Read Online The Tyrant's Novel by Thomas Keneally - Free Book Online
Authors: Thomas Keneally
Tags: Fiction
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But yes, he should feel free to go to the bathroom. I realize now I was grateful to him for introducing the possibility of human culpability into what had happened. Not that I believed she was gone. Oh no. She would be up again at any second, squeezing the line of pain between her eyes with forefinger and thumb, before directing her eyes in my direction. Dr. Colless lowered his voice, comforting me. It was probably an aneurysm, I'd say, Alan. There'll have to be an autopsy to find out one way or the other.
She was having a CT scan tomorrow, I suggested hopefully.
Well, the autopsy will show any problem in that regard.
Does that mean they'll take her brain out of her skull? I asked, my voice rising, I knew, to the level of primal hysteria Sarah and I had both heard on the stairs only an hour or so ago.
Alan, said Dr. Colless. You'd want to know, wouldn't you?
I shook my head. I did not choose to know cause of death, since I had not yet accepted death. If they were just to let her lie, she would recover. I do not need to detail, from this distance of time, the craziness of my bereaved ideas.
With Sarah, there had been that strange business by which she occupied the place in my emotional landscape previously taken up by the entire variegated tribe of women. I forgot my few army experiences with prostitutes, and Louise James and other failures of flirtation at university. This was surely what marriage was meant to be, a profound and exclusive reliance underpinning the occasional physical frenzy. In a confused way, I had always understood my good luck. Now she had made a noise no more than as if the pad of her thumb was pierced by a little shard of china, or a small knife for cutting oranges. Foreseeable and acceptable minor harm had been overtaken, outswamped a billion times, by something more gross and world-devouring, some accident under her skull. I could not have been more awfully dismayed if the dropping of a cup had destroyed her by causing nuclear fission. I possessed the normal craziness of someone whose love is taken in a banal second, with the television warming up to the postkickoff argy-bargy of a European championship final. By some terrible means, I suspected, the blowing of a referee's whistle in Lyons of itself produced this prodigious result in
our
hemisphere, in
our
kitchen.
One of Sarah's aunts, the tender one, Maisie, turned up with Sarah's brother, Jimmy. The aunt laid Sarah out for the rest of the family to visit, while Jimmy plied me with whiskey—on top of some vodka I had already drunk that day, but so what? Everyone was welcome to come and say good-bye to her, her brown hair combed back from her forehead, so that the brow could be kissed. The medical examiner would go away and come back with his men in a few hours' time, said Dr. Colless.
Before I could stop him I was aware that Jimmy was on to a school friend of his. Yes, Jimmy apologized to the friend, tears in his eyes, I know France and Italy are playing. But it's my sister.
His face was drenched with his sorrow. But his way of dealing with it was to begin arranging the funeral tents and refreshments. He must have therefore really believed that she was dead. Of course, our type of people, what you might call the remnants of the city's middle class, unlike the farmers, preferred coffins, but that was something, he conceded to his friend, I would need to have a say in.
Put the phone down, for God's sake, Jimmy, I pleaded. But he could not renounce its comfort.
Put the fucking phone down, Jimmy, please. I can't stand it.
He made hurried excuses to his friend, who, one of death's accustomed helpmeets, was no doubt pleased to get back to the football.
My poor fellow, Alan, he told me. I would never have started this had I known it would get you upset.
I prevented myself from saying that had he murdered her, he couldn't have wanted her in the ground quicker. The relatives came, Sarah's mother and my late mother's brother, my uncle Ted, and
She was having a CT scan tomorrow, I suggested hopefully.
Well, the autopsy will show any problem in that regard.
Does that mean they'll take her brain out of her skull? I asked, my voice rising, I knew, to the level of primal hysteria Sarah and I had both heard on the stairs only an hour or so ago.
Alan, said Dr. Colless. You'd want to know, wouldn't you?
I shook my head. I did not choose to know cause of death, since I had not yet accepted death. If they were just to let her lie, she would recover. I do not need to detail, from this distance of time, the craziness of my bereaved ideas.
With Sarah, there had been that strange business by which she occupied the place in my emotional landscape previously taken up by the entire variegated tribe of women. I forgot my few army experiences with prostitutes, and Louise James and other failures of flirtation at university. This was surely what marriage was meant to be, a profound and exclusive reliance underpinning the occasional physical frenzy. In a confused way, I had always understood my good luck. Now she had made a noise no more than as if the pad of her thumb was pierced by a little shard of china, or a small knife for cutting oranges. Foreseeable and acceptable minor harm had been overtaken, outswamped a billion times, by something more gross and world-devouring, some accident under her skull. I could not have been more awfully dismayed if the dropping of a cup had destroyed her by causing nuclear fission. I possessed the normal craziness of someone whose love is taken in a banal second, with the television warming up to the postkickoff argy-bargy of a European championship final. By some terrible means, I suspected, the blowing of a referee's whistle in Lyons of itself produced this prodigious result in
our
hemisphere, in
our
kitchen.
One of Sarah's aunts, the tender one, Maisie, turned up with Sarah's brother, Jimmy. The aunt laid Sarah out for the rest of the family to visit, while Jimmy plied me with whiskey—on top of some vodka I had already drunk that day, but so what? Everyone was welcome to come and say good-bye to her, her brown hair combed back from her forehead, so that the brow could be kissed. The medical examiner would go away and come back with his men in a few hours' time, said Dr. Colless.
Before I could stop him I was aware that Jimmy was on to a school friend of his. Yes, Jimmy apologized to the friend, tears in his eyes, I know France and Italy are playing. But it's my sister.
His face was drenched with his sorrow. But his way of dealing with it was to begin arranging the funeral tents and refreshments. He must have therefore really believed that she was dead. Of course, our type of people, what you might call the remnants of the city's middle class, unlike the farmers, preferred coffins, but that was something, he conceded to his friend, I would need to have a say in.
Put the phone down, for God's sake, Jimmy, I pleaded. But he could not renounce its comfort.
Put the fucking phone down, Jimmy, please. I can't stand it.
He made hurried excuses to his friend, who, one of death's accustomed helpmeets, was no doubt pleased to get back to the football.
My poor fellow, Alan, he told me. I would never have started this had I known it would get you upset.
I prevented myself from saying that had he murdered her, he couldn't have wanted her in the ground quicker. The relatives came, Sarah's mother and my late mother's brother, my uncle Ted, and
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