Martin Edmond


My Name is Adam

Jimmy was a man of indeterminate age and culture, with long flowing grey-black hair, dark brown skin, brown eyes, broken teeth, a skinny body that gave off the rank odour of one who sleeps under bridges, on park benches or in doorways, and spends his days trawling the streets of the city. The skin of his face was pitted and worn, there were enormous blackheads in his nose and his eyes bulged like Marty Feldman’s, probably because of an untreated thyroid condition. He usually wore an old checked jacket, a grey shirt, and nondescript trousers held up with string; a spotted handkerchief knotted round his neck; and socks and roman sandals on his feet. A clochard, the French would say, and like one of Beckett's immortal pair, he had a line in existential talk that brought the brevity of time and the darkness of space into annihilating collision with the quotidian. Often, too, like Vladimir and Estragon, he bore marks of a recent beating on his face or body, but if I attempted to find out who was responsible for this latest outrage, he would simply shake his head and say: those big people.

+ + +

One day I saw him on Liverpool Street and stopped to ask how he was. He looked away into the distance and in his soft voice said: Legally dead, mate. Yeah, they've just about abolished me. Jimmy's particular obsession was with the chemistry of the body, which he investigated exhaustively for clues to his errant state of mind. I used to see him sometimes in the Kings Cross library reading medical texts, or flicking through periodicals, scanning the mysterious symbols of the psycho-biologists. This particular day he was inquiring into the scientific status of the resurrection of Christ. How did he get himself to rise up? Jimmy wanted to know. Something magnetic in the blood? What do you think? Or is it just a story they made up to keep us guessing? What could I say? I felt my own mind tipping as I entertained the possible mechanism of a 2000 year old confidence trick. Yeah, I said, probably. Jimmy nodded, looking away down the street. Probably the iron in the blood was magnetised, he said, and that's how they did it. Where you going, Dutchie? (Jimmy, for no reason I know, always called me by this name. The closest he ever came to an explanation was the day he told me: You know, Dutchie, you're half Holland, half New Guinea, and half New Zealand; that's why you're more than a hundred percent!) I wasn’t going anywhere except to the Green Park for a drink, so we walked a couple of blocks down the road together, making desultory conversation. Outside the fashionable Robin Gibson Art Gallery he stopped suddenly and began rooting around at the base of an iron fence bordering the palm garden until he came up with an audio cassette, battered, unlabelled, unplayable, and spent some time turning it over in his hands, wondering what was on it, before explaining he didn't have a cassette player anyway and hiding it again in a chink in the sandstone wall outside the Church of Christ, Scientist.

+ + +

I don’t know if Jimmy was his real name. I called him that because Iris did. Iris was the Cypriot woman who ran the corner store in Womerah Street, a blonde with enormous dark eyes that filled with tears at the least provocation. This was where I first met him—he used to hang around the steps of the shop, chatting to Iris. She liked his company I think, and maybe dispensed a little charity in his direction as well, although there were other times when she would lose patience and chase him away. Jimmy never offered any information about himself, and if you asked him a personal question was liable to change abruptly out of his engaging, companionable self into someone both reticent and deeply ashamed; he might even, head down, wounded and sorrowing, turn and walk away. He was not an alcoholic or even a drinker; he would sometimes ask for cigarettes, but never money; and he remains the only street person who ever gave money back to me, as he did one lucky day by the El Alamein fountain, taking a two dollar coin from one of his pockets and pressing it upon me. I remember him talking about Ford motorcars that day, and this was also the occasion when he delivered an especially inspired rave, most of which I have unfortunately forgotten, apart from one blazing image, which was that he could see the iridescence of his thoughts turning in the hubs of the wheels of cars passing in the street.

+ + +

The last time I saw Jimmy was beneath the Coca Cola sign that stands at the top of William Street at the very place where Victoria Street and Darlinghurst Road intersect to make Kings Cross. He was carrying a small cardboard suitcase such as children used to take with them to school, with black dots and yellow clouds painted all over it. We had not met for a while, and greeted each other with pleasure: Gidday Dutchie! Hi Jimmy! At that his face clouded in the familiar sorrowful way; but instead of turning and walking away, he held up one finger to me, like a mime, then ceremoniously took the case and placed it carefully upright against the wall of the building before which we stood. Next, drawing himself up to his full height, with his feet in second position, standing beside his suitcase and indicating it with a graceful theatrical gesture of his hands, he said: My name is Adam.

+ + +

The last time I saw Adam was in Hyde Park; at least I think it was him coming slowly toward me down one of the long diagonals, pushing a shopping trolley full of junk. His head was down, his hair was completely grey, and he seemed many years older. I paused. He did not look up. I passed on, not wanting to disturb him on the long shuffle graveward. I have since heard it said that once those men and women of the street begin to carry things, it is rare for them to speak to anyone much any more.

Martin Edmond lives and writes in Sydney.

 
 
 
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