The Retreat of Radiance

'...Quin lives alone, and rarely speaks

to neighbours. Left of Centre, but not

considered violent. Has had

psychiatric treatment...'

Australian Security Intelligence Organization

Hua-shan, Shensi: My 19th birthday.

We descend like a slug on a Sung scroll; we slime every rock as we wind down through this chilling mist. My poisoned hand is puffy; I imagine it glowing like a fungus in the gloom. We have stopped on this mountain for a brief rest. Keh pokes his head out of his sedan chair, shouts with terrible anger, sees me looking at him, gives the V sign and pops back inside. A bitter wind burns my face, I want to tear it off like a mask and fling it over the precipice. The soldiers just squat beside their packs, staring stupidly. I will bayonet my hand and spray them with yellow pus.

Later: I still can't quite believe it has happened. One poor simpleton sat staring at me, murmuring and smiling, and then he began to pluck gently at my sleeve, as if he were removing insects, and finally he began to push me firmly, and then harder and harder, towards the edge. I just don't know what it was all about; I just don't know. Shiozawa shoved past me, dragged him back by the collar, pushed the Mauser pistol into his mouth, and there was this God-awful bang and he sagged down with the blood pouring out through his small black teeth, and Shiozawa rolled him over the edge with his boot. I keep thinking of the sick whale I saw slaughtered on the headland at home; the river of blood flowing down through round black stones. I keep trying to think of the whale. I am trying to pretend this is something I'm used to. I can still feel my arm where he was pushing me... Everybody is laughing a bit now; they have perked up. I stood up a minute ago and pretended to stretch. He is upside down on a ledge about 12 feet below, with his legs over his head like a straw dummy. I closed my left eye so I couldn't see him.

West Ridge, New South Wales: My 49th birthday.

Dear Rock, Dear Leaf Mould, Thank you for your cards. I am quite well, thank you, and you? You never change. I caper before the coffin — I shake a belled cap — but I know you are always there, stretching away beyond the limits of my own little life. And you, Dear Emptiness. How are you? Do you remember the last time we swam together down in the gorge? Years ago now, wasn't it? We clambered over the soft sandstone boulders, some flushed a deep peach-crimson, others a rich orange, and we drifted quickly down the creek, laughing as the gap widened between us. Then over the little rapids we slid into the deep green pool, and we floated there, gazing up at the caves licked out of the olive-green bush; remarking on the medieval cross-bows of the king parrots as they flung themselves across the bland blue sky. Remember? The rusted cans are still there tonight, caught in bearded flood-driftwood in the rough tan river sand, but they are of metal and timber, and I am beginning to think these days that I have almost merged with memory itself. Perhaps, like you, I belong most truly in the world of crickets, of dogs which bark, faintly, far away, plucking the primeval chord.

CHAPTER ONE

Someone was watching the house. Quinn half-rose from his bed, one elbow jammed hard into his pillow. He stared at the bedroom windows, his eyes alert for the quick blur of a face or knuckles rising over the sill; his brain and ears awaiting the creak of the bedroom door behind him. Faintly, far down on the highway, a truck whined down towards the city beneath a scatter of icy stars; he pictured a green rectangle of cabbages swishing briefly through the black wastes of bush. Nothing else stirred, but the oppressive awareness of a presence lay all around him; it had shaken him from sleep. He slid his feet on to the floor and sat quite still on the edge of his bed. The streetlight beyond his front gate lit the white trunks of eucalypts like the backdrop of an empty stage.

Quinn switched on the rickety yellow bedlamp which lay on a chair by his pillow. He was not ready yet for a confrontation: the sudden glow was a plea to intruders to melt away until he could face them on his own terms, in daylight. Somewhere a roof-beam cracked in his lonely fibro cottage; he imagined a man crouching up on the rafters. Quickly he pushed his feet into a gaping pair of old desert boots which served as slippers and moved to the bedroom light switch. He stood alone now in faded pyjamas: prepared, at last, to kick a groin if he was cornered, or to smash a nosebone with one backward swing of his right fist. The courage of the fearful buoyed him: the last glass wall of defiance which dropped into place when it was too late for the protective armour of words. He pulled open the door into the hall with a brisk show of confidence.

No one. Quinn stooped swiftly through the cottage; opening doors, snapping on lights, peering beneath the empty beds in which his three children once had slept. He even gazed up at the manhole cover in the hall ceiling in case some intruder above had dislodged it. And after that, he took a torch and cautiously opened the front door.

The dark, damp shapes of the garden rose immediately to meet him; he flashed the beam on them imperiously, and then he began stepping slowly around the house — avoiding the far side, which was clotted too thickly for safety with oleanders strangling in a half-stripped tent of honeysuckle. Quinn merely stood at a corner of the house and flashed the light over them with a spurious aggression, ready to hurl the torch at a hostile body suddenly rushing towards him out of the black pit of his own fear — out of Kwangsi Province more than thirty years before. His inviolability now had ended, he knew; his long peace, of sorts, had shattered forever.

He stood for three or four minutes beneath the pale eucalypts, both inviting violence and rejecting it; indecision (like the armour of words) had shielded him from involvement for most of his life. A few moths clicked against the streetlight, but nothing moved in the garden. Warily, he walked back inside the house and flattened himself against a wall. He began studying a black group of photinea bushes which clustered like cowled monks around his front gate.

Once before, in these years of solitude, he had imagined a silent Leaf Man crouching out there with them: a gawping symbol of impending death. The Leaf Man was perhaps a real being, perhaps not — he had never quite decided — but he was a figure, anyway, whom he had clothed in his brain with dead brown leaves and twigs and sent out to warn himself that his end was imminent — to say that it was approaching time for the suffocating volcano of pain in the aging ticker; the procession of watery headlights down to the crematorium at noon.

Now, however, he was looking for bone and muscle, a gun, the glint of a knife. Only the welcome clink of bottles up the street ended his vigil: the slam of a van door as the milkman jumped in for his last delivery at Quinn's place on the edge of West Ridge.

He sighed, checked the rooms again in case someone had slipped in through the front door, and switched on his cracked electric jug to make tea. The old refrigerator shuddered in a corner of the kitchen, and Quinn leaned on it until the water boiled, wondering who it was who had been crouching out there in the early-morning darkness, silently calling him from his bed.

It was April, in the middle of autumn, and his end, he suspected, was approaching.

'Quinn's Final Phase', as he morbidly called it then, began a few months before this. His cottage perched on a bushy mountain crag at the end of a sandstone road, and its isolation confirmed (to his own wry amusement) his semi-withdrawal at that time from the human race. Few relatives or former friends called, and he rarely answered the door when they did. He played, instead, a queer game of hiding, squinting through the kitchen curtains at occasional callers who penetrated this far west of the city. He even lay in the hall one day and stealthily pushed back a 'Watch Tower' booklet which a Jehovah's Witness had just slipped beneath the door (trembling with mirth at the astonished silence of the disciple on the other side). To be going a bit around the bend in this anaesthetized society pleased him secretly; the only worthwhile people, he had concluded during a brief bout of therapy, were a trifle mad.

Quinn had bought the cottage some years before; it was the only one he could afford. That had been the springtime of it all, when his children were very small; occasionally (half-hoping to find Aboriginal stone tools or convict manacles) he still dug up cracked, withered dummies which they had dropped when shrieking with glee under a distant summer hose: artefacts of a lost age which made him smile gently, leaning on his shovel, while he sprayed them again in his memory. For West Ridge was a perfect place to remember: his backyard sloped down into the river gorge where once the whole family had swum together. Now, alone, he sat sometimes on a shelf of rock in his yard, his back against a boulder which shielded him from the road — his tail-gun turret, he called it privately — scanning the empty sky, the blank bush, for the sudden appearance of a pattern.

And so the years passed. Each December the summer bushfires flared, heralding Christmas; he and his neighbours stood on their rooftops with hoses, guarding the residential sprawl along the ridge, while the sirens wailed and the sky boiled orange above them. He half-looked forward to this approach of danger — although even it laid bare images of his youth in Asia. One fire gutted an old weekender a few hundred metres from Quinn's place, and he was poking around there one afternoon, out on a walk, when he saw a white china dish on a tank stand: the only object, apparently, which had survived intact. But when he touched the dish, trying to pick it up between his thumb and a curled forefinger, it disintegrated into soft ash, and he stood there bemused in the ruins, suddenly recalling Tony Doyle.

Now, however, it was really the winters and rainy springs which he noticed most: the water jerking heavily through the rusted gutter outside his bedroom; a faint stench drifting up through the snail-tattered leaves of the cannas which he had planted to suck up the septi coverflow. Mist drifted up around the cottage each cold winter night from the gorge; grey medallions of lichen crusted its old red roof-tiles, and the hidden highway in the bush below sizzled endlessly, like a live high-tension wire flung down in the dull scrub. Reminding him.

And yet it was a pleasant enough purgatory there: the spot for retirement and respectable termination — the choice which his neighbours had made. He had half-made it himself (he did everything by halves): he had already stopped regular work, and some of his former colleagues from the defunct proof-reading room of The Star down in the city — phased out, as he was, by automation — spoke of him as if he were already dead.

More and more he was being 'driven in on himself’, as the saying went — a process he recognized clearly as he existed on the dole and his dwindling savings. 'I'm being driven in on myself,’ he chuckled one night, blundering down the hall and pretending to bump into himself. And sagged against the wall: his dark hair greying fast, his green eyes dancing, laughing at the empty rooms. He liked to think that he was twenty-nine, not forty-nine.

Quinn also liked to think that he was a bit of a clown, but he was too often alone in this middle period of his life. Melodramatically he registered the creaking of the empty house, the sudden movements of timber as it settled down each night, as if he sheltered within his own heart. And, inevitably, he talked to himself: old family jokes scratching short on phantom records as he pottered around the rooms.

Sometimes he teased a small pillar of air (his daughter) recoiling, grinning, against a wall, just as he had when her tiny fists had pummelled his chest with exasperated love. Occasionally he wrote letters to himself, or to the air and the earth and leaves, and sometimes at night he lay on trial in his littered bedroom, pretending he stood in a dock.

It seemed to Quinn, on evenings like those, that the pressure of his middle-aged aloneness was extruding part of his mind into another dimension, so that he began to haunt a frontier wavering through a streaky mix of Technicolour fantasy and monochrome melancholy, unsure which tracts of the landscape were real. On those occasions, he lounged alone by his fire, the moon and stars glittering through the windows, and he became — although he could never confess this to anyone — he became one night a stone on a far frosty hill; the stiff yellow grass and the nettles in a gutted cottage; he even became a train engine crying through the bush as he raised his head, in fancy, from a woman's warm breasts.

This was his second 'Poetic Phase' — the first was in adolescence — and nobody then felt more Australian than he: oblique, defeated, the bitter lonely land itself, its ribs rubbed sharp as bullock bones. West Ridge deepened his gloom: few people ventured forth in his neighbourhood except old men who limped down to the local bowling green in the awful stillness of noon. He watched them sometimes through his windows, vowing never to limp into line behind them.

Now, however, was the ultimate lonely period of his life, he surmized: the season when mortality crept into the bones to take up lodging, and an endless darkness began to press against the windows. He dreaded the half-century: a rare achievement for Australian Test cricketers about that time, but a personal score which he was not keen to amass. The ego of youth had drained away, and for the first time he truly sensed his transience. Life seemed to be closing its pale circle; the trees crowding closer to outlive him, and all the songs he had ever loved destined to outlive him, and stretches of wet streets he had walked at night on the fringes of country towns, and factory walls he had known in the city, and gratings and the corners of buildings; all the second-and third-grade backdrop to his life, all destined to outlive him. Quinn MM, he sometimes called himself. 'Q: Military Medal?' he asked, pausing for the answer. 'A: No, Male Menopause,' he replied. He seemed locked in sick indecision during this period; once he even signed a conservation petition 'M.A. Angst'. A middle-aged joke, he told the young widow who presented it at his door, and he invited her in for a glass of riesling. Later they embraced, briefly and inconclusively, on his sofa.

Quinn suppressed all thoughts of his former wife. He began thinking quite a lot, however, about the dead — including his father and Tony Doyle, although both had died in the fifties: his father up the coast in their hometown of Wongbok — Wongbok! It always rang like a cracked bell; like their lives — and Doyle in the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong, back in the days when Hong Kong Government officials still called it a 'colony'.

Two vivid pictures of his father usually surfaced. The first he snapped off immediately: his father rose like a gutted cathedral from his wheelchair to lean on the flying buttress of his mother as she lowered him to the lavatory seat; his father's eyes then became tall Gothic windows set with stained glass. In the second image, however, his father sat in his wheelchair by the orange tree in their backyard on the edge of Wongbok, coughing First World War German gas as the Passchendaeles of ring-barked paddocks stretched away behind him to the lonely coast. He had tried to paint this scene, but it was better in his mind. In these reveries, his father always tossed a tennis ball to him (which he strove to hit straight back to him with a cricket bat in case he toppled sideways from the wheelchair), and when a visitor appeared at the side of the house his father turned and pretended to inspect the orange leaves for aphids while Quinn gazed down at him steadily through the dark tunnel of the years.

It was particularly difficult, on occasions like those, to separate the reality of memory from the reality of the present. Sometimes Quinn switched off the lights of his cottage at night and wandered through the empty rooms: cradling a glass, easing past furniture, remembering the China of his teens. And what was more real, he asked himself, when he did that? The spirits of his children played unaware among the cracked yellow feet of the Taoist priests from Hua-shan, while down at the village pub on the highway crowds of brutalized youths and young girls, maimed in road smashes, were surely turning into car metal themselves: crumpled mudguards sprouting from their knee caps, headlights from their shoulder blades.

He had grown to hate the petrol combustion engine: occasionally he sauntered across the highway in the path of thundering oil tankers (although his heart was thudding), gesturing savagely at the startled drivers as they yelped at him through the glass with frightened fury. And, somehow, it seemed that Doyle and his father and Asia were linked with all of this, as if his whole long life since those feverish days in China had been a dutiful dream; a long pause in an unfinished story which still burned for a conclusion in his brain.

Quinn also began dreaming vividly again about this time, and each dream, each day, became pretty much like the other. He dreamed early one morning that his children were running gaily down the hall, calling to him. 'Don't run on the road!' he instructed them automatically while reading a book; 'Don't run on the road!' But he was aware that a giant chasm had opened in the hall beside the kitchen door, and he failed to warn them of that. Their little figures, idealized in white nightgowns, began wafting gently down through dark space towards a landscape he could not quite imagine; he peered over the edge of the worn green Feltex and watched them drifting to and fro a few metres beneath him in the darkness. Quinn placed moss on the bottom of the chasm to break their fall, but the wet black walls of rock were grinding together on their feet as he jerked his head away. He opened his eyes after that dream and switched on his bedside radio for distraction; the seven o'clock pips were puncturing the morning, and the kookaburras were wheezing on a tree outside his bedroom like old men in a club, unable to raise a real laugh. 'There has been an accident,' said the announcer, and put on a record: music to bleed by... Quinn switched it off and got up.

And that was the way it went, week after week, month after month: ten crowded years of marriage, and now a recurrence of the solitary grey ones of adolescence; even a return to the abortive one-night stands (after too much liquor) of his youth. But through much more than that period of marriage — for three decades, in fact — Quinn had preserved one secret above all others; a secret which he never babbled in bars, but which lit his brain with subliminal flashes while he was talking and laughing with his old colleagues from the reading room of The Star, or joking in bed with strange young women down in the city. Nobody ever suspected what he was seeing inside his head.

He painted this secret, suitably disguised, during his brief 'Art Period' in the early seventies: a litter of golden starfish wilting in a parched bean field on a cracked plain, the misty mountains of traditional Chinese landscape towering above them. He called this painting 'The Chinese Civil War', and entered it, like a murderer deliberately planting a clue, in the local Art and Horticultural Society's annual exhibition down in West Ridge village.

It was a bad painting. The judges agreed that it was clumsily executed, confused in intent, and not worthy even of a Merit Card — and they were right, as it turned out, for nobody bought it. Quinn carried it home after the exhibition and propped it on a dusty chest of drawers. He certainly liked it, but then only he could hear the cries and songs from that bean field long ago in Kwangsi: the young voices floating up clearly through the morning bird calls; drifting sweetly around the walls of the Retreat of Radiance — the monastery where he crouched in horror above the plain.

He never forgot that day in 1948, or the long ghastly night which followed before General Keh Shih-kai's Nationalist troops continued their flight south from the Yellow River towards the Golden Triangle. He painted this army as a slug, smearing a trail of slime down the cold peaks of his memory. Not that it mattered, of course; not that anything really mattered much any more.

Of course Larsen mattered, he had to confess: Larsen climbing towards the top of the management-executive pile in New York, certainly still mattered. Quinn never quite forgot Larsen: most of the other China ghosts which haunted him were dead — like Tony Doyle — but Larsen was alive and prospering in Manhattan while Quinn sat waiting for the eucalypts to burst through his back door on knobbly legs; to spike his peeling plaster ceiling and clamber on his bed, beckoning to their fellows through the windows.

Larsen was one of his most important secrets — and an easy one to keep in a land where people never revealed what they felt most deeply. And, strangely, his hatred for Larsen became therapy of a kind: he could not slip silently into the furnace at more than 500°C before he had resolved their story. The time had come, in middle age, to wipe the slate clean.

This fact did not appear in the slender ASIO file on Quinn's career which Larsen obtained several months later, and neither did the final trigger of Quinn's journey: an unforeseen stroke of luck. One of two aged aunts — his father's sisters — died in a brick cottage of heart disease, blue down beside the Harbour. She left him $15,000 (undeclared) in a plastic shopping bag, and a black suit, tie and hat which she requested him, in a final, spidery note, to wear in mourning: his penalty for accepting the gift.

This archaic request dismayed Quinn even more than her death, but it was a small price to pay: stroking an imaginary beard, he posed secretly during the funeral service as Modigliani's Portrait d'Homme (so blotting out painful memories of another church, two smaller coffins).

Later, at his surviving aunt's home, he smoothly comforted her over her prized plum cake and tea while sliding a strand of her grey hair from his saucer and slyly emptying the cup into the sink.

'Don't worry,' he said, turning and patting her bony little shoulder. 'You'll see her again.' But it was the sort of comforting lie a father told to a child. He knew in his heart that life on earth was merely a molecular fluke; it could never happen again.

Picking up the shopping bag, declining a second cup of tea, he thought of his cottage up on West Ridge. 'Bye, Auntie,' he said. 'Look after yourself.' Because I'm afraid I won't be able to; I have to act now, or forever hold my peace. Quinn did act. He began the next day by unwinding some of the vines from the dark oleander branches in his garden, which the vines had crushed into barley-sugar shapes. He worked happily, imagining himself dismantling the black Bernini columns rising above the high altar in St Peter's; Pope Benedict XV, who had excommunicated his Catholic father, dropped with a gentle thump through a trapdoor as he prised apart the last marble strand.

The work tired him; he was out of condition. The swifts were flicking back to northern Asia's conifer forests after their annual summer migration down the east coast of Australia. He watched them until he spied old Miss Bird, an elderly Englishwoman who lived over the road with a malevolent cat. Miss Bird, as always, was watching him, half-crouched behind a diosma bush. She had spread her tattered underwear on the bush, trailing loops of elastic, to convey the impression, he suspected, that they were cleaning rags. He knew better: he had seen her bending over her zinnias.

Quinn waved cheerily to her and cried: 'How are you?' and this confused Miss Bird greatly, for he had never acknowledged her before. She ducked around the back of her cottage to escape from him, and Quinn marched inside his house for a beer, well pleased with himself. He was beginning to feel liberated at last; the money had opened up a vast new world in his head. When the kookaburras laughed now, he chuckled too.

Sprawled on a couch, sipping a can, he realized suddenly that the rooms were suffocating in paper. Sagging cardboard boxes were jammed everywhere, stuffed with dust-furred newspapers and magazines commencing with the Lifes and Looks of John Kennedy's assassination; most of them charted the rise of conservation and the fall of Vietnam, when he, like so many others, had cared about the distant future of the globe.

He spent the next few days burning them. He tore up his old clothes and thrust them into garbage bags. He collected piles of his children's old gear which had lain in drawers for years and thrust them into bags for the St Vincent de Paul (tipped in hurriedly, afraid he might reconsider). He peeled their old sticky-taped drawings from the walls and placed the best of them carefully in his wallet. As for his wife, he had removed all trace of her several years before.

When he had done all that — when he had cleaned and swept his tomb — he was ready to leave it. He began jogging every day through the bush amid the giant cicada shells of abandoned cars — sparring sometimes, his skin gleaming with sweat, when he was sure that no one could see him. The university lightweight quarter-finalist 1947 (KO'd, round one) was launching his comeback, he announced to the trees, and he stopped, leaning against a eucalypt, grinning at the absurdity of the mission which was forming in his mind.

One night, the most important night of all, Quinn took a small hessian bag from a filing cabinet in his bedroom and emptied it on to his kitchen table. Three tattered little 1948 diaries slid from the bag, followed by his ancient Vest Pocket Autographic Kodak and three red rolls of undeveloped film. He weighed the rolls of film in his hand like shotgun cartridges while Larsen's dry mid-West voice rustled back into his brain like rat paws in corn husks.

He wrote a very explicit letter that night to Larsen at his home in New Jersey telling him precisely what he intended to do, with further letters to General Keh in Taiwan, and to Lancelot Ming, Albert Porter and Andrew Veitch in Hong Kong. Then he walked up to the mailbox on the corner.

Soft autumn rain was dripping through the trees, and shiny cars clustered beneath the Eversharp spire of the little Catholic church: the drivers were now inside polishing their souls. He flicked a cigarette cynically at the cars and watched it hiss in a puddle. Only earthly love (which did not include General Keh or Ed Larsen) was truly worthwhile; religious faith of no more consequence than the sheet lightning which was flickering over a distant ridge like the silent re-run of an old war. And yet when a door opened in the church he pushed the letters into the box and stepped back quickly into the shadows. He was the enemy. He was the guilty one.

The door closed; he stood alone. Large hounds began barking in a new housing estate which was expanding on the other side of the valley, its looping streets pressed like the whorls of planners' thumbprints into the shrinking bush, and down on the highway tyres were squealing as the estate's young businessmen swung up from their clubs on the plain — up to their in-ground pools and snooker rooms and restless wives; their furtive affairs after squash, the keys on the lazy Susan on New Year's Eve, their large dogs and small expectations.

Quinn walked back slowly along the sandstone road, between cottages lit by the sickly blue glare of television. The eyes of Miss Bird's cat gleamed at him from her path, and he stopped again. He became aware for the first time of a bond between himself and Miss Bird; she was softly playing 'The White Cliffs of Dover' on her piano. Like him, she lived in the past: her war, too, had never ended.

Four weeks later — not long after he first concluded that he was under surveillance — Quinn stood at the doorway of his cottage holding a small sludge-grey suitcase. It was five a.m. in winter, and he stared back into the dark hall, the familiar shabby rooms beyond; ready to return to China.

'Bye, kids,' he said softly, stooping to place his key beneath a mossy brick, and immediately his children pelted towards him out of the empty house: somehow four years old again, giggling, clutching his neck, bearing him down to their level.

Quinn disengaged them gently. 'See you,' he murmured, and he closed the door and walked out briskly through the photineas at the front gate. This morning — well, it was strange, perhaps — but this morning he felt light, almost jaunty: a cheerful man in mourning-black about to sink amid the sleeping cottages, the rolling ridges of furry bush, on his final journey down to the railway station.

Solitary figures were drifting silently through the mist towards the train: factory workers bearing sandwiches and vacuum flasks and cheap thrillers in their greasy airline bags. Quinn fell into step with them, a shadow amid the shadows. He saw now, not the dark waves of eucalypts, but a vast calm ocean brimming deep to its horizon. Then, close up, he imagined a shark slicing like retribution through a wave — a bloody flurry in the breakers.

'I'm not certifiable,' he whispered, grinning at the bone-white trees, and raising his left hand, he jiggled briefly in a crazy little dance.

That was the last time that Miss Bird, peering from her bedroom window with a pain killer and a glass of water, ever saw Quinn: he boarded a jumbo jet that day for Hong Kong. His key began rusting beneath the mossy brick.

CHAPTER TWO

'The bastard's nuts,' thought Larsen. He sat in a large dun suite at the Manhattan Statler scattered with colour brochures of gaping mouths. Sticky martini glasses studded the furniture, and the air reeked of sweet gin and vermouth and tobacco. He picked up the phone and called Westchester, waving with queasy good cheer as the last of the dental convention delegates bellowed out with their aging women.

He could hardly breathe, sitting there watching the women with scorn: they were smoke-dried from too many hours in too many suites like this amid the fat phallic zeppelins of businessmen's cigars; their hair frosted as if powdered with cigar ash; the hair of dead old women. His hatred, he suspected, sprang partly from their inability to arouse him.

'Hi,' he