Читать книгу Walter - Ashley Sievwright - Страница 9

By the time Walter went to bed his mood had lifted slightly. His car had been broken into, sure, but it was now safely in the garage. His credit cards and licence had been stolen, but he had put a halt on them all and was getting new ones. Soon the car window would be fixed, the interior of the car cleaned. Tomorrow morning the garbage would be collected and the clothes he had worn that day would be gone, and with them any possible remnants, any last whiff of that smell would be gone also.

He lay there straight and still in bed, the sheet folded neatly over the top of the doona, his arms outside the covers, his hands folded together on his stomach.

Maggie was in the ensuite bathroom. She was humming a tune and obviously in good humour for some reason. Walter wasn’t really able to follow her moods much any more, but if she was humming it was a good sign and he was content with that. It added to his general lift in mood.

All he had to do now, Walter thought, was put that man and his ridiculous warning out of his mind. Don’t get on the next train. Walter lay there, thinking about it. Pondering. It wasn’t the warning that bothered him so much, it was his reaction. He had really behaved most incalculably, being so rattled by that silly warning. Safe in bed, calm and tightly tucked in, he thought back to his stick-insect-like indecision that morning on the platform, but he thought about it ruefully and without any heat in his cheeks. It was more, Walter knew, than just what the man had said, as unexpected as that was, it was the location in which he had said it—a train platform, with a train pulling up in front of them, the noise and the wind along the platform, the sensations. He had to hold himself in, as it were, especially tight when the train came in along the platform like that, even on a normal day, but he had been doing so well for so long now. He thought he was over all that, over, at any rate, the more overt symptoms. So perhaps his response, his behaviour, his reaction was not so incalculable, given the circumstances. Still slightly disappointing though.

Then his thoughts meandered off in another direction.

Funny. If it wasn’t for that man and his warning, he would never have driven to work, and none of the stuff with the car would have happened …

But before he could think more along these or any other lines, Maggie came out of the bathroom. Her face was glistening and moist with cream. She wore an old, thin, too-big t-shirt and actually, Walter thought, looked quite sexy in a daggy, not-trying type way, with her hair up in a messy bun and her face all dewy and glistening.

*

Maggie turned off the ensuite light with her elbow and took a step towards the bed, then suddenly stopped dead and made a half-laugh sound in her nose. Walter, she thought— look at him! Up and down, straight as a rod, tucked in neat and tidy and snug as a bug in a rug. What a sight. Suddenly, with a pang of surprise, she remembered how she had once found his sheer asexuality sexually attractive. It was a perversion of response she hadn’t experienced for some time and it delighted her, in and of itself, but also because she was glad she still had the capacity to feel it.

‘Comfortable?’ she asked in a light, teasing tone.

Walter looked nonplussed.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Why?’

‘No reason,’ she smiled and continued over towards the bed.

*

Not very much later that night Walter and Maggie were having sex. It wasn’t very exciting sex, perhaps, being as it was missionary position and strictly by the book, but it was sex all the same. It had been Maggie who had initiated it. Usually it was these days. She had been the one to initiate it their first time together, and that’s how it had been for most of their sexual life, apart from that brief honeymoon period when they were first married and Walter, well, lost his head really, with the whole idea of sex-on-tap. But after a while it had seemed only natural to Walter that he take his sexual-Greenwich-Time from her. When the opportunity arose, he was not one to say no.

Unfortunately Walter was unable to stop thinking about, of all things, Mick and the new guy at the office, and the silly conversation they had earlier that day in the kitchenette, the conversation about the odds of dying. They had asked, after the car accident odds, for another go. Mick had asked this, saying that ‘car accident’ was too simple, too easy. He wanted something more unusual, he said, something that would be harder, more of a challenge for Walter, something like autoerotic asphyxiation.

Walter was instantly sure that this was what they’d had in mind all along, that they had possibly even discussed asking this exact thing before they came to the kitchenette. Aware as he was that it was exactly the reaction they were hoping for, he was unable to stop himself from giving it—he blushed furiously.

‘We don’t … we don’t have st-stat-statistics for that kind of …’ Not only had he blushed, he also stuttered and stammered and left his sentence unfinished. His reaction was extreme and beyond his control, and obviously highly amusing to Mick and the new guy.

‘What’s that?’ the new guy asked Mick innocently—not very convincingly.

‘You know,’ Mick answered. ‘Choking yourself to make your orgasm more, you know,’ he made a fist, ‘intense.’

‘You’re kidding me. Does it work?’

‘Oh yeah mate. Yeah. Bit of pressure on the carotid—is it the carotid, Walter? And you’re off like a cracker, mate. Every time. Guarantee it!’

‘Come on fellas,’ Walter tried. ‘Come on … that’s enough …’

In bed, having sex with his wife, Walter squinted his eyes, concentrated on his thrusts and tried to think about something else, someone else, not Mick, not the new guy and not autoerotic strangulation, but he couldn’t help it. He kept seeing flashes of naked men with a stocking tied around their scrotum, hanging by the neck from closet doorknobs in anonymous hotel rooms. It was at this point that underneath him Maggie began to moan more convincingly. Apparently she was starting to enjoy herself—finally.

He couldn’t help himself, couldn’t help flashing back to one final thing from earlier in the day. He was back at his desk, his blush had subsided after the kitchenette episode and his breathing was returning to normal, but after a second or two he heard them, heard Mick and the new guy in the kitchenette. Whispering? No, not whispering. What was it? He cocked his ear and listened harder. Then he realised what it was—a soft, furtive, sound coming from the kitchenette—they were laughing at him.

With a grunt of extra effort he successfully blacked the whole kitchenette experience from his mind and coincidentally brought his wife to orgasm.

*

That night Walter had the dream again. He woke with a small cry and sat bolt upright in bed, a sheen of sweat over him. Maggie was awake beside him and manoeuvring herself up on one elbow. She said nothing, just watched him, too bleary eyed and tired to display any particular expression.

‘OK OK,’ Walter said. He got out of bed and padded across the carpet. Maggie re-settled herself under the covers.

Walter went to his study and clicked on the light. It was a single uncovered bulb in the centre of the ceiling, and it illuminated a room that was very Walter. There was a bookshelf against one wall with mostly non-fiction books, history books, biographies of political or wartime leaders, a set of encyclopaedias, other random reference books and a large number of back-issues of National Geographic. It was an incredibly tidy bookcase. Along the other wall was a desk with an upright PC, monitor, keyboard, mouse and printer. There were also, just like his desk at work, various stationery items laid out as if rigidly spaced—pens in a plastic holder, magic-tape, stapler. Otherwise there was nothing—no pictures on the wall, no pin-board of postcards, no standard lamp for a more subdued lighting option, no wastepaper basket, no mess to put in one, no coffee cups, no slippers kicked off under the desk. It was so sparsely furnished, so tidy, and in the glare of the bare bulb so flat, that it looked like a trompe l’oeil painting of a room rather than a real room. In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, Walter found his study comforting.

He sat down at his desk heavily, as usual straight-backed and flat-footed, ran his hands through his hair, damp with sweat, then rubbed at his eyes and temples with the heel of each hand. He took a deep breath and blew it out noisily, through his lips, like a horse. He felt … how did he feel? His heart was beating quicker for a start. He could feel it, feel the pump of blood in his neck and the inside of his elbows. He let it go for a while, just sat there and felt the foom-foom of his blood, sat with it until it quietened down. When that had happened he got up and went across to the bookcase. He drew his forefinger across a number of the spines, none of them cracked or broken, of course, all aligned perfectly with the edge of the shelves, until he found what he was looking for—a small book, smaller than most of the rest, slimmer. He took the book out and held it for a moment. It was the size of a small paperback, covering almost exactly his palm and extended fingers, where he let it sit for a moment, as if he took comfort in the weight and size of it. He then flicked through the book with one thumb, fanning the pages carefully. He could smell the paper, the slightly chemical smell of bleached stock, an unusual smell, stronger than the smell of his other books. The pages, blurred as he fanned them, were not printed thickly with paragraphs of text but instead contained tables, lists and numbers in a regular, generic font, widely spaced. It did not look or smell like something that was commercially printed and distributed for sale. It wasn’t. It was published by a group that called itself the National Australian Committee for Safety and it contained statistics for each and every recorded death in Australia between Federation and the current year. The title on the front of the book was The Odds of Dying. In short, it predicted how Australian people would die.

Walter didn’t have to look it up. He already knew that the odds of dying in a train crash were one in sixty five thousand eight hundred and seventy. He couldn’t work out whether that number seemed like a little or a lot.

*

The next morning Walter was back on the Wintergardens train platform waiting for the 7.15am express. It was Thursday so he was wearing his Thursday suit—navy, three button jacket, double vent, single pleated pants, 40% off, but almost six years ago now. He would have to go to a menswear store at some point and replace Wednesday’s suit—charcoal, three button jacket, single vent, flat front pant—the one he’d thrown in the bin the previous day. He carried his briefcase and also had the daily newspaper, rolled in plastic, under his arm. There was no sun-shower that morning. The temperature was mild enough and the sky blue, so he did not carry an umbrella.

Again there was the motley assortment of his Wintergardens fellow commuters around him. Some of them carried papers and briefcases, or laptops, the occasional one a backpack, or a packed lunch in a plastic bag, leftovers perhaps in a Tupperware container.

Some smoked, but not under the covered areas of the platform where it was not allowed. Some talked on mobile phones or listened to their ipods.

Walter looked up and down the platform, looking for the man who had spoken to him the previous day, but there was no sign of him. Not that he could remember what the man looked like, not really. He was older, Walter remembered that, maybe edging towards sixty, with grey hair, an ordinary sort of face, clean-shaven. Walter found he couldn’t remember details. He felt sure he’d recognise him if he saw him again, but he wasn’t sure he could accurately describe him, which was unexpected and a little unnerving.

Even though he’d only done it one minute ago, he looked at the platform clock. It was 7.14am. Then he looked down the tracks. No train. He double-checked the time on his wristwatch. It was correct and the train was late again.

Walter juggled the newspaper out from underneath his arm, took it out of the plastic wrapping, which he discarded in a nearby bin, then set his briefcase between his feet, shook the newspaper open, bent the kinks out of it and looked at the front page. The headline gave him a nasty jolt. KNIFE ATTACK ON CROWDED TRAIN.

Walter scanned the story quickly. Apparently the previous morning a young man with a knife had lashed out at commuters on a packed peak-hour train. The attack had been random and unprovoked, although many commuters interviewed afterwards said the young man had appeared to be nervous. One witness had said he looked ‘off his nut’. The young man had been subdued by a number of commuters who exited the train with him at North Melbourne and handed him over to station security who held him until the police arrived. The story seemed to end, but there was more, Walter saw, on page three. He turned to page three.

‘Which train?’ he asked the newspaper.

He read on. Six people sustained injuries and one man was taken to hospital where he later died. The names of the victims and suspect were not reported.

Then he saw it. The knife attack had happened yesterday on the 7.15am express train from Wintergardens to the City—his train.

Don’t get on the next train, the man had said, and if it weren’t for that warning Walter would have been on that train, his regular train, and he could even have been in the carriage, the one with the man with the knife. Possibly. Why not? Pressed in, packed in like a sardine right near this young man who attacked unprovoked, lashed out with a knife. He could perhaps have been one of the people injured. He could have been that man, the one whose name they hadn’t released, the man taken to hospital where he later died.

Walter gave a start and crumpled the newspaper between his hands. The train had pulled into the station and the sudden noise of it, the wind around his knees, had surprised him out of all proportion. He smoothed the newspaper, folded it, put it under his arm and picked up his briefcase. The warning beeps sounded, the train doors were opened by passengers from inside, a couple of people stepped off, then those waiting began filing on. In a few seconds it was his turn and he stepped onto the carriage in a determined, stolid way, as if holding himself very tight and focussed. He found a seat and sat there rigid and well-arranged, his briefcase square on his lap, his newspaper neatly folded and square on top of that. His face was fixed.

Taken to hospital, he was thinking, where he later died. The phrase chilled him. The death bit, certainly, but even the first part— taken to hospital. He didn’t like hospitals. He didn’t want to have anything to do with hospitals. Not after last time. Not much had been wrong with him then, not really, not physically; nothing that wouldn’t mend at home, but they’d kept him there, for observation they said. He’d hated it. It had been more than just the smell of the place, the smell of sickness partially disguised by disinfectant and a sort of chemical smell which he thought of as the scent of medicine, it was also the attention he received from the staff, many of whom came to look at him, just look at him—OK, examine him, they said—as if he was something odd and unexpected and out of the way. He didn’t need examining. There was nothing wrong with him, nothing special about him, nothing to observe. There had been others too, outsiders, reporters, one time a man with a camera, although he was escorted off very quickly. Paparazzi, Walter thought, and he thought it as he would have said it, with an intonation of irony, of ridicule, of distaste, and of pure disbelief that he, Walter Kovak, should be hounded by paparazzi.

Behind these thoughts on hospitals and paparazzi, like an incongruous soundtrack, Walter could hear the sound of the train, rickety-clack, rickety-clack. Nobody else in the carriage heard the sound. Of course they did, but they didn’t notice it as Walter did. He heard it all the time, listened for it, heard it in his head perhaps louder than it really was. Rickety-clack, rickety-clack, like the foom-foom of his pulse.