Swords and Crowns and Rings (55 page)

‘Cheapest is the City Refuge, son,' said the policeman. ‘You can walk there, too.' He pointed out the direction, calling after Jackie, ‘Better have a bite here first. You'll get sweet damn all there at this time o'night.'

So they bought hot pasties and ate them walking along to the refuge. It was a hard-featured building with the date 1887 incised over the door, and a streak of vomit beside the steps. Jackie went in, came out quick smart. ‘All full up. Good thing, too. Stinks. The bloke said there are seamen's boarding-houses down by the docks. Come on, Dad. Down the hill.'

The Nun followed him submissively, stupefied with weariness and with the noise. The offensive odour in the air reminded him of heated dirty metal, or acid chewing through wood. They found a boarding-house, paid their money in advance, and were shown to a cubby with a spavined double bed.

‘Maggoty dump,' muttered Jerry.

‘Never mind,' said Jack. ‘Just for tonight, eh?'

Jerry didn't like to remove his clothes, for the blankets were mildewed and the sheets smelled of phenyl and were unidentifiably smudged. At last he pulled off his boots and lay down on top of the bed with his own track blanket over him.

‘I'm stonkered,' he said.

Jack took a pack of cards from his pocket and slipped a couple over the holes in his boot soles. ‘Think I might go out for a wander,' he said. ‘It's only a bit after eight.'

‘Don't lose yourself,' grunted Jerry. ‘Put the light out as you go, will you, mate?'

With the boy gone, he felt as if he had dropped into a sea of pumice. Everything abraded feebly, yielded, fell away beneath him. His sense of hopeless dismay was so profound it was near panic. He wanted to get up, run like blazes out of this place, jump any train anywhere. The city noises clacked in his ears, his head. He couldn't think. Everything was wrong. There was not even any true darkness outside the window, only a church spire scummed over with green reflected from some illuminated sign. After a while he saw a blister pearl appear from behind the spire. He lay there, scratching, looking at it dully for several minutes before he recognised it as the moon. His scratching became frantic, and he lit a match to see what was biting him. The whole wall was hung with tiny black berries. As he gaped, they broke their ranks and vanished.

‘Ghost!' groaned Jerry. But he was too bushed even to get up to put on the light. He sank into sleep, and the bed-bugs came out in their thousands and nearly ate him alive.

Jackie's reaction to the big city was altogether different. In a daze of delight, he walked around the streets, down to the Darling Harbour wharves, lined with ships like moored churches and palaces. Behind high tin fences men laboured; he could hear steam panting, winches squealing, clangs and rumbles, distant shouted orders. He thought, ‘People working everywhere, there must be jobs for us somewhere.'

The lights fascinated him, the topaz and diamonds, the red glare and the foggy pearl. There were lights high up in the air as if they were on poles or mountains, and lights deep down in valleys—dazzling clots and strings and nebulae. The city seemed to sprawl everywhere. As far as he could see there was no darkness ungemmed by windows, street lamps, the little searchlights of moving cars.

He thought, ‘Oh, God, this is for me. If only I had come years ago!'

He turned and almost ran up the hill to the big street along which they had come from the station. George Street. It shone at the top of the hill like a luminous vapour, pierced by the glittering squares of display windows. It was a late shopping night. The shops had not long shut, and the street was crammed with people. Trams moaned and crashed past with what seemed perilous speed.

Scarcely anyone stared at Jackie, not even children. Nor did they look at each other. They were shabby people, but the shabbiness was not humble but brazen, devil-may-care. He saw a man with the seat half out of his strides, showing dirty underpants, and no one even glanced at him. And an old woman in bedraggled skirts, wearing a man's felt hat and carrying a birdcage containing an outraged cat, and again no one looked.

The multiplicity of goods in the show windows astonished Jack. He gazed at them like a savage, uncomprehending. Yet it was the Depression! What could this city not produce in better times?

A tiny newsboy ran past him, squalling incomprehensibly, thrusting papers under people's arms, grabbing their money, not interrupting his chant as he did so. ‘Paper, mister?
Sun
Final, Sports?'

Astonished, Jackie saw that the paper-boy was an old dwarf, even smaller than himself, with a face creased like a dry passionfruit. Jackie smiled at him, wanting to say something, but the dwarf did not even see that Jack was the same as himself. He ran on, hoarsely shouting. On his back was pinned a yellow
Sun
poster which said
BRITAIN GOES OFF GOLD STANDARD
.

The occurrence delighted Jack. He felt that he had in effect become invisible. He was just part of a Sydney crowd.

He found his way back to the boarding-house unerringly, as though his very skin told him which way was Central Railway, which the Bridge.

When he lay sleepless beside the snoring Nun, he could still feel the fierceness and swagger of the city. It was in the air, like a half-mad glitter, unlike anything he had ever known, and yet uncannily familiar.

‘This place is like me. Like what I used to be when I was a kid, before High Valley and all the rest.'

It was extraordinary. The furious chemistry of the city had half-poisoned or half-intoxicated him. He could not sleep. All he felt was a wild longing for morning to come, so that he could go out into those streets again. Some time in the night he heard thunder like bronze gongs, and rain falling as if from a bucket. Water overflowed the gutters with the sound of rivers, plunged down the broken spoutings like waterfalls. And this excess, this violence, seemed so right for Sydney that he fell asleep again like a trusting dog.

In the morning both he and Jerry were marked all over with swollen welts; their shirts were speckled with blood exuded by the glutted bugs. The musky smell of the insects was in the air.

They had a cup of tea and a slice of currant cake at a corner shop, glad to get away from the lodging-house. They saw now that they were in a congested, ugly part of the city. Factory chimneys blew out low streamers of pungent smoke, stridulous groans sounded from the docks below. Yet the sky glistened like a child's eye.

‘Bridge first, eh?' asked Jack.

They had scarcely rounded the corner before they saw it, a monstrous hump jamming the end of the road, hanging the sky obliquely with a net of scaffolding. It was like the cadaver of a dinosaur being dissected by ants. No photograph Jerry had ever studied had come within a mile of showing the Bridge's soaring massiveness, the grace, the power.

‘Gawd,' Jerry kept saying reverently. ‘To think that they can get that great bugger to stay up there! Would I think myself lucky to work on that! I'd be like a dog with a tin tail.'

All the way to the Bridge they saw men standing in knots on corners, in doorways. Some were dejected and gaunt, others challenging or cynical. The Nun looked at them, perturbed. Jackie scarcely noticed them. The sunny city shone around him; he knew his previous night's reaction was heightened, as though he'd had half a dozen beers. He felt skittish, and winked at a sluttish woman banging a doormat against iron rails.

‘You dinky little bantie,' she croaked in delight. ‘Come in and have a cuppatee, come on.'

The prodigious structure of the Bridge was crawling with men.

Notices were nailed everywhere: No jobs. No Work for Casuals. Keep Out. No Vacancies.

Still, Jerry approached a foreman with a pencil behind his ear. The man was civil. ‘You're about eight years late, Dig. She's just coming up the straight now. Expect to have her opened next March.'

‘You'll be clearing up for years,' protested Jerry. ‘Look at the place around here. You'd think the Huns had been shelling it. Labourers...you'll want labourers. Me and the young fella are real good on the shovel.'

Jackie could see his father was disappointed. He said cheerfully, ‘Well, we didn't expect to hit it first time up. Tell you what, we'll find a decent doss somewhere and count up our dough, and work out a plan of attack. What about around here somewhere? Handy for the Bridge. We'll go and ask every morning till they're sick of our dials around the place.'

‘What's this place called, then?' wondered the Nun.

Jackie found out that it was Dawes Point, commonly called The Rocks. It was a dilapidated district, a stony backbone of a peninsula full of jump-ups and fall-downs, dog-leg flights of perilous steps, crumbling rows of stone tenements leaning against each other for support, bald waste sections where starveling women hung their washing and scurfy kids ran and squealed. These youngsters had legs blotched with festers or impetigo.

Jerry spoke to one of them, holding up a penny so that the child grinned ferociously.

‘Where's a place to get a good clean room, Snow?'

The child considered. ‘The Buggerin' Barn is full up. But there's Towser's two and a zac for the room, and get your own tucker. And if you're down and out he'll let you have a pozzy in the basement for nudden.' He gaped frankly at Jack. ‘What made you like that, mister?'

‘Smoking,' said Jack.

The boy snatched the penny and flew away, stopping momentarily to point a thumb at a tall house on the upper level of the cobbled lane. On the way they passed a tottering cottage surrounded by a crowd.

‘What's going on, missus?' Jerry asked an aproned woman. She said tearfully, ‘Rotten shame! How they can! The Atkinsons are being sold up.'

Later Jerry was to get used to these pitiless slump auctions; but this, his first, filled him with a raging contempt. During Atkinson's long unemployment the family little by little had become bereft of all comforts.

‘All the bedding they got is sugar-sacks and newspapers,' Jackie heard someone say. ‘Aw, they tried but. Poor woman, she tried to keep the children looking decent.'

Even their funeral insurance, dearest possession of the respectable poor, had lapsed. Now they were being sold up on the spot to reimburse the landlord for portion of the rent arrears. No notification had been given.

‘They put it in the newspaper; that's the law,' explained an old man. ‘But fancy spending penny'appeny on a sausage wrapper! You can get coupla stale bread rolls for that.'

The husband was out looking for work, the wife alone and half-silly with terror. She sat on the floor in the small front room, her head pressed into the stomach of a fat neighbour, refusing to look as the linoleum was torn up and sold for five shillings, the kitchen table carted away on someone's back, the very cups and saucers of that morning's breakfast taken off the sink. For, in spite of the sympathy of the crowd, the frequent vicious heckling of the impervious auctioneer, there were plenty of bidders. Jackie himself bid for and obtained for three shillings the absent Atkinson's toolbox.

The Nun was flabbergasted. ‘I'd never have thought it of you, Jack! God damn it, you're a rat. How in hell will that poor devil ever get a job without his tools?'

As he spoke, an overalled man came out of the crowd, tapped Jack on the shoulder and said, ‘Give you six bob for the lot, Shorty. There you are, a hundred per cent profit.'

‘No, thanks,' said Jack. He turned to his stepfather. ‘See?' he said.

But the Nun didn't see, and strode along for a hundred yards, ranting, until at last Jack got sick of it and said brusquely, ‘You've got a big mouth, Dad. I bought these tools to give back to Atkinson. I could see that big cow back there was just itching for them.'

The Nun grunted, then exploded into laughter.

‘Stuck me neck out, didn't I?'

‘Get it chopped clean through one of these days, y'long streak,' replied his son.

When Jack took the tool-box back to the distraught wife she insisted that he take something from the box for his trouble. As he shook his head, backing away, a neighbour growled, ‘Don't want her to feel under an obligation, do you? Ain't she got enough to put up with?'

They opened the tool-box, showing a meagre accumulation, a claw hammer with only one claw, a set of chisels and screw-drivers, a blunt saw, a workman's few odds and ends. Amongst the worn but well-looked-after collection, Jack noticed a pair of hair clippers.

‘I'd be much obliged for those, lady, if you can spare them.'

She nodded, suffocating with tears.

Jackie said, ‘What will happen to these people? Where will they go?'

‘Liverpool, La Perouse, one of them unemployed camps. Poor cows. Four kids, you know, and she's got shocking legs.'

The Nun expressed the opinion that Towser's house stood up only because it was too silly to fall down. It was a blighted yellow, its iron lacework torn off years before, its verandas death-traps of rotten boards. When they knocked, Towser himself appeared. He was a strong middle-aged man with sharp hazel eyes and a lumpy contentious nose. Towser had an educated accent, and a voice both challenging and mocking. His real name was George Vee, and Jerry disliked him the minute he saw him.

Both he and Jack instantly realised the origin of his nickname when he laughed—an eruptive bark as if he were about to have a seizure.

‘Bit of luck you caught me,' he said. ‘I was just about to go off with the old truck, woodbusting. Jock will show you the room. Four bob for the pair of you. Jock!' He yelled down the stairwell to a black hole at the bottom. He added, ‘Jock's an old Wobbly—IWW. Camps in the basement.'

A stout man with white hair growing straight up from a gibbous skull took them upstairs.

It was a terrible house, full of old dry disconsolations. The floor was covered with a mosaic of broken lino, compacted dirt squeezing up through the cracks like tufts of felt. Even Jackie felt uneasy on the stairs, as though there were spooks all around, wheezing, coughing, feeling crook. The air smelt of damp wallpaper, clothes dried while still dirty, and the sad saps of man.