The Pages by Murray Bail Page B

mighty kind of you. The rest of those bastards couldn’t give a shit.’
    â€˜They said to say hello.’
    â€˜No-hopers all of them.’
    In flannel pyjamas on special from Woolworths, Sheldrake lay in bed, just a sheet covering the immense rise of his stomach which heated the entire room.
    â€˜It’s all here,’ he prodded, ‘running amok as I speak. It’s in the stomach area. The bowel, liver, lungs. Nothing can be done. I had been feeling a bit tired, that’s all.’
    Wesley realised that at the hospital Sheldrake’s usual elongated stool would have been uncomfortable.
    Tomorrow, Sheldrake was due in the hospice. ‘Take a seat!’
    And Wesley too gave a smile at their recent history.
    Everybody was trying to be funny, while he wanted to remain serious. Why he had made the visit he wasn’t at all sure. He looked around the room. In the corner was a neat selection of news magazines. A bookshelf had on display a concise Oxford and an encyclopaedia held together by a ginger rubber band. Above, in a gilt frame, was a photo-realist scene of a perfectly mirrored lake surrounded by snow and pine trees.
    â€˜Tell me something I don’t know.’
    Wesley had always liked this aspect of Sheldrake, the large man, now having trouble breathing. Wasn’t it Schopenhauer who placed a gold coin on his café table every day, as he ate his lunch, to encourage one of the gawping onlookers to say something – anything – that would be of interest to him? (And any takers? Not one.)
    â€˜Can I make you a cup of tea, or anything?’
    Sheldrake shook his head and looked up at the ceiling.
    â€˜How’s the pain?’
    â€˜I already know that.’
    â€˜Pain, I haven’t had much experience of.’ Virginia would have quickly said, ‘Touch wood!’
    â€˜You have something to look forward to.’
    Wesley wanted to know if he was afraid. What can it all possibly amount to – being alive, on two feet, and being aware of it, then, after a short time, it coming to an end.
    Instead, he stood up to examine the walls which he noticed had been papered over with printed pages, the walls blurring with columns of words, sentences.
    â€˜That’s the Holy Scriptures you’re looking at,’ Sheldrake turned his head. ‘If you’re interested.’
    He had never thought of Sheldrake being religious.
    â€˜I’ve glued them on the wall, as an aide memoire. Do you know what an aide memoire is?’
    Wesley said nothing.
    â€˜I don’t know what’s worse, the Old Testament or the New,’ Sheldrake said in a loud voice. ‘I’ve glued them up in case I forget what a load of baloney it all is. I want to be reminded every day. Pick a verse there, any verse and read it out. Do you see what I’m getting at?’
    Now his ring of yellow hair took on the fallen halo look as he became stuck in a convulsion of hacking, spitting and reddening.
    â€˜I’m being punished.’ He tried laughing, only to cough still further.
    â€˜I was about to say,’ Wesley remained standing, ‘the accumulation of facts doesn’t always add up to much.’
    Did this man alone under the sheet have a wife somewhere? A few children discarded along the way? What about a black-sheep brother trying to grow coffee in New Guinea? A younger sister out at Bankstown bringing up three kids after the father shot through?
    â€˜You’re a thoughtful character, I see that,’ Sheldrake searched around with his words. ‘You’re probably smarter than me. I didn’t mind the hospital. The job was a good one…the sitting around and talking out in the sun. I liked it.’
    Wesley waited as the large man closed his eyes.
    â€˜Thank you, thank you. I’ll give it a rest now.’
    Hendrik Sheldrake would remain a small unravelled knot in Antill’s life – unexplained.
    The day, shortly afterwards, he died