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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780702246272 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Queensland Press |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2011 |
| Sold by: | INDEPENDENT PUB GROUP - EPUB - EBKS |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 778 KB |
About the Author
Kathleen Stewart is the author of eight novels, including Ordinary Affects, Spilt Milk, and Waiting Room and two collections of poetry. Her memoir The After Life was short-listed for the Nita B. Kibble Award.
Read an Excerpt
Men of Bad Character
By Kathleen Stewart
University of Queensland Press
Copyright © 2010 Kathleen StewartAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7022-4627-2
CHAPTER 1
Mr Hyde
Gary Gravelly wasn't the most likely person for me to have fallen madly in love with. Mad swooning love was never part of my plan. He was someone whose name and face I knew vaguely, who'd crossed my path from time to time, a scruffy figure nowadays in his trainers and tracksuit, a sad-faced fellow who always managed to flash me a friendly smile.
One slow Sunday afternoon he fell into step with me, startling me from my reverie, as I was heading from the city up Oxford Street. As I stepped off the curb he gave me a pallid smile that briefly illumined his face, and I realised who he was and even his name hovered in my mind for a moment, so familiar I might have known him, and suddenly it was as if David was alongside me muttering, 'It's that fuckwit, Gravelly.'
I glanced backwards at him, and met his dark eyes for a moment, and then I stepped out a little faster in my high heels, as if I was going somewhere, meeting someone perhaps.
He was a tall man with longish straight dark hair that hung lankly now, obscuring his hollowed cheeks, and though I remembered him as someone who generally sported a broad smile and an even tan, his skin was pale and sallow and unshaved. He'd had the physique of a body builder back in the early nineties, or whenever it was that David used to point him out to me, and had seemed rather pleased with himself, but these days he was lean and hunched, smaller in every aspect, even shorter somehow.
David never worked out, being above such concerns, but he exercised his charm on every person he encountered out in the world, not bothering so much, once he had me snagged, with me. Which was why it was so difficult for all the others who had known him to accept that he was capable of such a thing. It was hard enough for me, and I had always known on some level that he was quite another man.
I was waiting for the traffic lights to change. I was going to the cinema that day, I think. I'd forgotten about Gary Gravelly, so that I was unpleasantly startled again, as if by a passing ghost, when he leant towards me, brushing against my shoulder as he did so, and said softly, so softly I wasn't sure he'd spoken, 'I've heard of your troubles.'
I shook his gaze off and smiled politely and carried on walking and to my surprise he kept his stride steady so that he walked alongside me, as doggedly close as if he was my shadow, all the way up Oxford Street. It felt odd to have a man alongside, as if we were companions, off for an outing together, and it felt soothing also, briefly.
Unlike most other people, he did not press me for details, for which I felt a surprising gratitude. His continued silence as we waited at the lights at Taylor Square seemed to say he understood. He left me then, with a pleasant wave, and I forgot about the incident, for it was nothing more than a brief run-in with a distant acquaintance, and my mind was cobwebbed with other thoughts.
My husband, David Flower, had gone away. He had often been a ghostly presence in our marriage, travelling lengthily on business for the various companies he'd represented, so that I was sometimes not entirely sure he'd gone for good. I opened the door to his study then, or his wardrobe, to be certain. Empty. As I'd thought. Still, each time it was a shock, and the world about me quivered and shook and the house seemed to move uncertainly left to right, and back again on its stumps. In the queer silence that followed, it seemed to me that he'd gone as suddenly and irrevocably as if he'd just dropped dead in the kitchen one day, or keeled over in the shower.
'It would have been easier in some ways if he had died,' Fleur remarked at my first appointment, when I wept through the entire hour I'd been allotted and then a further twenty minutes that didn't belong to me.
I thought about it for a moment, the damp earth, his family and friends gathered about the grave. There would be condolence cards and flowers and discreetly timed visits and I would have a new black dress, in a simple shape, silk or taffeta, I thought. Fleur nodded and pushed the box of tissues closer.
I began seeing her when the shock of David sent me sideways from my body, when I would find myself in the shower with no knowledge of getting in, crying and staring at my hands as if from far away.
'It's panic,' Fleur said. 'Dissociative states are common in panic. Children do this sort of thing when they can't cope. It's called spectatoring.'
At that first appointment she drew me a little map of the stages of loss and said, 'You're going to be on a roller-coaster for some time.'
I stared at the piece of paper and back at her, and waited for her diagnosis. I trusted her, with her soft understanding smile and her eyes that were a shade of cornflower blue, and the calm accepting steadiness of her gaze.
'You're not going mad,' she said gently. 'Your grief is normal, and you're very frightened. However, I believe that, like me, you suffer from JPN disorder.'
'JPN?' I said. 'What's that?'
'Just plain nuts,' she said gravely. We were both still laughing as she walked me back up the hall.
When I got home I pinned the diagram onto the fridge door with a coloured magnet. I often stood there and studied it, for reassurance. At the very top Fleur had drawn a stick-figure woman, with her mouth open and her hair flying, riding a wavy line. Oh, no! she shouted. Oh, shit, yes.
So there I was, by the fridge, in my rubber gloves, staring into nothingness. I was forty-three now and a little tired beneath the eyes, even before the shock. I must somehow remember how to live, I thought. Doing the dishes seemed a reasonable start. But time expanded in that house, it dripped and trickled down the walls. I might have been dreaming, I might have been caught up in the undertow of a nightmare – and would I be dreaming of my daily life, or trapped in a nightmare, if that creak in the hallway was David walking back in?
It began some time in our first years together, a strange sense of foreboding that I could not shake from me by telling myself it must be the weather. There was a summer back then when it rained heavily for months and the city grew green and fetid with heat and mould. I told myself it was my nature to be anxious. But there was something not quite right, I knew it sharply then. I was always sniffing the air. It was later, much later, I began to look for it, to try to find out what it was. I cracked the password on his computer only months before the walls fell down.
Some time in our second year, we moved over by the harbour, and the foreboding moved in with me. It would hit me at the oddest moments, as I was waiting for a bus, as I was returning with the shopping, so that I entered the flat with trepidation, so that I waited as the rooms darkened, feeling he would not come home, that something awful must have happened to him, or that something awful was about to happen to me for daring to feel happy. I gathered my courage one night and I asked him if he was seeing other women. The words were difficult to say, brittle in my mouth, and I found myself stiffly posed in our living room, one hand resting on the television, like a bad actress flinging accusations in a soap. He laughed and assured me I was completely off the track. He held his arms out in a familiar posture that called me to him, and hugged me consolingly. Nothing could be further from the case, he said.
I would forget about it for months, and then the feeling of foreboding was more intense on each return. My skin would crawl at night, and I would wake and listen, lying in the dark for hours until my eyes adjusted to the dimness, thinking, thinking, running over small occurrences. I laugh now when I think of all the innocuous things I imagined it might be, that filled me with dread, that burrowed through my dreams. We moved house half a dozen more times over the years, the action seeming to settle the nightdread, though the moving itself I found unsettling. Sometimes it felt as if we were on the run from something, the way I'd been throughout my childhood. My mother used to say, crouching down beside me to hiss it, as if the walls had ears and might tell if we weren't careful, Your father is a very dangerous man.
The nagging thoughts, the niggling worry-feeling disappeared for a few years, and then it returned. I searched and I searched and I could not find the answer. I searched my box of memories as I lay awake at night, and when David went on one of his trips I searched the sunroom, where he kept his files, and later the gloomy spare room in our last house, where his computer sat like a throbbing eye. Periodically, as if from affection, David told me I was crazy; and on those occasions when I'd snapped when he was far away, as I stood in his room, sweaty from my exertions, with nothing to show for my suspicions, I told myself I must be going mad. I could laugh that off; I didn't seriously believe that, though some days the whole world felt unsafe – but that, I told myself, is precisely what it is.
Something was wrong, something was hidden. It nagged at me, I could not uncover it, and so I buried it – just as I'd buried my fear of his anger, after that first year.
There was a patch of time when it left me completely, and then those last few years when I had no time for it, no matter how softly it pattered and scratched about the doors, when I pushed it roughly from me as something unanswerable, no matter that I had for those years a headache all the time. In what would turn out to be our final year together I gave in to it. It took nothing, a sort of breath on my shoulder, something pulling at my attention as I passed from the kitchen to the lounge, carrying something perhaps from the fridge. I would stop whatever I was doing and then, not caring that I was invading my husband's privacy, relentlessly search and search. Coats, pockets, spaces behind wardrobes, through papers, books, computer files and discs; and boxes and boxes of film stock, mastertapes and old beta videos that he was in the process of transferring to CDs or DVDs, or into the bowels of his computer, that I could only examine the outsides of and then stack back on their shelves. There were mounds of stuff to search through, dispiriting, and in the odd light of his workroom I felt as if I was pawing my way through piles of rubbish and decay. David was tidy in his appearance, sleek and polished as a seal, but things being beneath him, he never troubled to put anything properly away. Even so, I was careful to leave things as I'd found them. After such feverish searches I would feel foolish and yet satisfied, and calm, very calm and rather happy for a time. It was like a drug that held: there is nothing there, I told myself in this new happiness, it is only my anxiety looking for its name.
I was temping for a publishing company now, which had its moments, ensconced three days a week. Permanent part-time, I think they said; but something about it being in an office, something to do with the airconditioning perhaps, as Pinky said, made it seem more like six. Temping was good, because I was never anywhere unbearable for too long, and it was bad, because I had to wear pantihose usually. My ideal job was vague: working with animals? Only I was allergic to cats and scared of large dogs. Something involving filing, but not so much that your head started to explode. Something that did not require me to answer phones, smile at strangers, or wear any colour pantihose.
Publishing was full of women, young slender women given positions well above their abilities – absolutely no experience must have been what the job descriptions said – and older women who did all the work. I was an older woman, though I felt young and slim inside. We older women sat at our desks developing health problems and applied ourselves to all the tasks that made the company run, while the slender girls and the men who planned to sleep with them swept smiling down the carpeted corridors, or dawdled about like butterflies.
I was thrilled to be employed in such an industry; at my age and skill level, I was thrilled to be employed at all. But the work tired me beyond measure, or else I was just exhausted from losing it all – all the certainties, the dull and the satisfying, of a regular life. Half a dozen times a day I fled my cubicle and hid in the toilets, resting my head against the wall. Sometimes I caught the wrong train home, stepped off wearily and waited and retraced my journey, and then found myself speeding out to unknown stations on another unstoppable express. I came home eventually, kicked off the burning shoes and the clutching pantihose and slipped into my pyjamas, and wondered how I would do it all the next day and the next; and then, after a drearily healthy dinner, I saw my life stretch out before me, regardless of what was on the television, all the quiet uneasy hours.
Keeping occupied was essential, and of course soon there would be yet more bills coming in, in waves, all of them bearing our names linked, as they had been all these years – his name quivering on the page like some horrible worm, no matter how many times I phoned and asked for it to be removed – but only I was left there, the house shifting queasily about me, to pay for it all.
David was at art school when I first met him. He'd been an accountant, a diving instructor. He'd done a bit of everything it seemed to me and, although he was a good ten years older than the other students, now he was doing what he'd always wanted to do, making highly disconcerting experimental short films. 'Examining societal taboos,' he explained on our first official date, the day after I'd slept with him, pushed too soon by him, acquiescing too easily, as I was prone to do.
A pattern was set up the first time I lay back on the floor and his silky length penetrated me. I knew it at the time, I regretted it. I wept there on the carpet beside him after, while he slept on solidly till dawn. He was camping out on a friend's living room floor then; his sleeping bag had been pushed aside in the exertions of the moment, and was caught up under him.
It should have been a one-night stand, I muttered viciously now as I shoved the vacuum across the Chinese rug. It was all there, all laid out that night how it was going to be – his way – for eighteen years.
'Eighteen,' I'd wept at Fleur last session. 'How could I have been so stupid?'
'Perhaps you needed that hiatus,' she offered.
That was her job, in between the soothing and the clear-eyed listening, to say things that surprised.
'An eighteen-year hiatus?'
'Yes,' she said simply, and folded her hands.
Regardless, I had gone with him, smiling, into our bright future. I was casting around then, not very enthusiastically, for some sort of job that wouldn't drain me of my ability to write; I was trying to put another manuscript together that first year, but I was too confused by happiness to concentrate. I learned how to cook instead. David was raising eyebrows and garnering attention from the senior lecturers on his course. How he'd ended up as a sales rep was something we didn't discuss. Someone has to be practical, he'd say and cut me off.
I'd had no idea how much he'd resented me all those years, but looking back it was obvious. I'd seen it, felt it, but I hadn't wanted to interpret what I perceived as fact. So I didn't believe it, while waves of something unnerving emanated from him and flowed out through the house, passing through walls. Sometimes though, feeling rebellious, I gave him the forks with savage abandon, while standing in another room.
He'd always claimed he didn't want me to worry about work. We don't need the money, he'd say. By all means take the job, but only if you want to. My money seemed like pin money, or play money that evaporated, and my contributions to the running of the household like some sort of play he indulged me in. But I did contribute, I bought all the groceries, and I bought all the furniture, as he wasn't interested in that sort of mundane thing, and I did all the cleaning and running of the place, like a fifties housewife or a personal maid. I had no idea how much he resented all of it until he was faced with leaving it, and he stalked into the kitchen and flung open the cupboard below the sink and said, incorrectly, You've spent all my money on cleaning products!
He was angry when he realised that I'd bought all the manchester too, and I did not say you won't be needing bedding where you're going, as he was convinced then he'd charm them into giving him bail and then I suppose he thought he'd leave the country. He surveyed the house and sniffed like a dog spoiling for a fight and then he said, in an accusing voice, with this face like a madman's, You've set this all up, haven't you? As if it was all down to me, and the attempts I'd made to make a home for us had been part of some plot I'd been hatching all those years. He went and sat on the front verandah smoking, and I could feel his fury swirling around him like black smoke, like oily water, and I went out and when I came back ten hours later I realised with a thud of horror that he was still sitting there in the darkness, oozing malevolent fury in dark waves.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Men of Bad Character by Kathleen Stewart. Copyright © 2010 Kathleen Stewart. Excerpted by permission of University of Queensland Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Cover,Title Page,
Mr Hyde,
The Other Man,
The Dark Mirror,
The Other Man's Wife,
The Haunting of Rose Andersen,
Heathcliff,
Dorian Gravelly,
Rebecca,
Mr Rochester,
Cheri,
Mr Wrong,
The Invisible Man,
Vertigo,
Miss Havisham,
Mrs Jekyll,
Gloomy Sunday,
The Psychic Hairdresser,
Black Beauty,
The Woman in White,
Thrushcross Grange,
The Two Mrs Gary,
Bonjour Tristesse,
Good Morning, Midnight,
Bride of Fabio,
Anna Karenina,
The Mirror Crack'd,
Copyright,