The Whistler by Stephanie Johnson

Author:Stephanie Johnson [Stephanie Johnson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781775530244
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand
Published: 2013-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

8

OUTSIDE AND AWAY

‘Beside Brook Cedron I fell,’ concludes Vernon, ‘my last image of that life being the whirling, ravenous vultures.’

There is a soft, deep silence. Vernon peers with his poor eyes into the crowd of children. Does he expect applause? The act of bringing one’s hands together again and again in appreciation is not instinctive, audiences learn to do so from the time they are children sitting among adults in the concert hall, theatre, or stadium. These midgets have had no such experience.

From the floor issues a soft snore: Liban, her moist lower lip gleaming, her face in blessed repose, rocked to sleep on the chest of Pidge. When she awakes, will she be his enemy still? Their intimacy is one of warring puppies, fallen with exhaustion into a remembered, mutual truce at the nipple.

Though I cannot see the other children, from their slowed breathing and smell of sleep I deduce all are dreaming. Was it the tedium of the story that did it, a story they could not possibly understand? Or perhaps the hypnotic quality of my boy’s voice. He tells stories in his boy’s voice still, though his answering voice is sometimes a man’s. The short, easily traversed responses come first in that register. I have first-hand knowledge of this from my life as Neville of New Zealand—an extraordinary life, particularly for me who lived it, because it was the one time my soul was transposed to a higher key and I existed as a man. Like Jesus, I knew it only the once, the single human experience …

But I will not remember it now. I will simply plant the tantalising seed of recall in my mind and in dull moments extend my Whistler’s proboscis, figuratively, to lick and pick, to tease the story out, to make a sore of it. Neville of New Zealand—what an extraordinary metamorphosis it was.

Vernon, then, is a failure as Gamemaker. The children will wake, each with a different broken dream circulating in his head, and each dream fervently believed by the dreamer to be the story Vernon told. Perhaps some of the dreams will be played out, one day.

The idea strikes us both, suddenly, that this would be an opportune time to depart, to make our way back to the street. We ease off Zoe’s spinal chair, Vernon holding me against him with his bad arm, the other levering us off the bed to land, louder than we would have liked.

There is a sudden rearrangement of shadowy limbs at our feet: Pidge, standing carefully, smoothly, so as not to wake Liban. He gathers up the blue sports bag, lies her sleeping head gently on the floor, holds a finger to his lips and takes Vernon’s arm. The dark door to Zoe’s ante-theatre looms, a darker rectangle in the soft fuzz of the heavy air. Out of it looms a figure, shaking something out, a towel. It is Pidge’s brother. As he goes back inside we see there is a light glowing in the room, one of the tapers, brought through from the operating theatre.

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