Authors: Niall Griffiths
I’d like to hang about here, for a bit; wait until winter, when the snows come, get a room in one of the balconied hotels and do some walking through the gorges and across the plateaus and, at night-time, get rat-arsed in the Gardners Inn and come to Evans Lookout for a drunken gawp on my way to bed and see it all covered in snow under the blue moon. How would that look? I don’t know, but I know I’d love it. Some bits of Australia are okay.
But that’s it for Blackheath. Never came here as a kid, anyway, so it’s got nowt to do with the trip. Just recuperation, after the hellish Blackpool-in-the-sun of the Gold Coast. Sightseeing and all that. Sydney’s only about two hours away. I remember quite a lot about Sydney.
The family knew a couple, John and Margaret, who moved from Brisbane to Sydney, and it is they who they stay with whilst they are in the city, in their flat in the district of Vaucluse. It’s a small flat, so beds are made up with cushions and blankets on the floor in the front room for the children to sleep on. The boy likes it; it’s a nest, he thinks, beneath the bay window, through which he can look down on the revellers below, being as they are in Vaucluse’s party area. One Saturday night the boy sees different coloured lights and people moving
and dancing through those lights and he hears loud laughter and shouting and music and it looks all exuberantly abandoned and celebratory and suggestive of something good and bright about humanity. One day, he thinks. One day. There are things to look forward to in this life and this world. Plus, one afternoon, they go shopping in the Argyle Centre in the city by the bridge and they go to a bar and the boy wants a shandy but the barman has no more than a splash of lemonade left so the boy drinks a pint of more-or-less undiluted lager which is enough to get him drunk. Colours glow brighter and everything spins. The skin on the faces of the adults around him looks endlessly fascinating and their words reel with mystery and the hilarity and absurdity that underlies everything makes itself known and available. My God, thinks the boy, here is something extremely special. This stuff, this drink, this is something that is going to help him for the rest of his life. This is a gift from God. This is magical. This drink is a beautiful and secretive potion. The world trembles and hums in a curious pale blue light.
And, even through the sickness and sweating that come on later that night, still these words: This is truly magical.
They go to the Botanic Gardens and gaze in wonder at the huge orb-web spiders suspended between branches. They go to Coogee Beach. Bondi Beach too, where they witness large rats scampering through the litter on the sand of an evening and where they eat at the Double Bay Steak House after which, in the dad’s words, they all ‘get the wild shites’. On Coogee Beach the boy swims in the sea and, back on the sand, is surrounded by sea-wasps; giant jelly blue-bottles, they pop and hiss and spit and slither towards him with malevolent intent. He panics and leaps across them and runs to his mother. At
Botany Bay, John straps himself into a hang-glider, his first attempt at the activity, and is caught by a sudden gust and sent tumbling sideways to the bottom of the hill and cut and bruised and battered. The boy’s eyes have that imprinted on them – the rolling triangle of canvas and the flailing shadowy limbs seen through it like a demented puppet play. Recovering from the accident that night, on deckchairs outside, John sips at his restorative tea and suddenly coughs and splutters and gags. A moth the size of a small bird had drowned in his mug.
Taronga Park Zoo. The Court House, Lady Macquarie’s Chair. Parakeets and cockatoos and galas. Watson’s Bay. At the Opera House, the children sit on top of the steps while their mother takes a picture, the building soaring, vast white clam shell, behind them.
–You’re sitting too far apart, the mother says. –Get closer together.
They shuffle closer and squash themselves together like giggling sardines in a tin.
–No. Move further apart.
They do. Ten metres between them now. They find this very funny.
–You’re going from the sublime to the ridiculous, the mum says, but takes the photograph anyway, and the picture will show them separated by several yards of space and tiny before the cliff-face sail of the building behind them and big beaming pleased grins on each of their faces.
Inside the Opera House is a huge painting depicting the hallucinations of a drowning man. Vivid squiggles and static starbursts, twisted faces, strange animals and birds on a deep purple background. It captivates the boy. He was born with a caul on his head. He is immune from drowning. These are
images which he will never see and they’re not too dissimilar from what happened in his head when he was drunk and they’re not too dissimilar from what he saw of the partying people when he looked through the window of the flat in Vaucluse. Life can be this, that, way, even at the moment of its ending. Wondrous and colourful and immensely exciting. Thrilling and holy, even at the moment of its ending. One day the whole world will quake.
The boy likes Sydney. The big bridge and the surrounding sea and the towering buildings. He doesn’t particularly want to leave, and when they do, and overnight at Orange in a caravan park and his sister wakes up in the middle of the night being sick off the top bunk and his dad runs to help her in the darkness and cuts his toe open on a chairleg (‘CHRIST! Bastard! Me bloody toe!), the boy sees that as a sign. Should’ve stayed in Sydney. He liked it there. How the beer made people dance and how the people danced anyway. It is 1976.
Love that sight of cities, particularly unfamiliar ones, getting closer as I move towards them. The buildings growing bigger. So exciting; all that glittering glass and steel and concrete, and the narrow canyons between them which will contain bars and music and lights and people. There’ll be a waterfront, full of dark dive saloons and salty air, there’ll be people of many races and there’ll be exhaust and neon and many different languages and many treasures to be found. Differences to be celebrated. Faces both hostile and friendly. Lots to discover, lots to explore. We check into the Palisades Hotel in The Rocks on June 14th.
This is one of the oldest pubs in Sydney, in one of the oldest European-settled parts of Australia. The bar is brilliant, dust and log fires and smoking permitted, the rooms basic as hell – bed, wardrobe, side table and that’s it. Not even a telly. But it’s clean and cheap with a wide balcony that overlooks the harbour, the arc of the bridge swooping above and the ships coasting underneath and the skyscrapers in the foreground and also beyond the river, the early-evening sunlight striking their heights. I already like this part of the city. It seems old, or at least as old as European-settled Oz can get. I don’t remember Sydney looking like this, but then I don’t remember much of the city’s physicality at all, and no doubt it’s grown and boomed in thirty years. The Nullarbor is getting closer to us, as is Perth, and those are the things that appear largest and nearest in my memory.
But The Rocks, The Rocks… this is the place where I first got drunk. My first ever taste of alcohol occurred here, in the Argyle Centre, which isn’t there any more. So I get drunk in The Palisades bar instead and it’s just as interesting and astonishing as it was all those years ago, the hum and hover in the head, raise the glass to your mouth and the world is one way then lower it and it’s another. It’s changed in those scant seconds of gulping. It’s always the same in that it always changes. Each instance of drunkenness is different from the other, yet connected, somehow, links in a long chain of intoxication. Roundabout midnight, drunk, a taxi carries me under the bridge. I look up at it. Think nothing but a big bellow of approval, untranslatable. Fall asleep thinking; I’ve been drunk, now, on six continents. I know it’s childish to feel proud of that. But now I’ve been on drinking sprees in six continents.
I have things to do in Sydney. A month earlier, back
home, I’d received an email from a feller called Ian Peddie, a native of Wolverhampton who was teaching at Sydney uni and conducting email interviews with contemporary British writers, his field of study. Would I mind answering some questions? Not at all, I said, but if he liked, we could talk face-to-face in a month or so. Great, he said, and he’ll organise a reading for me at the uni. Bit of extra money for me. And my agent’s assistant had put me in touch with a Sydney-based journalist, Geordie Williamson, and we’d exchanged emails and arranged to meet so I bell him and tell him to meet me on the steps of the Opera House, which is why I’m sitting there, slightly hungover, frowning at the rain that threatens to grow in strength, wondering if I’m sitting on the very same spot that my arse occupied thirty years ago. Going from the sublime to the ridiculous. I remember the laughter, and laugh a little again.
I like Geordie within a few minutes of meeting him. He’s warm and learned and witty and interesting to talk to and he can drink like a thirsty fish. The sky opens and dumps oceans of water on us and continues to do so all day as we taxi over to the fish market where I gaze amazed at the pelicans and the bizarre, whiskery, spiny things on the slabs and eat fish and chips and peas in Doyle’s famous restaurant, which are delicious, even without the vinegar. Geordie tells me that he grew up in Orange. My sister was sick there, I tell him. And my dad cut his toe open.
Tony joins us later and we drink a lot and then in the morning I have to chivvy him out of his room, which reeks of sweated booze and farts. He can’t move. He’s not used to heavy drinking. Welcome to
my
world, I tell him. You can bloody keep it, he says, and lets out more foul miasma.
We drive out to Bondi, past the Toxteth Hotel on Glebe Point Road. The Double Bay Steak House is long gone, replaced by a fast-food outlet, so we go for food in the Bondi Bay Hotel. It’s still raining. It never stops raining. Battering downpour. Halfway through my shepherd’s pie I feel ominous rumblings in my belly so I dash to the toilet and am both dismayed (at the mess) and pleased (by the symmetry) to discover that, again, and at thirty years’ remove, I’ve got the wild shites in Bondi. This time, however, it’s probably got more to do with the score or so of whisky shots I necked the night before than any kind of food poisoning. Still, nice to see that memory resides in the guts and arse as well as the head and heart.
Ian’s with us, Ian Peddie, in Bondi. We’d met him in a pub the night before and I’d warmed to him instantly. A big man, shaven-headed, gentle giant, with that type of
self-deprecating
humour common in the Black Country which is always endearing. (He’ll return to Britain not long after I do and we’ll become friends. He’ll have a heart attack in Sydney, after I leave, and jack in his job at the uni which will, allegedly, renege on his medical care.) He’s been getting pissed off with Australia recently, and when he gives his reasons why, I nod and murmur in recognition at each one. Sydney’s good, I like Sydney, but like most of the biggest cities in most countries, it’s different from the nation of which it is nominally a part; it’s more relaxed, more tolerant, less restrictive. Yet the experience of Queensland is still festering within me and the Oz propensity to over-legislate and control and forcibly modify the behaviour of its citizens and bask smugly in its own spuriously inflated sense of itself is still evident in Sydney, if to a lesser extent. And I’m only passing through; Ian’s been living and working here. I’ve already seen
enough of Oz to know that I couldn’t do that. It would drive me crazy. That herd mentality. More on this, and of this, later.
We’ve got to get back to the city – my reading’s scheduled for that night, in the university. At a pub close to the uni Ian interviews me while the rain furiously batters the
corrugated-iron
roof over the smoking area. It’s ferocious, this rain, bouncing back thigh-high from the tarmac, hurling itself to earth as if in rage. The gutters are rivers, the roads wet running slicks exuding a thick and greasy mist of evaporation. Ian’s recording our talk so we have to shout and I’m thirsty and drink quite a lot of Toohey’s Old so that I’m half-drunk giving my reading, but it seems to go well; people laugh when I want them to, gasp when I want them to, throw up etc., and after it we return to the pub with some of the staff and students, one of whom attaches herself to Tony. She’s pretty, if overly made-up, with pneumatic boobs, obviously silly-cone. Early forties. Quite a sweet person, but she has a way of fixing you with eyes unmoored and laughing hysterically at an unfunny comment for three seconds and then abruptly stopping. Serioushysteriaserious, like that. I feel a wee bit sorry for her, to be honest. She limpets herself to Tony and other students whisper to me that he must be careful with her. She’s a poledancer in one of the city’s clubs. Gangster-connected, or something. She’s trouble. Not all there. Your brother needs to watch himself, here. I look over at Tony with my best expression of fraternal concern and he beams at me and gives me a thumbs-up. Oh Christ.
We go to Kings Cross, which is mad, but not in the sordid and lawless way of its London namesake; here, the chief impression seems to be of exuberance, not extortion. The
prostitutes are astonishingly beautiful and they call us ‘gentlemen’ when propositioning us.
I don’t go with working girls, love,
I tell one,
but if I did, I’d go with you,
which makes her laugh. No crack-raddled acned skin and morbid marasmus here, these women look healthy and well. I’d like to speak to them. Ask them about their lives, where they’re from, how they ended up doing what they do for a living. We go to a bar called Baron’s which has a late-night licence providing you eat so after one bite each of a hotdog downstairs we’re allowed to go upstairs to a wondrous dimly-lit warren of rooms with sofas and tables and paintings on the walls, old, judging by their craquelure. I’m drinking gin. At the bar, the guy next to me asks the barman if it’s true that the club is to close down soon and the barman sighs and pulls a blackboard out from beneath the bar which reads (and I’m quoting from memory, so this isn’t verbatim, but you’ll get the gist): YES, BARON’S IS CLOSING DOWN, LARGELY DUE TO A HUGE INCREASE IN RENT FROM GREEDY BASTARD LANDLORDS. WE’RE ALL AS PISSED OFF ABOUT THIS AS YOU ARE. DON’T WHINGE TO US. WRITE TO YOUR M.P.