The Custodians - Couverture souple

Jose, Nicholas

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1743312806 ISBN 13 : 9781743312803

Editeur : Allen & Unwin, 2012

Synopsis

Against the scarred landscape of contemporary Australia, eight childhood friends seek their individual destinies: Alex, ambitious but melancholy; Cleve, snatched by the state from his parents; Danny, his twin brother, who has spent more of his life in custody than free; Elspeth, the heiress seeking enlightenment; Jane, passionately committed to her art; Josie, dedicated to doing good; Wendy, in search of fun; and Ziggy, the brilliant actor. They are the custodians, but of what, and for whom? From the 1950s to the 1980s, from the South Australian outback to Manhattan's art world and the London stage, from tropical Queensland to Mao's China, The Custodians has an extraordinary reach. It is at once a startling and often comical novel about friendship, love, and betrayal, and an astounding story of struggle and history—a history which these eight characters must both embrace and transcend if they are to find reconciliation with the land to which they belong, but which does not belong to them. The Custodians is a triumph of storytelling, a sharp and moving epic from one of Australia's most acclaimed writers.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Nicholas Jose has published stories, essays, translations and four previous novels, including Paper Nautilus, Avenue of Eternal Peace, and The Rose Crossing, which has been translated into French, German, Chinese, and Japanese.

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

The Custodians

By Nicholas Jose

Allen & Unwin

Copyright © 1997 Nicholas Jose
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-74331-280-3

Contents

Part One: Eclipse, 
Daniel, 
Part Two: Out Across the Universe, 
Daniel II, 
Part Three: The Walls of China, 
Daniel III, 
Part Four: Inland Sea, 
Daniel IV, 
Part Five: The Morning-Star, 

CHAPTER 1

The children found it strange that the sun went dark, and I stranger still that the round silver moon could turn into a flat black disc, giving off no light of its own. In the pinhole camera a cartoon image of the moon was passing in slow motion across the sun. The schoolyard had descended into gloom, as if the sky were filled with dirty smoke from a great burning-off. Only Alex, when the teachers were not looking, stared directly at the real thing with his naked eye, until the moon let the sun erupt again from the other side with a paring of light so bright it would brand the retina forever. Jane and Wendy and Elspeth and Ziggy checked that Alex's gaze did not flinch from the celestial beings in the dance of their orbits. But when he turned to his friends, blinking wide, he could not see them at all. He saw only a fingernail of light burning against the sphere of total blackness.

'Are you blind?' asked Ziggy.

'No, no, I'm not. Only wait –'

'Tell us what you see,' demanded Jane. There was something strange about Alex. He covered his eyes with his hands while the others looked on in horror.

Then he peeped out through his fingers. 'I can see you,' he said.

'He's lying,' said Wendy.

'Alex, are you sure?' asked Elspeth.

'Of course I'm sure. You're Elspeth, aren't you? Ziggy. Wendy. Jane.' Alex laughed with relief. What the teachers had said was wrong. He had proved that you could look directly at a total eclipse of the sun if you wanted, if you believed no harm would come to 'You

'You're the winner then,' said Jane. 'What's your prize?'

'You can push me on the wheel as fast as it will go.'

So they spun him and spun him until he was dizzy and screaming for them to stop, and Mrs Hazlitt the school principal came over and told the children to behave.

When the wheel stopped turning, Alex fell to his knees in the dirt and put his head between his thighs to stop it spinning. The others stood in a circle around him. He looked up at them, then scraped the ground and held up a handful of the red playground dirt.

'There's another thing,' he bragged. 'You can eat dirt.'

'You can't,' laughed Jane.

'You can so,' insisted Alex. 'Dirt's no different from food.'

'Do it then,' said Wendy.

'Yuk!' groaned Elspeth. Alex was always so disgusting. He sat behind her in class and tied her plaits together. She had called him a bloody bugger.

'I will if you does,' offered Ziggy.

'Certainly not,' said Elspeth. 'You're mad!'

'I will if Alex does,' offered Ziggy.

'You'll get sick,' squealed Elspeth.

'You don't believe me,' said Alex. 'Well, here goes.'

'Dogs eat dirt when they get ill. When their noses go dry. To make themselves vomit,' said Wendy.

The capacity of all things to be turned upside down was palpable while the dirty brown light filled the sky: sun and moon, light and dark, poison and food, right and wrong. That was the dare Alex Mack had taken. That was the bet. He had a palm full of dirt from the circle where the wheel was turning. Sifting a little through his fingers, he held the dirt up so they could see. He picked out the stones. Then bending his head, he clapped his hand to his mouth. The dry dirt coated his tongue. He tried to swallow, but it clogged his throat. He kept his mouth closed, his palm empty save for a dusting where the dirt stuck to his skin. The others were shocked and impressed.

'Say Ah!' ordered Jane.

When Alex opened his mouth, they saw how the dirt had been swallowed down that pulsating red hole. He had tears in his eyes from the distaste of it. Like a comedian, he turned to walk away, only rolling back to say: 'Your turn, Ziggy.'

'Don't you dare, Ziggy!' protested Elspeth.

'You'll get foot-and-mouth disease,' said Jane.

'Very funny,' answered Alex. 'Go on, Ziggy,' he coaxed, scared suddenly by what he had done. He wanted someone else to join him.

'I won't let you,' said Elspeth.

Ziggy bent down and scooped up a small handful of dirt as gracefully as if he were picking a strawberry. He looked at what he held and screwed up his nose, then he tossed his red hair out of his eyes and bowed his head to his hand in silence.

'I won't look,' said Elspeth.

Ziggy put out his wet pink tongue and licked the dirt. Then he retched. He ran to the seat of the carousel and spewed, barking and spitting until every last grain of dirt was removed from his mouth.

'That's where dirt belongs,' announced Jane.

'It won't go down,' said Wendy.

Ziggy looked back at them over his shoulder as his body disgorged the same substance that Alex's had taken in. The girls were giggling. Ziggy laughed back.

Elspeth turned to Alex like a cross mother. 'Go and wash your mouth out, Alex Mack!'

Then the bell was ringing to end the day. The eclipse had swallowed up the afternoon.

The dogs in the suburban yards were barking more than usual as Alex walked home. He was not in a mood to be pestered. If he detoured to avoid the barking dogs, he could loop down the hill through the park and cross the railway line to the street of close-together houses of white stone and red brick, where people sat on their front porches watching the passers-by over low fences – and Josie Ryan lived.

Josie was so white she could not go out in the sun. On the day of the total eclipse, that summer of 1958, she stayed in the scented rooms of her house. There were too many children for the teachers at the Catholic school to manage. When she was outside, Josie had to cover up from top to toe in a long dress with floppy sleeves, long white socks and patent-leather shoes, gloves and a straw hat with a band of blue flowers. She lived with her fat freckled mother, Mrs Ryan, and another Mrs Ryan, her mother's mother, whose skin looked like it had been scribbled on and who, despite her white stick, knew everything that went on. After school, while Mrs Ryan Senior rocked on the porch with a cup of tea in her lap, the younger Mrs Ryan, whose name was Audrey, did her bets from the paper with a brown bottle of beer on a table beside her and Josie, running beads through her fingers, watched the street through the pruned crepe myrtle. Josie had two black spots on her white skin. No one knew what would happen if the sun did get her. One day she told Alex Mack that if she took her hat off in the sun, the spots would spread to cover her whole face.

Alex got the giggles as he walked past the house. The interior was dark, the lace curtains drawn, but you could look right through to the statue of the Virgin Mary that glowed against the fiery sunset.

Josie's grandmother asked who it was and Josie, giving a cross glance, said it was no one.

When Alex reached the railway crossing the boom gate was down. He listened for the train's roar. At the last moment he ducked under the bar and ran across the tracks and up the hill before the stationmaster could yell at him. Then he was home, slamming the back door shut.

His mother appeared in a white tennis dress, her face hot and pink with a blue band holding down her curly fair hair.

'Darling, your mouth's all green.'

'It's only snakes,' Alex said, pulling the sweet snake out of his mouth to watch it curl. At the corner shop he had bought three snakes – a green snake for himself, a red one to keep for Josie, and a yellow one to spare.

'I'll butter you a finger bun,' his mother said. 'Elspeth Gillingham says you were silly at school today. She says you ignored the warning not to look at the eclipse.'

'I heard what they said.'

'And you ignored it. You looked straight into the sun with your naked eye.'

'You don't have to believe Elspeth. Anyway nothing happened to me, Mum, did it?'

'Don't be a know-all, Alex. It's not nice.' She grinned at her smart little devil, then looked out the window at the lacy leaves and splendid blue daubs of the jacaranda across the lawn. She had made Barb Gillingham, Elspeth's mother, run to return her serve that afternoon. It was her way of welcoming her friend home – back in Adelaide from overseas, from Italy. Sometimes Clarice Mack's life seemed hollow in comparison with Barb's. But after beating Barb Gillingham at tennis, Clarice always felt good. 'Elspeth had some hits with us, Alex, when she got home from school. Where have you been? You should've come over. You could practise with her. Elspeth's a lovely girl.' His mother flashed him a complicit smile.

'She's a bossy-boots,' retorted Alex, swinging his legs under the chair.

'She's such a lovely girl,' cooed his mother. The Gillinghams had a tennis court and a swimming pool hemmed by petunias. No object inside their grand two-storey colonial box of a house failed to make a public statement. The Macks' rambling bungalow was more of an accumulation; the rooms faded when people left them. The Macks had to keep their own world going by themselves, and so it was that Clarice Mack imagined Barb Gillingham's daughter Elspeth with her hair ruffled by the wind leaning from the balcony to young Alex, who stood on the steps below with his hair combed and his know-all look on his face. 'You and Elspeth will make a lovely couple one day.'

'Yuk, Mum. She's taller than me. She's like a giraffe.'

'Pigs play with their food, you two,' Clarice scolded, taking a sip of her gin and tonic. Her husband Tim had not come home yet and the kids were eating so slowly that the rainbow icecream had melted into grey soup. She pulled off her sweaty head band and tossed out her curls, sighing at her daughter and son. 'Bedtime, children! Bedtime, Susan! Bedtime, Alex!'

By Alex's bedside his mother teased: 'Shall I go on with the story of the bride and groom? Elspeth and Alex? Mr and Mrs Mack Junior!'

'Stop it, Mum.'

He shuffled his head along the pillow until, pressing against her, he could smell her perfume and feel the rise and fall of her body's breathing. On the ceiling the cracks and shadows formed a giant spider.

'I spy with my little eye something beginning with E,' his mother was murmuring.

'I give up,' he said. He let himself float on the secure rhythm of her heartbeat.

'E for Eclipse,' she replied, circling his eyes with her index finger. 'We'll have to get Dr Gillingham to test your eyes. But we won't tell Dad when he gets home, will we?'

* * *

Josie bent over her bed, her chin in the chenille bedspread. In her prayers she pictured herself serving a beautiful baked dinner at a table where her mother and her grandmother sat up like ladies and her father, Tom, back from the dead in a white suit and black bowtie, carved the meat with a silver knife. Her father was never mentioned except in prayers. There were no photos of him in the house. He had no name but Tom. When her mother was inflamed with emotion, tears rolling down her cheeks at the sad bits of a bedtime story, Josie would cry too. 'What's Tom doing now, do you think, up in heaven?' she would ask.

Then Audrey would grab her with a noisy convulsion, half sob, half pitying laughter. 'If only he was in heaven, my love.'

Josie had seen the man lying on his back across the step in the morning and the sun moving him from shadow to glare as she passed by with her schoolcase in her hand. The man's arms and legs were splayed, his face ruddy, with a purple-grey undercolour, his thick hair flaring around his head where he lay, and she could hear his heavy breath. The night before, her mother had announced that Tom the Father was back and waiting down in the pub. Never a word of explanation had been said to Tom about the child, and after discovering Audrey Ryan's situation, he had never once said that he loved the woman and wanted to be with her for the rest of his life. Tom was not interested in sacraments. So Audrey told the bastard to piss off, back to the hinterland and the rodeo circuit, where he came from. Only once in a blue moon he came sniffing round just to make sure that the proud Ryan women still needed him, and Audrey would put on her flowery dress and curl her hair sweet and lovely and go out to show that no one needed him. That brought the frown to his brow — the furrow that Josie had inherited.

The key fumbled in the lock, the door slammed, the kitchen light went on. There was the shrilling of the kettle for a cup of tea. Josie heard her mother's restless steps. Her grandmother was up too. It was the next morning as Audrey took Josie to school that they found Tom lying on the step outside the pub. The publican was hosing down the front tiles, letting the man lie there for all the world to see. Josie bent over the man's plum-red lips and the glistening stubble on his brick-red skin and smelled his breath, dog's breath, and touched him, as heavy and unmoving as the sofa in their front room.

In imitation of her mother, Josie walked on, decisively, continuing her way to school. 'Pray for my dad,' she whispered that night to the chenille bedspread, beseeching the image of a drunken man sleeping off his sorrow in the morning, spreadeagled across the half-shaded step outside the pub that was called The Crow.

Audrey Ryan had a basket of ironing to do before she could call it a day. The iron hissed when she tested it with her finger. Five shillings a load, supplement to the child endowment and her mother's invalid pension. She pounded the iron down on Mrs Gillingham's ruffled pillow slip, flattening it against the patched ironing cloth on the kitchen table. Finding her rhythm, she began to hum in company with the volley of dialogue from the radio play. She could never keep a tune.

'Girlie-girlie-gir LEES!' chortled Mrs Woodruff, stalking outside the door of her daughter's room. 'Henry the Eighth had six wives. When he wanted a new one, he had the old one BEHEADED, and when he couldn't chop off her head, he got a DIVORCE, only the Pope won't let Catholics get divorced, so Henry the Eighth said he was a Catholic no longer, he was King of the Church of England. Know your history, girls!'

Wendy Sunner and Jane Woodruff squeezed their thighs to stop themselves from bursting. They had barricaded the door and turned out all the lights except one that was wrapped in a beaded shawl to work their transformation into fairy princesses.

Jane cut out the cardboard crowns and coloured them in. Wendy went through the dress-up trunk.

'The women were chattels of men's POWER, girls, until Elizabeth came along,' called Mrs Woodruff, 'the VIRGIN Queen!'

That brought on a renewed surge of giggles. Wendy found a satin slip and a scarlet chiffon scarf with golden threads. She brushed her hair to make it stand on end and when she did the hula in the mirror she looked bee-you-tee-ful. Placing the circle of cardboard delicately on Wendy's head, careful not to let the wet glue come apart, Jane rolled her eyes at her own leering reflection in the mirror – a vixenish handmaiden to Wendy, who put on a princess's swept-up look to match her crown.

'But the person Queen Elizabeth feared most was not any man but another woman, her own COUSIN Mary' Mrs Woodruff pronounced it Meery with a rolling Scots grrh.

Jane put on the crimson Chinese dressing gown, covered with sprays of gold chrysanthemum, which her mother had brought back from Hong Kong. Then she put on the coloured plumage of her crown. She felt proud and tarty as the independent second fairy princess. Wendy licked Jane's pencil and rubbed carmine hard on her lips and cheeks. She did her eyebrows cobalt blue.

Mrs Woodruff's history lesson had disappeared down the corridor to the living-room, where the girls' homework was spread out on the table, and the girls came spinning in a fairy dance, chanting their high music. Jane's mother removed her glasses and opened her mouth wide in a show of amazement.

'Oh clever girls! Did you make the crowns yourselves?'

As they danced, Dr Woodruff came in the front door. The girls ran to him like dragonflies and escorted him to his seat. Jane slipped in between his thighs and threw her arms round his neck. Wendy pirouetted, eyes cast upwards, in a circle just beyond his knees.

Wendy did not understand why she had to go away and stay with Jane when her younger sister Sandy had stayed with their father, or why her mother went into hospital to get their new little brother and came home with nothing. Her father had dropped his voice, and her mother was weeping, when he talked to Jane's mother on the phone.

'Jane made the crowns,' reported Mrs Woodruff.

Jane had stopped her act, but Wendy continued her charged vibrations, her arms shuddering like insect wings. Through thick black-rimmed glasses, Dr Woodruff's scientist's eyes ogled his seven-year-old-daughter's little friend. She made his bushy eyebrows twitch, tempting him to reach out and grab her. She was like an electron passing through concentric rings of particles to the hypothetical central mass of his soul.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Custodians by Nicholas Jose. Copyright © 1997 Nicholas Jose. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Allen & Unwin
• Date d'édition: 2012
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1743312806
• ISBN 13: 9781743312803
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 504
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible