Mug Shots (8 page)

Birth and afterbirth

At about this time of exhausting class warfare, Bill Hannan and Desmond O'Grady, newly sophisticated, returned from Paris and Rome respectively. They wore sharp jackets and pointed shoes, and had bad news. Australia was not a good place for would-be novelists. Cultural thinness. Fiction couldn't grow in it. Bill went further. Not only did Australia have no soul, it wouldn't matter if it had. He'd converted to the French New Realists—Michel Butor and Alain Robbe Grillet, who maintained that fiction didn't need story or character, merely neutral descriptions of the external world: all that could be known was the surface of things.

Since I at the time was having a Ned Kelly period, and writing a story of his final hours which
Southerly
, moving at its own marmoreal pace, would eventually accept, I riposted by saying that Australia mightn't yet have a civilisation but it did have myths, and until cultivation and Left Bank berets came along they would do. All this was tossed back and forth as we wandered the suburban streets with the unavailability of a bar or coffee shop proving their point.

If Desmond was critical of Australian society he was surpassed by his Italian wife Gegi, whom he'd married in St Peter's in Rome. Both Gegi and Carmel were pregnant, and Carmel became a complaints sounding board. They ranged from the poverty of the cuisine to the lack of central heating. We had a party in our flat to welcome the visitors back to the land they weren't happy with, and the two pregnant wives found they were wearing identical coat-dresses from exclusive Georges. Though Carmel's was lilac and Gegi's light brown, she and Desmond left immediately.

By now the baby was imminent, and kicked at night as if impatient to get out. It made its escape early on the eighth of November, but seemed to have second thoughts beforehand, forcing Carmel to endure a thirty-six-hour labour. Her husband was not on hand to help. At our arrival at the hospital, we were confronted by a fierce nun, who told me to leave at once. The patient was briskly instructed to ‘go and empty your bladder'.

Carmel was then taken into a cramped and primitive labour ward, with two beds separated only by a plastic sheet. As she endured her own labour, she had to listen to the cries of the woman on the other side as she gave birth, and then witness
the doctor
emptying the afterbirth into a basin. The hospital was called Bethlehem, and the name was apt.

When, after a day and a half, the baby arrived, she was blue, and taken away immediately. Her mother had to lie there uncleaned for hours, while others waited their turn on trolleys in the corridor. We called her Madeleine, and she had perfect features. ‘When your father saw you after you were born,' my mother said helpfully, ‘he went out and vomited.' We marvelled at this being that had begun life no bigger than a full stop at the end of a sentence. To hold that evolutionary accident was the sole cause of this miracle requires a leap of faith greater than that required for Christian belief. Madeleine was not the blind product of the forces of nature but a gift.

All done the old-fashioned way: first the wedding, then the baby (Madeleine).

The gift cried a lot at night, and every morning I'd emerge from our flat as if dazed by a dart and walk to Caulfield Technical College, to which I'd mercifully been transferred. Though the students were more manageable, teaching was just as trying as at Richmond. It was hard to be enthusiastic about punctuation in front of a class of forty after a run of sleepless nights.

Madeleine was soon getting teeth and I was losing them. The trouble went as far back as the war, when our father, who was in charge of Air Force stores on Thursday Island, sent us back a huge tin of quarter-pound blocks of chocolate. First we used them to build ships and castles, then we began eating them. After this, and a daily diet of lemon tarts in my school lunch, my teeth gradually succumbed, and I was forced to go to a dentist.

‘They'll have to come out I'm afraid,' he said, as he inspected the stumps and stalactites of my upper jaw. A few days later, in a surgery opposite Caulfield Railway Station, a mask was put over my face, and I was told to inhale. It was nitrous oxide, laughing gas, and I had an Experience. I was ballooned to Somewhere Else, where the ace of diamonds had inexplicably to be presented to gain admittance to a behind-the-mirrorland quite different from the field of dreams. Things happen in dreams, but this was suspended in timelessness. I was floating in an eternal now, and this, it was immediately evident, was what the afterlife was going to be like. Time and space will fall away, leaving just you, treading presentness as one does water. You don't expect intimations from your dentist, but this has stayed with me ever since.

Nightmare of the red room

Despite her now having an indentured husband, Carmel was pregnant again, and we moved from the Caulfield flat to a characterless house in Carnegie, a characterless suburb. The price ($6500) was all we could afford. ‘Stylish' was how the estate agent puzzlingly described it, and stylish was what Carmel did her best to make it become.

Some things needed doing in its progress towards this ­condition, and I couldn't do them. I was the kind of man who thought grout was the name of an Australian wicketkeeper, a bastard file a public service expletive, nogging something done with eggs, and sarking a Scottish folk dance. When the fuses went, we had to wait in the dark for my father to come, as he did when the pilot light went out under the hot-water tank.

Determined not to give up, I got up a ladder once to unscrew a curtain rod bracket. The screw had been painted over, and was immovable. At that moment one of Carmel's sisters and her husband arrived from Queensland. Alex, huge-handed and practicality incarnate, got up on the ladder, poked with the screwdriver and loosened the screw in what seemed one continuous movement. Alex was the kind of man who spent hours in his shed playing with tenon saws, mitre boxes and diaphragm valves.

When our second, Justin, arrived, he was brought into a house held together with Blu-Tack. He was a crier too, but we had three bedrooms now, so he could be consigned to the far end of the house. The bedrooms soon filled with a third and a fourth. On the arrival of the fifth, the lounge was taken over, which left us with only the kitchen and living room. By the time the quintet was put to bed with their bottles, books, teddies, dolls and blankets, this room was a wall-to-wall litter of toys. Every night we shoved them into cupboards, and every day they came back again. It was a pointless but essential ritual, a brief respite from detritus as relentless as lava.

We bought a Guernica print to put over the fireplace, and sometimes, on wet days, when the five were at play, war or both, Picasso's images of chaos and uproar reflected what was happening at floor level. The contrast between day and night became unsettling. Hours of shouts, thumps and howlings—and then, by eight o'clock, after the last story had been told, the last warning issued, silence. We'd sit with a glass of what was still called claret and at about half past ten open the door, creep down the hallways to the front bedroom, lie there and wait for sleep, knowing that when it came it was preparing to leave at least one of the children.

Married life in Carnegie.

We had twelve years of broken nights, an endless catacomb of cryings and coughings, that focused particularly on what we called the red room. It had cheap red lino and a red night-light, and when going in there to a child trapped in a dream-terror, you seemed caught up in it too—the glow of ambulances and brothels, the nightmare redness in the heart of the dark. They might have been the swinging sixties for some. For us, they were the sleepless ones.

There is a scene in
Pride and Prejudice
where the wealthy and eligible Mr Bingley is seen unexpectedly approaching on his horse, sending the Bennet family running around in crazed circles. Our own reaction, when our leisure was precious, was similar. Is it Uncle Len from Newcastle? Auntie Gladys from Shepparton? Max the mad Fitzroy poet? At an unexpected knock, we'd shepherd the brood into the laundry and hide.

One lonely bachelor friend—we always had one lonely bachelor friend—used to outwit us by coming round the back, so we put a dustbin against the side gate as an early warning system. Once we heard it move, five little children had to be hidden and hushed. Finally the problem solved itself. One of the kids peeped out a window just as he was looking in, and he went away for good.

Every weekend, our boisterous household was rivalled by our next-door neighbours—an elderly couple and their middle-aged son. They lived in a state of passive alcoholism during the week and broke out on Saturday, pursuing one another from room to room while roaring insults. Next to them was another middle-aged misfit son who lived with his mother and went on peeping expeditions on summer nights. And next to them again lived a large, sullen Slavonic man who stared out at the world from his front gate and rarely went beyond it. One night he shuffled in his slippers to the railway line at the end of the street and was killed at the pedestrian crossing. Carnegie was not as characterless as I first thought.

Responsibility avoided again

In 1960 Brian Kiernan, absurdly youthful and freshly graduated MA from the University of Melbourne, arrived at Caulfield and we found much in common. It was a friendship built on books and a lunchtime beer.

Brian and his partner Suzanne moved into an Italianate mansion called Labassa. It has since been taken over by the National Trust, but was then divided into grand but shabby apartments. Theirs took in a drawing room and ballroom, and sometimes we had dinner there. We'd dine on the ballroom's podium, with a distant fire burning in the baronial grate, flickering highlights in the wallpaper's gold.

To add to its decaying glamour, Joe Lynch, the alcoholic subject of Kenneth Slessor's
Five Bells
, once lived in Labassa's tower:

Everything had been stowed

Into this room—500 books all shapes

And colours dealt across the floor

And over sills and on the laps of chairs.

During the sixties, Brian's essays on such canonical novelists as Joseph Furphy, Xavier Herbert, Christina Stead and Patrick White rescued them from the benign prison of the democratic nationalist tradition, locating them within the vivifying currents of European and American fiction instead.

These essays, when collected into a book, also rescued Brian himself. They led to a lectureship in English at the University of Sydney, which made the Kiernans pioneers in what later became a minor exodus—the Careys, Williamsons, Oakleys and a number of others leaving Melbourne for sybaritic Sydney.

Just when I thought I was getting on top of sleepless teaching and settling into a routine, the principal called me into his office. He was a grave, authoritative man, and he asked me, gravely, authoritatively, whether I'd consider being sports master. The more I thought of it the more awful it sounded—so, true to my philosophy of constant movement to avoid responsibility, I applied for a vacancy in the Humanities Department of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.

The interview was a frightening experience. I was confronted by a semi-circle of men, but I had my words ready. ‘Inchoate' had got me into the university, and I had a small lexicon of others at hand: ‘captious'—as in ‘I don't want to sound captious, but in some ways Caulfield Technical College wasn't challenging enough.' ‘Peremptory' also came in handy, as did ‘lucubration', trotted out to let them know I studied at night; ‘recondite' did not go amiss, and ‘plethora' and ‘hermeneutics' were also deployed. I thought afterwards I'd given them persuasive evidence that I would not teach English expression well, but I got the job.

I joined an institution that had neither bike racks (as in Mildura) nor sports, and was elevated to lecturer, but my stay was short. Long words had got me into the place, and five short ones got me out of it: STUDENT DRINKS BEER IN CLASS. These words were on a Melbourne
Herald
poster outside Flinders Street station as I, with hundreds of other gaberdined commuters, hurried under the clocks to catch a train home.

The student's name was Ryan, and the lecturer involved was me. I walked into the classroom on a Monday morning and Ryan (I later testified in court) was drinking beer from a bottle. He held it high, proudly, like a trumpeter doing a solo. I escorted him from the room and remonstrated with him
(the perfect
, formal courtroom word, as I continued with my evidence) in the corridor. The defendant (there he was, in the dock, tall, raw-boned, aged about twenty, with a sullen stare) then swore at me and threw a punch. It came at me slowly, and got no further than a shoulder. I grappled with him (another good courtroom word). To continue, in non-legal language: he lunged at me and ripped my shirt. I got him in a headlock, a hold I'd perfected from years of wrestles with my younger brother, and by the time we stopped I was ahead on points.

Ryan was found guilty of assault, and did a night in the slammer. (Later, tragically, he followed a girl to Tasmania, and when she rejected him he shot himself.) The head of the Humanities Department, an owlish bureaucrat, wasn't happy with the publicity. I told him he seemed more concerned about the press report than the welfare of his staff. Perhaps, he replied, it might be best if I left. I agreed with him, and went into advertising.