Mug Shots (23 page)

Caryatid no longer

A couple of months later, before we'd made the move to the mountains, James Hall hurried into my little office as I hunted and pecked, knelt by my side and told me ‘it might be best if your column finished up after another four weeks'. He was ­agitated, and his voice had a tremble in it. ‘Calm down, Jim,' I said. ‘I don't mind.' (And though we'd miss the extra money, after four-and-a-half years of searches for a subject,
I didn't
mind.) The cartoonist Bill Leak, whose studio was next door, came in as soon as James left. ‘What's going on? Are you sacking him or is he sacking you?' I told Bill I'd enjoyed it more than James had. That afternoon, as I left the building, I felt like a racehorse whose saddlebags had been unleaded. I could have sprinted home.

I suspected James was acting under instructions. I'd had a run-in with the then editor, who'd had a critical review of one of his books on politics removed from the pages at the last minute without bothering to consult me. I'd then written a memo to him (always get it in writing) to the effect that in pulling the review, he'd put his own interest before that of the reader, and I took strong exception to it.

On my way to drop it into his office, I showed the memo to the chief sub-editor (always protect your back), which ensured rapid circulation of its contents round the newsroom. The editor was in Canberra, but his deputy, who also got a copy, rang and abused me, and I abused her back. The story leapt across to the rival
Sydney Morning Herald
, where it got an airing. This was bad news for the editor but good for me—it made it hard for him to sack me. But—to use a cliché this same editor was fond of applying to politicians—my days were numbered.

Earlier in my career, John Alexander, then editor-in-chief of the
Sydney Morning Herald
, had offered me a similar job with his paper. When he'd asked my current salary, he'd whistled, and called it ‘derisory'. He'd pay me a lot more, but that came with a proviso—he was, he said, very much a hands-on man. Thanks, but no thanks.

Years later (1996 by now) my salary remained derisory, but the editor I'd crossed refused to increase it, maybe hoping to starve me out. When this failed, he announced, like a sentencing magistrate, he'd give me six months. But he went instead,
sideways
, and his successor gave me another twelve—why not? I was probably the cheapest literary editor in the country.

Misquoted—twice

So I was still there in February 1997, when we moved to Wentworth Falls. After nineteen years of dead money, there were many goodbyes—to Geoffrey Plant, the Franciscan who preached so powerfully at our local church; to the film-making Marriotis, who'd lost almost everything in the fire; to my barber who, during a final cut had said to another customer entering his crowded salon ‘No go, mate. Try the wog around the corner', and to Andre, my literary dentist, with whom I'd had one-sided conversations for years. On my farewell visit, he told me he'd just discovered Annie Proulx. Fine, I said, before being gagged with cotton wool, but please check my bridge. Andre was not to be put off. He had the page and the sentence ready: ‘At night on the ploughed prairie the darkness was thrown into deeper ink by the sprays of stars, asteroids, comets and planets trembling above him as though in a sidereal wind.' He shook his head. He was miles away.

‘The bridge!' I gargled.

‘Sidereal wind. I love that.' I pointed at the bridgework, he came to his senses, and probed. ‘It could go at any time,' he announced. Only one pylon supported it. So what should I do?

‘Don't bite hard.' Condemned to soft food indefinitely, I said goodbye to Andre. ‘I'll miss our little talks,' he said. But he was off too. Like so many dentists, he was going to start a vineyard.

Examples from my father's repertoire of axioms have been cited before, and there was another which we unwisely ignored—‘Never accept the lowest quote'. We did, twice.

First with Wally, the Lebanese removalist, who turned up early one morning in a van covered in graffiti. Though he'd checked what had to be moved a few days earlier, now he wasn't sure he could fit it all in. After volleys of obscenities he (a big man) and his assistant (a stripling) got everything out of the house and most of it in the van—but not all. A wardrobe, a chest of drawers and an antique table remained on the footpath.

‘We'll have to repack,' Wally said. ‘Tight fit. Fucking tight fit. Might cost you a little more.'

‘How much more?'

‘Maybe fifty.'

We were trapped. Wally repacked, but his silent and largely toothless assistant didn't look well. He'd gone from scarlet from lifting to deathly pale. While Carmel drove on ahead with bits and pieces, the three of us squeezed into the truck cabin. As we groaned towards the mountains Wally attempted banter—‘Poofs on the march tonight. Mardi fucking Gras'—but I was annoyed and didn't respond, while the stripling kept leaning over as if about to faint, and then appeared to fall asleep. ‘Fucking weakling,' said Wally, who whistled to fill the silences.

When we arrived, and squeezed our things into the four rooms, Wally had another go. I paid him the extra fifty dollars, but his huge hand was still out.

‘Tip?'

‘No tip.'

‘Let's get out of here,' he said to his bent-over assistant, giving him a whack on the back which almost felled him. Then he slammed the van door and roared off, swearing and shaking his head.

Before we'd moved in we'd had the flooring replaced, but as we moved our furniture around, the cypress pine bounced. The cheap carpenter we'd used had boasted he'd install it with ‘invisible nailing', and he was right. He also put in three French doors, but they were so crudely fitted they couldn't be locked, and we spent our first few weeks feeling vulnerable. We'd brought our inner-city wariness with us, and an axe-handle was kept by the bed. But Wentworth Falls was peacefulness itself, though we ended up paying double to keep it that way.

An experienced friend had one piece of advice: have one big room to winter in. He was right. In the Blue Mountains, winter turns from a noun into a verb, and we needed a space to spend it in. My wife, who sometimes has visions rivalling those of Renaissance popes, designed an enormous room. To help pay for it, I stayed on as the
Australian
's literary editor for ten more months, which involved four-hour round train trips every day. I finished at the end of 1997, after ten years on the job.

The late Frank Devine, by then a columnist at large (in both senses) would sometimes say, loudly and embarrassingly, especially after lunch, that I was the best literary editor the paper had ever had (competence at last!). Bruce Bennett, in the
Oxford Literary History of Australia
, was just as kind: ‘The book review section of the
Weekend Australian
became a necessary reference point for opinion and judgement, especially during Barry Oakley's editorship from 1988 until 1997.'

I was given a roaring send-off by my friends and colleagues (with the editor and his deputy absent), staved off genteel poverty with a one-year literary grant, wrote a novel (
Don't Leave Me
), edited my diaries (
Minitudes
) and slipped soundlessly into my seventies.

Old bones

By now I had a new doctor, who'd been told by my old Sydney one that I ‘presented unusually', and soon I had a challenge for him. Over the vice-like Blue Mountains winter, I developed a deep ache in the hips that came on at dawn. He pressed and tapped and told me that it wasn't arthritis, as I'd thought. Then he sent me off for X-rays.

Before I took the images back to him I broke the seal on the envelope (To be opened by referring doctor only). Here, like a
Penthouse
feature, was my pelvis from every angle—the skeletal self, mysterious and profound, a coral garden. The accompanying report was in code. There was ‘no significant scoliosis or rotational deformity, the vertebral alignment was well maintained'; on the other hand, ‘there is mild schmorl's node development in the end-plate surfaces, and minor
anterior
spondylosis deformans at all levels'. It sounded like what Quasimodo had in
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
. My doctor read it and said that my reputation for bizarre presentation was intact. He sent me to a neurologist.

The neurologist ran over my legs with brushes, pricked my legs with pins, pressed vibrating rods against my ankles, said he was baffled, and sent me off for blood tests. While I was waiting, there was a heavy thump from the other side of the door. Had someone fainted while giving blood? (I was quite capable of it myself.) A Chinese lady came out and I went in. I took off my jacket, but there was no hook to hang it on. The pathologist told me why. When the lady had tried to hang her handbag on it, the hook had given way—because there were gold bars in the bag. ‘I know specialised medicine's expensive,' I said, ‘but I hope you're still taking plastic as well.'

I still get the mysterious deep ache. As one sinks deeper into the seventies, and the body wears down, things also happen to the inner self. The membrane shielding it from the world wears thin, and reality breaks in. Small worries metastasise into major problems. Your body's slower but your anger's quicker, and so, embarrassingly, are your tears. Hoarded frustrations and resentments emerge into the light, foibles ice into vices, setting you, as the saying goes, in your ways. You hang on to routine like a life preserver: the morning paper, the coffee break (from what?), the trip to the village, the slippers. There's a feeling of a penumbra descending, the gentlest of twilights, even of a morning.

And yet, and yet. The less flesh, the more spirit. Marriage's physicality maturing into companionship, the vicarious pleasures of grandparenting, walks in Carmel's idyllic garden, friendships cellared like fine wine, indifference to the opinions of the world. As the body threadbares, intimations of a folded inner self, packed as if for a journey—a journey that, even for the Christian, is mysterious, even terrifying.

A room of one's own in Wentworth Falls …

with garden outlook.

Going home

The great American novelist Saul Bellow wrote that we have no home city, but what comes increasingly to seem like one is the place where you grow up. The further I move from 4 Montague Avenue, the closer it gets, and before starting this memoir I flew down to Melbourne and made a pilgrimage there. It was an afternoon in April, the city's kindest month. Montague Avenue, set between a resonant network of Crimean War streets—Alma, Balaclava, Inkerman—was deserted. Poised in an autumnal haze, it offered up a peculiarly Melbourne middle classness. Trimmed lawns, hydrangeas, broad Californian
bungalow
verandahs—decorums, privacies: a hushed suburban stasis, as if I were dreaming the place.

When I reached the gatepost of number four—I can't go in, strangers have taken possession—I remembered the scorch marks it carried for years from the 1943 Guy Fawkes Night, when Mrs Kirkpatrick, our neighbour, ran out through the smoke and told us to go somewhere else. And as for you, she shouted, turning to Alan, older and bigger than the rest of us, that should be the fireworks up in New Guinea.

When we moved there in the late 1930s, Montague Avenue was raw and treeless, frontier territory, where gang wars were fought. One summer night, the big kids from the top of the street attacked those down below—the Wenden Grove gang. Too small to throw them far enough, I dug up stones for the Wenden Grove kids. As the artillery hurtled up and down my mother came to the gatepost and screamed for me to come home at once. As I retreated to our drive Murray M— was being carried down the adjoining one, with a great gash in his forehead. Four years later the Japanese would behead him in Rabaul.

There were many things I knew about this street that the street itself no longer knew—the fights, the football, the steaming manure left by the horses that drew the carts of the baker, the Chinese greengrocer, the milkman; the sonorities of David's cello from the house opposite as he went up and down the scales, the backyard air-raid shelters now filled in and forgotten, big Alan's footfalls as he did his nightly run round the block, the white feather he'd once found on his doormat, the hundreds of unwilling bike rides to school—once so dreaded that I got off round the corner, scratched my knee with a stone until it bled and came back home again, pretending I'd fallen off and hurt myself.

We were staying with our son Justin and his partner Kathryn at the time of this Melbourne visit, and after listening patiently as I reminisced after returning from Montague Avenue, he held up some printouts and said, ‘There's more.' My cousin, who was the family genealogist, after months of my pleading had finally relented, and emailed his startling discoveries.

The family tradition that my paternal grandmother was an orphan was a fiction. Margaret Winifred Owen, the documents showed, was the daughter of one Barbara Mooney, a prostitute, who worked in Romeo Lane, off Bourke Street, opposite what was then the Eastern Markets.

According to her rap sheet, Barbara Mooney solicited so often she was jailed eleven times between 1867 and 1875, with extra days sometimes added in for insolence. Another document testified that at the age of five, Margaret Winifred ‘was left in a Romeo Lane brothel, her head a mass of sores'. She was placed into guardianship in Abbotsford Convent, and licensed to Margaret Burns in 1896 to be apprenticed as a dressmaker.

Maybe Margaret Burns, who became a wonderful family friend, and as an old lady in black took my brother and me
everywhere
, never told my father her secret—that his mother was not in fact an orphan but a neglected child. Whatever he knew, the half or full truth, he treated Burnie, as we called her, generously for the rest of her long life.

She outlived the fourteen-year-old she'd taken from the convent, who died in 1935 of pneumonia. My grandmother had re-invented herself. On her marriage certificate—to Albert Edward Oakley, my dour grandfather—she put her age down from thirty-four to twenty-nine, and her place of birth was changed from Pentridge Prison to South Yarra.

I have only two images of my grandmother. As a four-year-old I was taken to see her on her deathbed—the faintest of memories of a pale head topped by matted grey curls. The other is much clearer—it accompanied my boyhood for years. A portrait photograph that hung in our dining room of an elegant woman in an Edwardian ball gown, framed in gilt. I am a lady, it proclaimed to the world. (A lady who lived in a large house in Toorak.)

Some rapid googling revealed that unsavoury Romeo Lane was now Crossley Lane. Justin drove us there immediately. On the corner, fronted by the ever-popular Pelligrini's Espresso Bar, was a bigger, older building with a warren of rooms at the back. Was this where the brothel had once been, where my grandmother was rescued? It was getting dark, when the prostitutes would have been coming out. We were standing where my great-grandmother Barbara Mooney might have once stood, and this is where my narrative begins.

If we do have a home city, this is mine … Yarra dreaming.