Swords and Crowns and Rings (56 page)

‘Archie wack,' said the old man, taking them into a pitch-black room.

‘Reckon he's half sawney?' said Jerry out of the darkness.

‘Got a case of galloping tongue-tie,' said Jack. Chuckling, he struck a match and held it high. In the gloom there showed two stretchers, a table with a gas ring and a basin.

Jerry saw a gas bracket on the wall. He lit the gas, and a blue fishtail sprang up, bubbling.

‘Ah, hang this, Jack,' he said. ‘There's no window at all. It's a flaming wombat hole. Think what it'll be like when the real hot weather comes.'

‘You looking for a belt on the ear?' demanded Jack. ‘Sure, this is a hell of a place, but it's a roof. Better than a drain-pipe or a pig-pen. I've never heard so much moaning.'

The Nun tried to pull himself together. His naturally sanguine temperament struggled with his abhorrence of the city. His face was set against it, and he was powerless to change.

While he was shaving he talked to himself, and once Jackie was troubled to hear him say, ‘I feel as if me arms was tied down.' His hair became greyer, his face fell into folds like an old flag. Jack, seeking for some remedy, said, ‘Would you feel more like yourself if we could get you some teeth?'

The Nun said absent-mindedly, ‘Oh, yes, me tats. I can do without them a bit longer, me old Jack.'

What he felt, without putting it into words, was that his life was receding into a small cave. Hope had seeped away. In the country things were cruelly bad, but you weren't able to see it all in a birds'-eye-view as you could in Sydney. Men waiting all day to get food coupons checked or changed; going home empty-handed to starving wife and kids; going back the next day; standing in the sun till some officious pannikin boss let you through the turnstiles.

The immense, apathetically orderly crowds of the unemployed affected Jerry like a slow suffocation. He knew that every third breadwinner in the country was out of work, that the end of each year cast upon the streets hordes of youngsters whose chance of getting a job was nil. But he had the impression that he was seeing them all at once. They were an army, down at heel, inglorious, despondent. They raked in garbage-tins, stirring around in the muck; they prowled the streets, trying to sell things, packets of flower seeds, sugar scoops made of tin, jars of homemade jam and pickled onions. Sometimes they had sulky, reluctant children with them as though to emphasise their need. While Jerry was still decently dressed he was often stopped and asked for the price of a pie. He thought he would remember those hangdog faces, sockless ankles, and collarless necks until the day he died.

‘Ghost,' he sometimes said to Jack. ‘What's it all about?'

He came very quickly to the place where most of the unemployed were already, a critical point where he felt convinced that there was an enormous enemy out there—faceless, ravening, pitiless. Jerry didn't know what to call this enemy, but Towser called it capitalism.

Jackie saw very clearly that Jerry was bewildered to the point of paralysis. There was nothing solid for him to fight. He could not play a man's part because he couldn't see where a man's part lay. He had always thought of himself as having his head screwed on the right way, but intellectually he was now like a cast sheep. So many of the older men were like this, like blind dogs, apprehensive, listening hard for a clue, jumping and snapping at any threatening sound. Others were cowed and docile. Often they killed themselves, and the papers gave gruesome details of their deaths, employing a righteous approach as if the bankrupt grocer who sliced his own throat had in some manner let the country down.

Jack and Jerry were often themselves part of the speechless, dawn-lit rush, walking three or four miles to some factory which had advertised a vacancy only to find that there were sixty or eighty men camped there before them.

‘They read the newspaper, of course,' explained Towser, ‘when the job pages are tacked up outside the office. Some of them wait there from two or three in the morning.'

Jackie began to get up in the moonlight, to run through echoing streets to the
Nation
office, where the presses rumbled in a subterranean beat, and the lighted galley-board was surrounded by hordes of dark, shivering figures. He was too small to read the Wanted ads, but there was never any need. Someone was always reading them aloud, and the crowd dwindled in accordance with a constant, agitated movement, as men in groups hastened away to the industrial suburbs. Some already wore overalls and carried tools and packets of food, as though to impress a prospective boss with their desperation.

If there was no vacancy that seemed a possibility for his father or himself, he went back through the chill streets, passing an occasional waterproofed policeman propped in a dark cranny like an image. It was his game to pretend that Cushie Moy was walking with him, laughing, hand in hand, up alleys where dew-fall had glazed the tiles of mouldering, airless houses, and there was a smell of garbage and rat-holes.

In this game they went down to the sea, and sat on the massive wall that was all that was left of the long-demolished Battery of Sydney's first garrison years. They looked at the mountain of the Bridge, blotting out the spangled northern shore, and he said, ‘Why didn't you tell me that Sydney was such a...was so...?'

But even in the dream he could not think of the right word. The city had spoken to him, and he did not know how or why. There was nothing seductive about it. Its haggard Victorian dilapidation was not picturesque. With a native hardihood, it sprang from its cruel past with an unquenchable joy. This was its charm for him.

Maida would have been frightened of it. It would have rolled over her like a steamroller, as it had over Jack's stepfather.

He tried, in love and tenderness, to bring his wife's young face before him. But it seemed wan and out of focus. He thought, ‘I was true to you, Maida, really true. You and Carlie, you couldn't have been more cherished.'

Carlie! When Jack thought of him his heart melted. Sometimes he still had sore pangs of grief for Maida and Carlie, but more and more when he thought of the little boy he thought of him alive, jumping up and down in his cot, his hair so fine it floated. The gaiety of that baby! He was so pleased to be alive he spent his seven months beaming about it.

Astonishing to think that there was no more Carlie except in his memory, and maybe Lufa Morgan's. Jack thought of good old Lufe in the cream boat, glissading over the red-dawn river, the water birds rising, banking away, long legs dangling down like those of mosquitoes, Lufa turning his shy crooked grin upon some other offsider. But perhaps he was no longer on the Dovey. Maybe the Depression had got him too.

But it was never Maida who was with him on these solitary mornings when the sea slapped half-asleep at the foot of the old wall and lights looked up out of it like drowned faces.

What was Cushie doing, wherever she was? Was she content, did she know love? Or did she feel as he did, that they had always been two sides of one coin: she, in her physical perfection and defencelessness, like a beautiful gentle bird, he so small and grotesque, and yet hardy, full of purpose?

Sometime during these weeks he understood that he was a whole man again. Workless, always half-hungry, the seat of his pants so darned it was like sitting on a cushion, with not a thing in the world to give him hope, he laughed aloud, knowing that his spiritual centre of gravity had righted itself. The whole world was trying to climb a greasy pole, but he wasn't.

‘I've climbed mine,' he realised.

Walking home, he remembered his stepfather saying that he could feel his muscles deteriorating. ‘Gives me the pip. I'll turn into a flaming slug. Ghost, if I could only dig some spuds, load a truck, any bloody thing. I'd do it for damn all, just to have something to do.'

Jack thought of his own mental muscles sagging, turning into perished elastic. He fetched out his books again, and bought more from the Paddy's Market opened the year before in a cavernous tin shed at the Haymarket. Books could be bought there for a penny, even less. Jerry looked at them sometimes, jaw-breaking stuff.

‘What you ought to do, me old Jack,' he suggested, ‘is go to one of them night schools.'

Everywhere charitable organisations, churches, Government committees, provided free and almost free education. Towser was cynical.

‘It's to keep the workless off the streets,' he said. ‘Keep 'em busy so they won't dream revolution. Like those wool-masters in the old country that made their apprentices do an hour's compulsory education after a fourteen-hour day feeding the loom.'

‘Bloody hell,' said the Nun. ‘Do you want it both ways? The old country got thousands of people who could read and write out of it, anyway. And I notice you don't have any more fourteen-hour days.'

Towser grinned. He lived to argue. He belonged to the Unemployed Workers' Movement, organised to prevent evictions and the brutal stand-over tactics of some dole inspectors.

Jerry's antipathy towards Towser had not decreased. He said, ‘He's a ratbag. Don't know why you don't tumble to it.'

‘Takes all sorts,' said Jack. ‘At least he tries to help people.'

It was true that Towser was a lenient lodging-house keeper. There wasn't one of his tenants who'd be an acquisition to anyone. The richest were the pensioner couple who were scarcely ever seen, so timid and reclusive were they. Others came and went, ratty-looking drifters, who probably did Towser out of even his two and sixpence a week, and stole everything that wasn't nailed down into the bargain. Then there were the derelicts in the twilit basement, kept in order by Jock.

The thing which was secretly shameful to both Jerry and Jack was that the dreadful house had become precious to them. It was a bolt-hole. Each found a certain relief in the knowledge that when they came to the end of their resources Towser would let them doss down with the cockroaches.

The Nun groaned with self-disgust when he thought of it. A roof was a roof when winter came: he had to use his common. But it made him feel he was under an obligation to Towser, that they all were: tame people the man liked to keep around the place for some purpose of his own.

Since he had started at night school Jack spent all his spare time studying. He could smile now at the education his parents had thought so remarkable. It was better than that of his Kingsland schoolmates, and that was all. It was not a powerful enough weapon to overcome the drawback of his dwarfism, but it was a start, and it could be improved.

‘But why all this economy?' asked Jerry. ‘What do you see in this witch-doctor stuff?'

‘It just fascinates me somehow,' said Jack.

‘I can't fathom what good it'll do you.'

‘There'll be something.'

Jack felt an increasing power and energy; he longed to get his teeth into something. Sometimes he felt that it could well be the world; he wanted to shake it like a rat. But playfully. He could not hate the world now that he knew it better.

His specially made clothes were now all worn out.

‘I'll never get a job in these togs. I look like a chopped-off Charlie Chaplin.' So he went to the Clothing Relief Depot, to be knocked back with, ‘I dunno, dear, we never seem to get any second-hands from midgets.'

So he went to the principal of a nearby boys' school, a Christian Brother whose own long black habit looked done for, and asked if there were any old school uniforms about the place.

The principal was saturnine and pragmatic. He had no romantic ideals about Lady Poverty, knowing that the old girl was rarely dignified and austere, and tended in real life to have her front teeth missing and a grimy smell. Compassionate as well as wry, he was pleased to be able to find in a cupboard a navy serge uniform from the days when the boys wore uniforms and not just any clothes their parents could fossick out of charity depots and second-hand shops.

‘God, Brother!' said Jack, dismayed at the little bum-freezer coat with the badge on the pocket, the trousers with legs twice as long as his own.

‘Don't knock it till you've tried it,' replied the Brother tartly.

In the empty schoolroom Jackie stripped off unselfconsciously, and the man looked with pity at the large, muscular calves and thighs, the pot belly, and the backside that curved out as if to balance it. The angular deformity above and below the knee-joint was now very pronounced. While the Brother was thinking about this, he noticed that the young man was giving him a genial glance.

‘Picture, aren't I?' said Jackie with a teasing wink.

‘You've a ton of cheek, I'll give you that,' said the principal.

By this time the boyish charm of Jack's face had gone, vanished into a gauntness that made his unusual features all the more noticeable. His eyes were as fine as ever; and he used them like swords or lances, fixing people with them until they almost forgot the oddities of his anatomy. The principal felt it almost as a blow that these splendid grey eyes, with their thick eyelashes, should belong to one so devilishly treated by fate.

Jack took away the uniform to a tailor who no longer had a shop, but still did some mending and alterations in his tenement front room. He looked at it doubtfully.

‘I'm only a coat-hand,' he said. ‘Do you want to risk the strides?'

He made a good job of both, and Jack felt a new man. His shoes were still calamitous, and at interviews he had to be very careful never to turn up his soles.

A few times Jerry got as far as an interview, and once he had a start on a building job. He said he was a carpenter, though he was only a useful handyman. He might have weathered it, except that the work was three floors up, and the height nearly destroyed him. He had to creep along the joists on his hands and knees. The other carpenters carried him, in the way they had, so that he'd collect at least a week's wages when he got the bullet.