Swords and Crowns and Rings (63 page)

‘I'll go to Dad. He'll sneak me into the stables for tonight, anyway, and I'll decide what to do.'

But he was reluctant to lose his books and few belongings. How could he replace them?

He resolved to march boldly up to the house, wearing the mask of an innocent man, pretending he'd just been out to look for work, resolved to brazen it out if any rozzers were lurking in the hallway.

Half-way up the stairs he saw the male pensioner peering around a timidly-held door.

‘The demons been here! Took away a whole sack of Mr Vee's papers and things. Asking about you, they was.'

‘What did you say, Pop?' asked Jack, a cold lump of trepidation forming in his stomach.

‘I said I didn't know nothing, supposed you was out looking for work as usual. Dunno if they believed me though.'

The old man's eyes were red as blood with some inflammation. He kept dabbing the run-off with a grey rag.

‘That was mighty of you,' said Jack sincerely.

The old man grabbed his arm. ‘What will become of us all if Mr Vee gets put in clink, boy? The dees said maybe the house would be shut up. Me and the wife, we don't know where else we'd go for half a crown a week.'

He was servile with fright and self-pity, looking pathetically at Jack. ‘What's Mr Vee done, son? And them demons said Jock was in serious trouble.' He added absent-mindedly: ‘There's a joker in the basement in the rats, terrible noises, like a steam whistle. I asked the dees to take him away but they said it wasn't their business.'

Jack went on up to his room. There were so few things in it he couldn't be sure whether it had been searched or not, but he felt it had. He thought he could smell cigarette smoke in the air. He found a little food, and rolled it and his clothes and some personal belongings in a blanket swag. He slipped a few books into his pockets. Taking what was left, cups and saucers, a frying-pan, the rest of the books, he went down to the pensioners' room. It was some time before he could cajole the old man into opening the door.

He said, ‘I'm going to stay with friends for a few days. Would you take the rest of my stuff and keep it in your room till I come back? Especially the books.'

‘What if the dees come back and ask me?' faltered the old man.

‘You don't have to admit to anything, Pop,' explained Jackie. ‘Tell you what: If I'm not back in a fortnight, sell it all, do anything you like.'

The old man was not grateful. He knew Jack's belongings would only fetch a few pence from the second-hand shop, and he'd have all the trouble of carrying them there.

Jack walked away without looking backwards, feeling strongly that he had finished with the place. More than that. Something had finished him with it, pushed him out, because other happenings were waiting for him elsewhere. He fancied perhaps they were connected with the Nun. His steps quickened as he thought of talking it all over with that tranquil man amid the smell of straw and manure and feed, and the gentle sound of horses moving in the stalls below.

He was ravenous. It was late afternoon. He had had nothing to eat since he left the Murrays' neighbours, and God knew that had been lousy enough, a cup of tea and a scone as flat as a boot-sole.

He heaved his swag into a toast-rack tram, and swung himself up easily. A couple of people looked at him in their indifferent city way. It struck him then that it was a long time now since he had remembered he was a dwarf. When he had, it was about as important as remembering that he had black hair.

In this bone-shaker tram, built like a wooden ship or railway-carriage of the previous century, he realised at last that what his mother had planned for him had come to pass.

It seemed a funny time for it to happen, when he was stripped of all the world held valuable, job, roof, wife, son, human love—perhaps even his freedom if he were to be involved in the catastrophe of Jock and Towser.

Windows facing the westering sun were incandescent. A reflected fire filled the tram. The man opposite him had dazzling squares of red moving in his glasses. He said, ‘Well, Lang's opening the old Coathanger next week. Going to be there, mate?'

There were hurdles and hoardings for half a mile along the approaches to the Bridge. Men spidered around the pylons and below the arch, stringing light bulbs on loops of cable.

‘There'll be millions there, millions,' said the man, as pleased as if he had built the Bridge himself.

Before they had reached Park Street, Jack realised that he could not, after all, ask for Jerry's hospitality. There was Heenan, the righteous foreman. It was impossible, unthinkable, to put Jerry's job in jeopardy. Jerry's happiness had to be protected. Jack couldn't help grinning. It seemed to him that he was carrying on as if he were his old man's father. Somehow they had swapped roles.

‘No sweat, me old Dad,' he thought; and he left the tram at the corner and walked up towards the Domain.

A southerly was rising, a chill rampaging wind. It punched the big traffic lamps over the intersection, tossed the thick mops of the trees that were already losing leaves. He looked up towards Oxford Street, wondering if he should spend his last remaining money on a decent meal. But the hunger seemed to have died out of his belly. He had, anyway, some edible odds and ends in his swag. So he cut across through the trees and went on into the Domain.

There were already crowds of hoboes there. The police had almost given up patrolling it and moving them on; for where were they to move to? It was wasted effort. Jack had heard that the cracks and shallow caves in the sandstone on the other side of the Dom, facing Woolloomooloo Bay, were permanent homes for down and outers, an
al fresco
lodging-house all along that historic shore.

Jack merged with the hundreds of wandering men. The thought came that he should try for a bed at the City Shelter, or at one of the religious organisations' refuges, but it did not linger. He had had enough of that. He had camped out before and would again. He went looking for a tree, a rock, to keep the southerly's teeth away.

The curiously indifferent peace that had come to him in the tram persisted. He had taken some sort of involuntary step forward or outward in life: just as, on that long-ago early morning, he had accepted that he was Maida's husband, and had turned away with unselfconscious resolution from his boy's dreams of Cushie Moy; just as, out in the wilderness, under those unappeasable stars, he had known that he could survive grief, rage, anything.

The regular dossers knew just where the feral wind from the Harbour pounced, getting between ribs and into hollow teeth, making life close to the ground unbearable with whipped-up grit. Thus, already, with the afterglow still steady in the west, and only a few street lights showing on the overturned keel of the Darlinghurst ridge, all the good positions seemed taken.

‘All right, all right, mate!' Jack said a dozen times as a featureless bundle snarled at him.

He threw his swag at last behind the robust legs of some marble statesman who stood, head bent, hand caressing fleecy chin, thinking about Free Trade, or Federation, or Repulicanism, or some other issue of the eighties of the previous century. He wore a frock-coat, this statesman, for which Jack was heartily grateful, since its spread kept the wind from him. He sat there watching the lights across the Harbour appear like a fine dust of mica, hearing big ships farting out near the Heads, and seeing little ones shuffling rapidly towards Circular Quay.

Jack chewed slowly at the bread and meat he had brought from Towser's house. The cold, the long hunger, the fatigue and excitement of the day, had put him into a passive state. He didn't know whether to keel over with weariness or just wait for the thoughts to come into his mind where he could look at them.

He threw the gristle to the ruby eyes that flitted amongst the bushes.

Something abided. Perhaps it was God, as the song said. Or mankind. Or both, waiting, enduring for each other. His own life had been short, and he had, he supposed, little real knowledge of mankind. Sometimes he thought of it as running on rails, like trams, towards an unknown and unidentifiable terminus. But people like Lufa Morgan, his mother, the Nun, Het and her rabbiter, even Milly and her Dad, they were there to teach him something. He knew now that he had learnt not only to look but to see.

Like that knowledge in the toast-rack tram that he wasn't a dwarf. Some fellows, six feet high, burly as bulls, were midgets inside. Kewpies. Soft little mice. But he wasn't. He was a full-sized man, and nothing could alter that any more.

He remembered Maida calling him her little tiger. The Nun had sometimes called him that, too.

‘Well,' Jack thought, ‘I'm not little. But I can be a tiger any time I want to.'

And he let out a snarling roar, so that something in the bushes, creeping up to rat his swag, emitted a sputter of fright, and rose to its feet and blundered away.

Jack laughed. He rose and stretched, looking around at the town's stars and suns and coloured comets, the hard shapes of buildings suspended in halated metropolitan light. His sense of identification with the city's sturdy vulgarity, its rough beauty, resolved itself into words: ‘You game old bastard!' The words rose out of love.

The southerly had spent itself, but the air was like an ice-box. It smelt pungently of ships and petrol, the ashes of a bonfire where the Domain keepers had burned swept-up leaves that day. Jack rolled in a blanket, lay along the plinth behind the statue, his head on his swag, his face protected by a newspaper, and his feet propped against the statesman's marble box of a right boot. He wondered about Jock, furiously trying to deliver his story to some policeman who couldn't understand a word of it. Towser, too—the many inexplicable things about him. Brains, though. Beside him the other men in the Murray house had seemed as straightforward as horses or dogs. But there were oily patches in Towser that Jerry had sensed; something false, a corrupt smell of self-indulgence—something that Jerry had sniffed and recoiled from.

Yet Jack was grateful to Towser. The man had recognised something in him; that was why he wanted him in the Movement, why he'd tried to get him out on the balcony where the photographers could catch him. Towser had spotted that, as part of a public
persona,
dwarfism was irresistible; people couldn't help looking, listening, half-amused, half-admiring that big ideas could come out of so small a body.

Jack remembered then how that crowd had listened and watched when Mr Lang was speaking to him, even though he had been consciously only a stooge for the Big Fellow. The feeling of incipient power had knocked at him then, even a sense of inevit-ability, when he had thought: ‘I could do this better.' His interest in the world of politics and power, half-glimpsed as yet, was like a seductive landscape hidden in mist.

An intuitive excitement made him tremble. It seemed as though everything had been leading up to this moment when he was disarmed of everything but knowledge of himself.

To dismiss dwarfism as a burden was one thing; but to make an asset of it was a challenge, tomorrow's challenge. He felt a salty joy in his own toughness.

After he had been asleep for an hour or two, the stray cats crawled out of the bushes and ate the crumbs he had left on the steps. One, further from death than the others, able to hoist itself up the steps, slept against him for the sake of warmth. After the sun rose, it tottered away.

Before seven Mrs Marion and Dorothy Moy finished dispensing hot coffee and soup to the long line of gaunt men and a few dishevelled women who had been waiting at the usual place in the Domain since dawn. Some at the end of the queue missed out; there was no more to give them. They dawdled away, swearing or doleful. Robert heaved the big milk-cans that had held the food into the back of the van and waited for the women.

Dorothy said, ‘You go on home, Mrs Marion. I'll walk across the grass and get a taxi. It's such a peaceful morning.'

It was her frequent custom, but Mrs Marion said, ‘You look a little peaked, Miss Dorothy. And it's Sunday. Wouldn't you like to rest today?'

But the girl shook her head, smiling good-bye as she walked away across the wide sunny downland, the sea its fence on one side, the city on the others. There was scarcely anyone about now. Only a few bodies, too sick or drunk or numbed with sleep to go looking even for free food, lay on seats and under trees, covered with newspapers, blankets, flattened cartons. So great was their disorder and decrepitude that they looked as if their owners had thrown them away. Dorothy looked at them in despair, feeling Clara Jackaman leaning over her, leaning on her.

Her despondency was so great that she looked at the day as one might look at a flight of steps, the minutes occurring one after the other, each to be surmounted. Yet she was acutely aware of her surroundings: the church bells already quarrelling plaintively across the water, the long leaves of the Judas thorn turning towards the sun like hair blown all one way, the dark paths the feet of cats and men had left across dewed grass, the lovely light.

It occurred to her that a state of cowardice, courageously acknowledged, might be the start of something else; but she could not think what it could be. She felt then with certainty that no one would ever love her, that she would turn into another Australia Jackaman, that life would not round into anything. And while she suffered this affliction, another part of her mind pronounced decisively that such melancholy was what all young people felt, that it vanished with youth.

She turned aside, as she usually did, towards the statue of Sir Henry Parkes, the Father of Federation, the man who had first dreamed of pulling together the cluster of remote, squabbling colonies into one commonwealth, the man who had set her grandfather James on the road to prosperity, and been his faithful friend. But in the statue's face, both leonine and senile, she could never find any sign of the red-haired, pug-nosed firebrand her grandmother had often described to her.