THERE WERE men past sixty who had seen a lot – their interestingly mangled appearances. Some had been through hell in Europe or up in the islands, and God knows how many marriage break-ups. Others had endured economic hardship, rural and urban. Did experience of strange and difficult countries make a difference? Some had fled for their lives. Men otherwise living quietly had lost wives, children, brothers before their own parents. Surely they’d have news.
Being a witness to death, or almost death, or to suffering – at least to be in the vicinity of extremes – would perhaps reveal the occasional truth not available in ordinary life.
These were Wesley’s thoughts, obscurely felt, back then.
At St Vincent’s Hospital he got a job as a porter. It was not hard work. The doctors and nurses took their rapid strides. Brown lino shining. His job was to deliver crutches, and wheel patients along corridors and into cavernous lifts to be x-rayed or operated on. In these circumstances, women were willing and easier to talk to than the horizontal men, who all looked as if they were severely wounded in battle and reaching out for the cigarette.
Between shifts the porters sat outside on the concrete, white coats undone, and smoked and drank tea, and stared down at their shoes. In broad daylight they were a pale, blotchy, weary-looking bunch. One of them might announce the price of a haircut had gone up. No reply, just the faint sound of cigarettes being dragged on. Opinions on politicians and football results were delivered without pity, without expecting a reply. A heavy unsmiling man did most of the talking. His name sounded like Sheldrake. Early on, he turned to Wesley, sitting on one side. ‘What have you got to say for yourself ?’ A heavy presence, bald, except for a ring of yellowish hair, the way corn soup has overflowed a saucepan – as if his head could keep only a certain amount of information. He introduced topics. That very morning he was pushing into a lift and a wheel fell off his trolley, almost tipping out an old woman, which hardly rated a nod, since it had happened at one time to each of them. Did you know there was not one but two conspiracies to shoot President Kennedy? In the Navy they’ve now got women going down in submarines. Have you ever heard anything so fucking ludicrous? When it came to the nurses, the Irish ones, and from there to women in general, the tone was detailed, vehement and dismissive, the idea being to gain wry agreement.
Seated on his bar stool like a tennis umpire, this man Sheldrake waited for them to bat a conversation back and forth. The strong suggestion was they were not fulfilling their potential. As he stared at one, then another, they in turn leaned back on their assorted cane, tubular steel or perforated plastic chairs, and if one of them did say something it was usually an entirely fresh topic.
Wesley’s chair was a wooden one. It had an uncomfortable dark-stained ordinariness, a nineteen fifties kitchen chair, and with it the memories of a certain Australian childhood, which didn’t concern Wesley but apparently put off some of the others. The day he arrived it had been the only one left, and he sat on it; he grew accustomed to the cobwebbed concrete and putting his feet up, always taking a position against the wall near a dripping tap. It was a lapse, a space. Traffic along Barcom Avenue, and farther away Oxford Street, rose and fell in a blurry regularity, as waves come forward and dissolve on a beach. And voices, faint.
It was while half-listening to the others there in the sun that Wesley decided to begin thinking in a less pedantic manner. And he should begin now before it was too late. He thought of his father and his stamps. By following Clive Renmark’s recommendation and first concentrating on the Greeks, he had moved on in regular stages to the Moderns, soaking up everything he could lay his hands on. The discoveries of each philosopher allowed each subsequent philosopher to climb up onto their shoulders, as if philosophy was a form of gymnastics, from where they could climb still higher, or at any rate lean out at an angle while still holding on. All his available time spent scaling the tremendous peaks of western thought had left Wesley with the uncomfortable feeling his own mind was dutiful, pedantic, unoriginal. Clearly it was because his studies had followed a chronological path. In his apartment the books and journals piled on shelves, on the floor, on his unmade bed pointed to a free-ranging, seriously unconventional mind at work. This was the harbour city where cars rust and pages of books fox. Wesley had taken to underlining and scribbling comments in the margins, and made ‘copious’, as Rosie next door liked to joke, notes. Already he had formed the habit of writing statements on scraps of paper and sticking them on walls and mirrors, so he could reconsider them.
Rosie Steig was impressed with his industry. Now and then Wesley would pause and rub his eyes in wonder. Other times he’d say, aloud, ‘I don’t think so.’ (‘All swans are white.’ Not where I come from!) It was enough for Rosie to lift her head. They were friends. If a book he required was out of print, and if he couldn’t pick up an old copy at one of the shops in Glebe, she happily borrowed for him at the Fisher Library.
Wesley was finding a gap existed between the clarity of his chosen subject, and the softer, unavoidable intrusions of everyday life.
Rosie Steig often came in and lay on the sofa and studied one of her many subjects, while he sat at his desk studying one subject, his cheeks pressed between his palms, like a stone face on the corner of an old building. Not even her ostentatious yawns broke his concentration.
From the sofa and hidden from him, Rosie called out, ‘What is her name? Mrs Something – what do you see in her?’
Virginia Kentridge was old enough to be his mother.
‘I’ll tell you tomorrow. Maybe next week.’
‘I want to know now.’
‘What is it you want to know exactly?’
Virginia Kentridge had none of Rosie’s casual generosity; hers was anxious. There was a restlessness in Virginia Kentridge, her impatient widow’s body, and the way she thought and spoke, different from his mother, or his sister even, more of a series of blinks – becoming for him a complicating factor. Sometimes he noticed when she spoke she appeared not to be talking to him at all.
Standing before him, she pointed out how her skin was smooth, look, stomach nicely flattish, and – ‘Don’t you like them?’ Because of his studies he had become solemn, silent, single-minded. He was always somewhere else. As a consequence, she didn’t want him working in the hospital, especially since he didn’t need to work at all. ‘Have you washed your hands? I don’t want you coming near me, if you haven’t.’
In the bathroom one night, Wesley found Virginia weeping. She had noticed the first grey pubic hair; no amount of reasonable words comforted her. When he later told Rosie she looked up and said, ‘Poor Virginia.’
Working in the hospital he could think about the philosophical problems he had encountered that very morning. But the wards and the corridors, the chirpy, red-nosed nurses, and the patients in their helplessness, represented the close-by world, only more so. It wasn’t only the regular sight of stoicism.
On a Thursday he arrived as usual with his mug of tea at the concrete courtyard to see the heavy talkative one had taken his chair – not just sitting on it, sitting in that fat-arsed, over-casual way. Antill went across and while the man was talking pulled the chair out from under him. In the struggle Sheldrake fell onto the concrete and getting up was about to spring at Antill.
‘Whoa! Take it easy!’ – they were holding him back, as if he was a horse. ‘Here we are, slaving our guts out to save lives, and you two are trying to kill each other.’
It was a fight over a wooden chair, which Antill would later use to describe his struggle for a new philosophy.