Turning Back the Sun(2)
The children of his patients, watching him, would giggle uncomfortably and whisper, “Doctor Eagle!” (after a character in their comic books). He was a little awesome. You would not have thought that a man of thirty-four had had time to look like that—charged with such contradictory expression. The whole man gave out an exacting mixture of fierceness and sympathy. And he still looked young. But he walked with an angry, flamboyant limp from a leg shattered in a car crash. His right shoulder jerked upward as his right foot cleared the ground. To others he sometimes seemed to brandish this limp like a congenital injustice; but in fact he had almost forgotten it. Only occasionally he wondered if some bitterness had not seeped up from his foot into his brain.
But he liked to walk. He did most of his rounds on foot. In different humors he found different towns here: a place of crude vigor, a town of blinkered pragmatism, a city of pure loss. It was its isolation, he supposed, which made it seem so important. The wilderness pressed on it like a corset, crushing its energies inward. If it had any unifying trait, it was that of an insidious unease, like a distant apprehension of peril. Extrovert but self-protective, it had turned its back on the wilderness around it and looked inward, instead, on its own broad streets and squares, its fever of getting and spending, on its own miraculous presence in the emptiness.
But of course you couldn”t exclude that wilderness. The vista at the end of most streets was closed by a low, unbreaking wave of violet hills. Blood-colored crags and ridges surged along the northern suburbs and burst up even in the town”s heart. On the outskirts, two-lane roads stopped dead, petering into tracks or stones. Between habitation and desert was only a step. All around the town”s north and west a maze of butchered hills marked the site of earlier mines and kilns, where the earth had turned sulphurous and shone with a matt glare. Their slopes rose in tiers of russet and white, twisted with dead trees where the rains had sieved down a scree powdered to dust.
But it was on the far side of the town that the real wilderness began. The houses turned their backs on it. It spread in a huge emptiness of plains, glazed only by saltbush and eucalyptus trees, and by the tarns where the natives watered their cattle. Everything out of its earth grew up bleached and ghostly; washed-out greys and silvers. Here and there a track moved into nowhere. It was a mysterious, uninscribed land, ancient and empty. It fascinated Rayner. On a clear morning, across the farthest savannah, he could make out knolls and dried rivers moving away to a level, violet horizon—the depthless violet of all this antique country, which seemed to promise nothing beyond itself.
Even the town”s river followed laws of its own. It was heavy and fast and malt-colored. Some boardwalks and jetties covered its fringe of green, and there were boats on it: a police launch and some pleasure dinghies with names like Sunburst and Elsinore. Yet the river went nowhere. It simply died in the wilderness three hundred kilometers to the south.
At first the owner of the Seagull ignored the faint, regular thudding under his bows. It sounded like a rotted tree trunk: something soft and stiff. Then he went and peered over the side, and let out a breathy, high-pitched “God!”
Later Rayner recognized the day as a turning point, announced by the frightened tap of the messenger”s fingers on his clinic door. A big crowd had gathered on the riverbank. Two policemen had pulled the bodies into the shallows but now stood uncertain, as if afraid to lift them into the daylight. They deferred to him with relief. It seemed callous, for some reason, to remove his shoes and socks before entering the water, so he waded straight in to where the two corpses floated in one another”s arms. They drifted on their sides, swollen and blackened. The crowd hovered motionless. His hands started trembling. The corpses knocked against his shins. They were bound face to face, like lovers, and their heads had been axed in from behind. He circled one in his arms and closed his eyes, then pulled toward the bank. They came together.
On shore, the disintegrating hand of one corpse slipped its bonds, leaving part of itself behind like a glove, and released the bodies to lie side by side. Rayner had seen many dead, but none like these. Their bloated trunks had burst their clothes—the man”s trousers tangled round his ankles, the woman”s dress split top to bottom—and their faces were ebony balloons. He knelt by them helplessly, his revulsion stronger than his pity. Their eyes had sunk to milky slits. Their dilated tongues stuck out through their lips.
He did not know what to do. “Has anyone called an ambulance?”
He wiped the froth from their noses and mouths. Inspecting closer, he wondered if he might recognize one of them. But they were beyond recognition. Out of their blackened skulls the hair flowed white and gold. It was the only natural thing left to them, yet it seemed more violent and artificial than the rest. It was the woman”s hair which filled him with new horror. He was sure he recognized it, its distinctive champagne color, even the way its damp folds settled round her head. But when he looked at what had once been her, nothing came to mind. Only long after did he realize of whom the hair had reminded him.
In the back of each head the axe blow had left a jagged trench. It was the traditional way by which the natives killed, and now a man edged forward from the crowd, stared into the dead faces and said, “That”s what the savages do! They hit you like that!”
The crowd loosened, then surged to look closer. A fat woman suddenly cried out, “God help me, I know them! It”s the Mordaunts from the farm up the railtrack!” She plucked her husband”s arm. “It”s the Mordaunts, Gyorgy. That”s her dress.”