As a sort of accompaniment, or sound cover, an old Broomwade compressor was doing about fifteen hundred revs, from the sound of it, twenty yards from a team of workers with jackhammers, making another hole in the streets of Sydney. The lovers were getting on with the matter in hand, people were looking at the noise more than at them, and I thought I’d give them a hand; I went down to a newsagent in Castlereagh and got some bangers, went back and threw them down in George Street. That scattered the street-people and the two in the doorway did more and more to each other, until I couldn’t stand it any longer and kept away from the window. What I did wasn’t as bad as when I got up the top of the Mutual Insurance Building—that’s a place that’s wide open; you can go up the top any time and climb onto the top of the lift well—that was when I threw pies down into Hosking, or over the wall into Martin Place.
I had a rest on the carpet in the office and spent a bit of time remembering the happy times I’d had, like in a newsreel one day and a huge fat ex-Labor politician sitting with his daughter behind me, talking loud so that no one could hear what was going on. I turned round and said ‘Shut up!’ That was the only time I’ve ever spoken to a politician, or one has spoken to me. He started to say I shouldn’t interrupt what an important man has to say because the most casual thing he said was worth a whole lifetime of what I said—he didn’t exactly say all that, but I knew he was going to from the way he looked.
So I said, ‘Shovatt!’ and he shut up; they don’t like their names being mentioned when there’s criticism going on.
I got up to go and get something to read. Dymock’s wasn’t far away; boy, we used to give them a caning when I was at High School, hardly a week passed when we didn’t have dictionaries or notebooks to sell to the kids that didn’t go through the city on the way home. All I could get, though, was a tiny book in an orange cover. It turned out to be a Russian grammar. I hardly had the thing in my kick, standing near a corner of the shelves upstairs, when a hand seemed to come from round the bend and touched me on the trouser. You might think it was an accident and the hand was looking for books, but believe me, I had no books where that hand touched me. I don’t like that sort of thing, there were enough kids like that at school, but at least they had the decency to come right out and ask you, or if they were shy of talking they’d do something for you, a favour, and keep doing things for you until you sort of grinned at them and then you’d be talking together and pretty soon you’d find yourself walking home with them and no one else around and when they wanted you to look at something they’d grab your hand. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not one of those phonies that sees something clammy and weak in all the poor devils that want you to like them—want boys to like them—but it gets a bit too much when they try to sneak a kiss, or watch you and look right in your eyes and pay attention to what you say as if you were important. It makes you very uneasy.
But this hand round a corner, I didn’t like it. So what I did, it was pretty mean, but men like that take a risk all the time, they know they have to get caught a fair percentage of the time; what I did was whip out the book and put it in the hand then make a terrific noise so that the counter-jumpers across the way looked up and saw this hand with the book in it. He had to pay for it. The floorwalker or whatever he was lugged him down to the manager’s office and a few of the shoppers noticed what was going on; that was good enough, usually they wouldn’t know if you were up beside them. If I hadn’t made such a noise they would have given me a reward, I think; but they were a bit suspicious of why I made such a fuss. The floorwalker said thank you very much, but he was the sort that wouldn’t give you the smell of an oilrag, I could see that.
The poofter was dragged off, down the stairs to the main floor, and as he went he called out, ‘I love you, Michael. I still love you.’ What a thing to say. I didn’t want to stick around and explain that my name wasn’t Michael, so I got another thin book in my shirt and out.
Back to the office. I settled down again on the carpet to read the book. It turned out to be pacifist poetry, of all things, and I’ll tell you it was certainly a weak character that wrote that book; I bet he couldn’t stand the sight of his own blood, let alone someone else’s. Me, I think wars have to be. While two people in this world argue and don’t see eye to eye, there’ll be wars. It’s no great distance between an argument with words and one with fists and one with guns, but a lot of people think there’s a big difference. Which shows how wrong they can be if they’ve never heard of temperaments like mine. And like yours, Stevo, I hope.
It wasn’t much comfort to me, but I had to do something. I lifted the tops of the metal filing cabinets—it doesn’t take much muscle—and pulled the drawers out. That way you don’t need a key. Then I changed papers from file to file, there must have been thousands of bits of paper in those drawers, all standing on edge in light brown folders, I made such a thorough job of it that I bet they had to burn the papers rather than take the trouble to fit them together again. If they decided to get them in order, though, there’d be employment for a worker; that’s a main consideration, they tell me. Why they kept the papers, though that’s the real mystery. Sometimes I’ve heard office people talk and I’ve thought I’ve been on the track of what they see in all their papers. The ones I heard talking spoke as if the papers themselves, or the words written on them, had a life of their own. They even sounded to me as if the life the papers had, or the words, was a different kind of life, even a better sort of life than what us ordinary people have. And that’s just silly. It’s almost as if the papers and the words are a higher race of being that have to be protected; the men I heard talking started to come more alive when they got down to looking at them and reading the words. Perhaps their minds were on the papers, not in their bodies, and they only really lived when they dug out the paper words. I don’t know.
I suppose by now you’ve guessed that that sort of thing is beyond me; I’m no good at working out other people. You need a different sort of brain for that. More sympathetic.
Thinking gets you into trouble. I’d been so far away in my head that I didn’t hear the cleaner coming. The first I knew was an interruption to the sound coming into my head; there was something between me and the steady stream of sound. I was so startled that I jumped up and clobbered the cleaner just as he came in the door; I felt a bit bad because he had gear in both hands, it wasn’t quite a fair thing. Besides, I outweighed him. That always gets me. Right here.
He made a sound like when the dressing had to be changed on Stevo’s leg. Remember? The leg I scalded. And down he went, his face looking like old Mr Kelly when he came to where I worked one day and asked me for his shotgun back that I took. The stinking people next door rang up and told him they saw me climb in the window.
With him breathing heavy on the floor and me feeling miserable, the windows started to look like cemetery slabs, the desks like graveyard memorials. When I stood up, the desks looked like a forest of memorials to the dead.
As I climbed over the grille into the top floor of the Arcade, I wondered to myself was it the old man’s or was it Ma’s egg that was sour?
The trees round St Andrew’s were shaken in the wind, their sound reached down to me walking in George Street. As a matter of fact, their sound was a bit like long arms sweeping out from the trunks of the trees, flailing.
I walked round a bit, but couldn’t make up my mind where to go. What I did, I went back and down under the Town Hall steps, you know the little underpass where the Mayor’s Rolls pulls up. At night it’s nice and dark and no one bothers you if you stay out of sight. As nights go, it wasn’t a bad one, the concrete wasn’t too cold on my back and I got involved in this red and white dream. I was in an old town—I’ll think of the name in a minute—and I was higher than all the buildings and the light poles and every building was red and white. Even the spires on the old convict churches were shorter than me; I could reach down and have them tickle my hand, no trouble at all. The people in the streets—I didn’t remember them in my dream but I can see them now—were like ants. You know ants, they fool a lot of people, but have you ever watched them? If you do, it’ll open your eyes. They run around like mad; the hotter the day the faster they run, but they get nowhere. I never know who they’re trying to fool, but they fool someone; they really get their tucker under false pretences. Well, the citizens of Puddingate Bridge were like that. That was the name of the town. In the dream.
But the thing about the dream was that I was frightened. I was at the mercy of the red and white. The glare of it hit me. Somehow having actual bright red and real white both having a go at me made me very on edge. Why would anyone be scared because of a couple of colours? I suppose it has happened before, specially if the colours were the colours of enemy flags or uniforms or the wing-dots on bombers.
I woke up leaving a stain on the concrete where I touched it. A sweat stain. It was only another place I had to get out of. There were a good many people on the streets, so since I needed a few dollars I got up and walked to Woolworths’ corner and started a bit of a song. Singing made me feel better. Don’t get me wrong; I can’t sing for nuts. But making a noise was a good antidote for the feeling I had about the red and white dream. I got enough money for a few beers and after I swallowed them I sang louder and got more.
I had a lot of fun walking along in the street talking to people.
You had to have a doorway handy or a corner to duck round, not because they’d chase you, but they turn round and stare after you and if they see you talk to someone else they stop worrying and trying to remember who you are, but if you just duck off out of sight they’re still fretting.
‘How’s the goldfish, Gerald?’ That’s the one I started with.
‘What’s good for acne?’ An old lady about forty started to give me a few remedies, but young girls were the best ones to ask.
‘Did you get your membership card yet?’ That was a good one for men over twenty, that’s about the age they start worrying about what they belong to.
‘Why did they turf you out?’ That was for men, too. They’re always easy marks for the worry wart.
‘Turn it a fraction to the right. Just a fraction.’ That was for anyone that looked like a car driver, but any nut drives a car.
‘Has she had the baby yet?’ That made them go red. People don’t like to be the centre of attention, they expect to get out boldly in public, but stay private.
‘Was there rust inside it, as well?’ People are ashamed of rust.
I stayed there till I got sick of city faces, then I hopped a train and back to the sticks where I belonged. Actually it wasn’t very distant sticks, but far enough away to make me feel different. And better. I had a brush with a snapper on the train and I had to back up right to the last carriage, where I let him corner me right at the back of the train. I didn’t feel much like smacking him over the skull, so I pretended to go through all my pockets and some I didn’t have until we reached a station. It was only about five miles I had to go, so I waited until the train was moving out of the platform, pushed past him and off the train and started walking. I felt a bit of a coward, getting away sort of sneaky and not over his dead body, so to speak.
Suddenly it was a cold night and I couldn’t help thinking of my brother’s plaque stuck on a crematorium wall—Northern Suburbs—on a niche which may or may not have contained his ashes, out in the wind and the cold. Just stuck there. When you visit, it’s a nuisance if you strike a day when a lot died and they shoved them in the same wall. You can’t move for mourners, and people start swearing and treading on kids. And there’s no place to stick a flower. And maybe not even any ashes in the hole. A lot of people have nightmares about that, not only me. How does anyone really know they burn the bodies? If a few ashes is all they have to show for a corpse, they could ship the bodies out at night to medical schools and burn grass clippings instead. No one would know…It’s the first thing I would think of.
There it goes again. I’m noticing that a lot lately. I no sooner finish talking about something else than I’m back on to myself again. Sometimes I make me sick. Getting soft.
I sneaked in the house and slept the rest of the night out up in the ceiling, and when small bits of the morning poked through the old nail holes in the iron roof I was awake and listening to the kids making their talk about the world, what they could see of it.
Stevo was sitting up in bed by then, reading. Nothing could break his concentration. After Bee had tried to get an answer out of him for a while she got a bit sharp. I suppose you couldn’t blame her, and tiptoed into the room and gave him a Boo! just behind him, but it hardly shook him more than a foot upwards. She had to laugh, and asked him how he felt.
‘I’m feeling not pretty well and the only thing I can do is pray.’ You could see all the sharpness had gone out of Bee.
‘What you reading, Stevo?’
‘A book.’
‘Are they nice people in it?’ He looked at her.
‘Why do all my friends get killed?’
‘What friends?’
‘Even in books.’
‘I guess the people that make the books consider your friends have had their turn to live and now it’s their turn to die.’
‘Does everyone die, Mum?’
‘Everyone that has a turn to live, has a turn to die.’
‘Even you, Mum?’
‘Of course.’
‘Me too?’
‘You’ve got a fine long time to go, sonny boy. There’s a lot of years to be happy about yet.’
‘Mum, can we leave the front door open all day today?’
‘The front door’s open most days. I’ll make sure we keep it open today, son.’ You could see he wanted her to ask why.
‘Are you expecting a visitor, Stevo?’
‘Oh, someone might drop in to explain something.’
‘Could I explain it?’
‘No, it’s not in my head yet. It isn’t anything for you to worry about, Mum. But it makes me lonely when everyone has to have their turn to die.’