure terror. Every few minutes, he raises his head from the pillow to listen for ghosts. The wind, starting up again, is a waif begging to be let inside. The sensor light turns on and off, and footsteps cross the porch. The clothes he flung over the door become a figure which then squats atop his chest, an incubus about to choke or penetrate him mercilessly, before inserting one of its long fingers up his nose.
A single flash of lightning illuminates the bedroom and is gone.
A shock of rain lands on the roof.
The house begins to shake.
Crockery leaps from the shelves. The waif resumes her scratching at the window and the cottage’s foundations start to groan like something ancient waking from its sleep. In the hallway, the credenza disgorges books and ornaments, its broken shells. The child’s creepy painting dances from its hook above the table like a poltergeist and flies on owlish wings across the room. Jack hears voices. He hears things shattering. He shakes violently, clutching the doona around his vulnerable, naked body, which feels in this moment like the body of a child. Reaching his edge, he passes out.
The shaking stops. Returning to consciousness, he recovers his will enough to disengage from the foetal position and leap out of the bed. He dresses quickly and begins to run around the house gathering up his things, shoving books and food and toiletries into bags and sprinting out to the car, looking over his shoulder the whole time. He curses the lack of reception and thinks that if he’s murdered or possessed, no one will ever find him. Insensible with fear he jumps into the driver’s seat, shoves the Suby into gear and fangs it back to the road.
But the ordeal is not quite over. As the wine, dope and adrenaline compete in his system he speeds through Portsea and Sorrento, where everyone has gone to bed. He feels like the last man on earth in Blairgowrie, passing eerie shopfronts and parked cars. In Rye the rain hits, burying his windscreen underneath a sheet of silver. He aquaplanes just as a cop car pulls out from a side street, tailing him for a kilometre before disappearing down another road. In his terror he pictures losing control of the car and crashing into the bay. He begins composing frantic messages to his loved ones – Diana and their daughters, Elizabeth, even Graham. He drives recklessly for he doesn’t know how long.
It is not until Jack reaches the city fringe that he switches on the radio and takes a few deep breaths. There has been an earthquake. Not a big one – only 2.7 on the Richter scale. He pulls into the emergency lane, stills the Suby’s engine, finds his phone and calls Elizabeth.
ACT V
She picks up on the first ring. He can hear a party in the background and the sounds of music, talking, tinkling glasses.
‘What time is it? Are you okay?’
‘Elizabeth – oh my god.’
‘There’s been an earthquake!’ she exclaims. ‘Some glasses smashed and now we’re all excited. Did you feel it?’
‘I’m sitting on the side of the freeway. Where are you?’
‘What, why? I’m at a party, remember – Martina is leaving JLM. I can’t hear you … hold on while I go outside.’
A truck passes and its headlights sweep the car. Jack is reminded of the single flash of lightning, his terror at the cottage, what he did with Hannah’s photo. He can’t believe that he – who does not believe in ghosts, except as a theatrical device – failed to recognise the earthquake as a natural phenomenon and convinced himself that he was being haunted. There is a hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach which he understands is shame.
