Read Online The White Body of Evening by A L McCann - Free Book Online Page B

instead of patrolling the carriages. Paul was a taciturn and self-absorbed child and had brought a pad and a handful of coloured pencils with him. Even before the train started moving he was drawing what he could see through the window.
    “What are you sketching, Paul?”Albert asked.
    “Just tracks and stuff. And people.”
    As the train gathered speed the child’s hand became less steady. At first Paul gripped his pencil and concentrated more earnestly on the integrity of line and form. But the jolting motion of the locomotive became more intense and the scenes passing outside the window more rapid, until finally the cityscape rushed by in a blur. His hand gave in to the movement of the carriage, producing a chaotic series of jagged, plunging lines. Having finished with something that looked like a record of seismographic activity, he gave up, letting his eyes settle on the stream of images outside the window.
    “How
do
people draw on trains?” he asked his father.
    “Usually they don’t.”
    “That’s because everything moves so fast and the train is always bumping you,” he said sagely.
    Albert looked at his son, wondering what the boy knew. He could divine little from the child’s features, which as yet were too unformed to reveal much of his character. Ondine was, if anything, more opaque to him, but the fact that she looked so much like her mother suggested that the girl would grow up to have the same remote demeanour, the same passivity, the same dread-inspiring aura of Lutheran purity. That Albert barely knew his wife didn’t occur to him. He was confident that he understood her thoroughly, despite the obvious distance that separated them. Empathy wasn’t necessary for him to grasp the deadening, Nordic chill of such women.
    When Paul got used to the movement of the train he tried drawing again. This time he didn’t bother looking out the window, but drew from his imagination. He didn’t try to exert a strict control over the movement of the pencil either, but let the train exert a degree of influence on the shapes and forms he drew.
    “What’s that, Paul?” Albert asked, looking at the crude farrago of faces and bodies that his son was producing unselfconsciously before him.
    “It’s the arrival of midnight in the city of Melbourne,” the boy said.
    Albert could make out the post office clock tower, the streamers and banners, and the rudiments of a crowd. The whole thing had a grotesque, comic energy that could have been the result of the boy’s lack of skill, or of the train’s chaotic effect on the steadiness of his hand. The faces in the crowd were outlandish, warped little blobs stuck on bloated bodies. Some had animal fangs, chattering skeleton teeth, hollow eyes, or sharp, vulture-like beaks. Some looked like bears, wolves or dingos. Some wore top hats, carried swords, waved flags or were busy vomiting a nasty melange of liquid and assorted garbage into the street. The sky was dark and in the distance the child had drawn flames dancing around the revellers, and a scarlet moon. Paul’s hand jerked with the jolts of the train, adding further distortion to the brutality of the scene, as forms closed in on each other creating a menacing jumble of activity. As Albert watched his son’s seemingly random pencil strokes he saw the relentless chaos of plummeting movement. Coherence gave way to disintegration, ordered form to compulsive distortion, yet the drawing had more life in it than anything he could imagine producing himself.
    When Paul and Albert arrived home in the evening, Hamish was in the living room playing dominoes on the floor with Ondine, while Anna and Sarah drank tea in the kitchen.
    “That’s an eight,” Hamish said gently.
    “Oh,” the girl said, snatching the tile back and replacing it with a matching nine.
    Paul sat down beside them. “You wanna see what I drew on the train?” he asked.
    Ondine put her arms around him and diverted herself away from Hamish, who was