The Glass Canoe (8 page)

BELIEVE IT

I was drinking not far from Sharon's taps one day wondering how the radiogram knows the record is a twelve inch or a nine inch or one of those little forty-five-speed things, and also how it knows there's still one more record to come sitting up on the spindle, when there was a great roar from the back of the pub.

Blue raced in waving his arms in a westerly direction.

‘That way! Up the hill!'

Everyone rushed for the door and took a screw up the hill. Even Flash, who was down the back of the car park having a screw with a woman from the cheese factory showed himself, alert, ears pricked for trouble.

For a while there was only one glass on the red bar, which was awash with the tide of slops. It was full, a beached ship of treasure.

Blue pointed, they saw a figure darting round a corner.

‘That ute there. I saw him pinching tools from that ute. Whose is it?'

No one knew. It probably belonged to one of the old builders sitting in the pub, too tired to be bothered with fights.

It didn't matter. A dozen set out after the thief.

I'd seen a lot of things like this before and not all of them had a thief at the end of the chase. Sometimes you'd catch a decoy up the street with his own property
clutched under his arm and a grin on his face and later you'd find someone ratted the cars left open in the car park.

I watched. When they were out of sight, I went back inside for another beer. On the uneven ground, sparrows cocked their heads, alert for sparrowhawks. The beer tasted thick, like fresh milk.

They straggled back in twos and threes with stories of defeat. In fifteen minutes they were all back, the sprinter was away.

No one was happy about it. You could see by the way they began to snap at each other, not exactly looking each other in the eye. They should have caught someone or something. There was going to be trouble.

You could feel it in the air that floated round and over and across between the two long sides of the red bar.

The barmaids felt it. They kept their eyes on their taps and raised them no higher than the glasses on the bar. It would either be trouble between the boys themselves, or they'd find a scapegoat.

It was only Thursday, there was a long weekend coming up. It wouldn't be the best thing if they fought among themselves. There might be several times in the next few days when they'd fight together against strangers, the common enemy.

Strangers. Providence provided one. A big young fellow came in the door, looked round—recklessly—
and called for a beer while Sharon was still pouring an order of eight. The pub sort of froze. A few sly glances eased round to where the main trouble would come from: Mick and the visiting King.

The King and Mick had their own language.

‘Honestly.'

‘Truly.'

‘No worries.'

‘Well—'

‘Fair enough.'

They were agreed on the plan of campaign. The other words which would have made sense of their intentions to the sophisticated world outside were conveyed by eye movements or no movements at all, a shrug of one shoulder or the absence of a shrug, the lifting of a hand to bar level, the inclining of the head forward about ten degrees, a quarter step backwards, an attempt to reach for a glass then the withdrawing of the hand accompanied perhaps by a massive shrug of both shoulders in a forward direction, a pushing forward of the lips—puffing them up as if they were over a mouthguard—so they presented a soft, pliable surface the better for taking punches, a short sharp breath inflating the lungs and mimicking the coming effort, a short sharp expulsion of breath from the nose with mouth closed mimicking the out-breath that accompanies a punch and stiffens the stomach muscles against a counter.

‘You drinking?' the King called to the young guy.

He looked over, saw the two of them together, and nodded slowly.

‘Drink over here,' said Mick.

‘No way,' said the young fellow loudly. Didn't like the look of things. But he'd used the wrong words, the wrong tone. Too sharp, too definite. Refusing hospitality.

‘Don't argue,' said the King.

‘It's sweet,' said Mick reassuringly. Only an idiot would be reassured by Mick's voice.

‘Come here,' said the King. The stranger looked round. Everyone in the place had his mouth shut, watching him. Speculating where the flood would flow. Was he a bleeder over the eyes? Was he bumble-footed, which could mean a fractured skull on the concrete floor which was masked unconvincingly by hard tiles two millimetres thick.

‘Why not?' said the stranger, swallowing. His heart peered out of his mouth.

They made room for him so it was a triangle. Mick licked his lips.

‘When you're right, Sharon, a beer for our friend,' he said politely.

A few seconds later the King said in a loud voice so all could hear there was an identifiable cause for action and an identifiable person in the wrong, ‘Say that again!'

Perhaps the stranger
had
said something, because
he took half a step back.

‘I'll have you,' said Mick.

‘Come outside,' said the King. The stranger couldn't take his eyes off them—because of the danger of a king hit—but he could feel the pub watching. You couldn't back out of a fight. Word of it would follow you to your dying day. ‘I remember when he chickened out . . .' and so forth. Your friends would get to hear of it, your wife, kids. His own pub might only be a mile away, but the Southern Cross was another world.

He went with them, looking like a martyr. We followed in a body. They didn't king-hit him on the way, but stopped in the car park.

The action was too fast to describe, the dialogue will have to do.

‘You're mine.'

‘He's mine.'

‘Hold his arms.'

‘Let him go.'

‘Not like that.'

‘No worries.'

‘I'll give you the drum.'

‘Dead set.'

‘Keep his head up or his eyes'll fall out.'

‘I've got news for you.'

‘He's died in the arse.'

‘Sincerely.'

‘Is he alive?'

‘He's foxing.'

‘He's breathing.'

‘He's dead.'

‘He's history.'

‘RS.'

‘Let's go.'

‘See you.'

‘Sincerely.'

‘Believe it.'

An hour later the stranger was well enough to get up and come in to the bar. His beer was still there, flat as a tack. The tribe would never handle him for money, so he had his roll, and after a loss no one else would have a go. They'd just let him depart in his own time. Back where he came from, where he belonged, where he should have stayed.

For the next two hours he leaned on the bar getting steadily drunk, a vacant look in his eyes. No one would talk to a stranger in his position even when Mick and the King had gone. But they would answer when he spoke to them. They had their code. The customs of the Cross were stronger than laws of parents, priests and peers.

He'd have a staring fit for a few minutes, rouse himself out of it, then get gabby, calling everyone Sid. It took us a while to realise it was his own name.

Now and then his face got a look as if a thought
chimed like a bell in his head. But it was gone before he could make out what it was.

I wondered pleasantly what would happen if more strangers came than there were of us. That would be a test for the old reflexes, as well as the chairs.

On sad days the spatters looked pathetic. But never unfriendly. At least it was human blood.

DO YOU SUFFER FROM SHAKINESS?

Sibley's next caper was to go round asking questions. He'd write down some of the answers, for others he'd tick off a slot in his columned sheets of paper. What a place to work for a doctorate. Around a pub all day I'd become a Doctor of Beer in very short order.

‘If you were a baby again and could grow up, what would you want to be?' was one of his questions. ‘Where would you live? What sort of house would you like? What job? Where would you go for a holiday?'

The drinkers would make short work of these, Sibley would note the answers conscientiously, and go on.

‘Do you have chest pains, belching, constipation, tender skin, headaches, convulsions, urinary hesitancy? Are you accident prone? Are you touchy, angered by
orders, irritable? Do you suffer from shakiness?' It was weird. Most of the answers had to do with the golden sea on which they were afloat seven days a week, but he seemed to think he was recording their psyches.

‘Dizziness? Stiff muscles and joints? Do you wear yourself out worrying about your health?' Some of the guys laughed and Sibley looked pained, trying to get them to see it was a scientific search. ‘Do strange people or places make you afraid? Are you shy and sensitive? Do you shake and tremble, come out in cold sweats, do you wish you were dead and away from it all?'

No matter how serious he tried to get them to be, they still pissed themselves laughing. He'd have to buy another round to get them to stop.

Watching him, I wondered if he shared the tribe's harmony with nature, with furniture factory, rubber works, woollen mills, tractor yard, cheese factory, jail, mental asylum, hospital; with natural features of the landscape such as corner shop, power lines, bitumen, red roofs, traffic.

Or was he in harmony with a nature we didn't know and could never apprehend?

Sunday afternoon we had a hailstorm. Out of the blue. Drifts of little white balls of ice covered front lawns and piled up against fences. A mile away there was no ice anywhere, but up at the Lake it was like Christmas
in another country. Little kids had happy fights with them and trod round in heaps of hailstones in bare feet. Old folks from Europe stood on verandahs gazing at the whiteness, saying nothing.

ERNIE COPS IT SWEET

Ernie used to bring his work problems to the pub. He had no home to take them to.

His new boss, in conversation away from work, was a freak for rational spelling. Not a word about fishing. No matter the historical associations of placenames or the Latin derivation and lateral connections with other languages of ordinary words, he wanted spelling made phonetic. That is, phonetic according to present pronunciations. He wouldn't have understood if Ernie had said a new spelling will eventually change the pronunciation and sometime in the future the spelling will need further alteration to bring it into line again with future pronunciation, but neither would Ernie.

One trouble with Ernie was his literal mind. No sooner had the boss confided this apparently cherished
belief to Ernie than Ernie thought how nice it would be for him if he put into practice what the boss believed.

‘Knock off all e's, that's what I'll do for a start,' he said.

This gave him heer and ther, com and go and invit and separat, hir and fir, strik and arbitrat.

He incorporated this aberration in his work.

The boss carpeted him.

‘Ernie, you're not ready yet for our industrial conditions. You don't seem to understand that what a man says in private, what's on a man's heart, isn't meant to be put into practice in business or industry. Industry has its own rules and you bend to suit them or you're useless. If that's the case, there's no room for you. You might be happier elsewhere.'

Ernie didn't give up so easily.

‘I did what had to be done,' he said when we tumbled that he'd crawled his way back. His job was his life.

‘You know what that boss of yours does to his bumboys, Ernie,' Mac said. ‘I've seen him at it. He's walking along with them, cracks a joke and when they're bent over doubled-up laughing at it or pretending to, he dates them.'

Mac made a blurting noise with his mouth and gestured vigorously upward with his thumb.

‘He won't ever date me,' said Ernie stoutly. ‘I'll knock his block off.'

In the background, Sibley's voice: ‘Do you speak English. Have you ever been to the city.'

Ernie had no home, but he had home troubles, Mum was confined for her own good in a hospital where she wasn't allowed out except for exercise.

Every time some new broom went through the hospital and saw the poor old things there for no other reason than that they were hard of hearing and so appeared idiots when they were asked questions, or nearly blind so they fell over things easily, and started to do something about it such as getting them discharged to convalescent homes as a stage on the way to the ‘community'. Mrs Jones would get up on the table wherever they sent her and leave an unmistakeable message for all the staff to see and clean up. Back she'd come again. Hospital was home.

‘I've got 'em licked,' she'd say to Ernie.

‘SSShh, Mum,' he'd say, hoping no one heard. He didn't want to be lumped in with people who had relatives in mental hospitals.

But he knew how to act to the other old people. If one got out and there were no nurses around, he'd grasp her gently on the shoulders, turn her round and say, ‘You want to go that way.' And point her back in the direction of the ward. And off she'd trot. She
did
want to go that way.

Two blocks away the commercial district started. On signs, in windows, in the home, voices would say, ‘You want one of our mowers, or TVs or refrigerators and then you'll be happy.' And the populace would trot off in the direction of the sales room, deposit in hand. They had the cash; why not?

Ernie was a dead set prick—we all thought so—but he looked after his Mum's nineteen cats religiously. The number changed constantly, but he didn't mind. They always ate.

Ernie got caught up in a move to have the employees of Reclina-Matic join one of the big unions. It was only a small factory, but they had the standard hierarchy with the same names for the positions as if it employed ten thousand and had a turnover of two hundred million.

Ernie saw the boss's face one day after someone else had made his alley good by dobbing them, so Ernie covered himself by supplying the name of the ringleader and the rest of those willing to go along.

He was scared of being laid off. He might not get another job right away and from what he heard the young clerks down at the unemployment office treated you like dogs. Not dogs: drunken blacks. And spoke to you as if you were sick in the head. This society was the only one they had or knew: if a person was without a job and poor he was inadequate; if he was inadequate he was mentally ill. After all, if he was inadequate and
treated as if he was normal, where would the pressure be on the rest to appear normal?

A man he knew, Ek, laid off some time before, was making a good living in the cleaning business. Ernie was suspicious of anything that seemed to have no roots in production. As if cleaning floors and windows wasn't a real job. He didn't think of floors and windows and companies' desires for good appearances as things to be manipulated in his own favour, he thought there must be an object produced at the end of the line and carried away in a vehicle. Anything less was dangerously insubstantial. Even though his own part in production was making marks on bits of paper.

He knew about efficiency, and told us, not that we wanted to know. But when we asked him what the end of efficiency was, he got in a tangle.

‘Ernie, if efficiency means getting rid of as many workers as possible, does it mean getting rid of as many machines as possible?'

‘Yes,' he said, warily. ‘Fewer machines, less maintenance.'

‘And if you do that right through the country, you can use the scrap metal all right, but what about the scrap men and women?'

‘Yes, Ernie, who's going to buy Reclina-Mats then?'

‘It's always the same with you blokes. You never face the fact you can't stop progress.'

‘Surveys show Reclina-Mats lead to heart disease, Ern. All this lying about, no exercise. They're going to put a warning on them. Medical authorities warn—.'

It was his shout. His pockets were long and his arms got shorter and shorter. They had to prod him.

‘Ernie,' said Alky Jack. ‘Is there anyone in the firm, or in the companies all over the country, who's indispensable?'

Ernie thought a bit. One of those business mottoes came to his rescue, the printed cards hung in supervisors' offices.

‘No one is indispensable.'

‘So in theory it's possible machines one day will do the work of the sweeper, the truckdriver, the clerk, the machinist, the assembler, the supervisor, the wages man, the accountant, the manager, the PR man, the company lawyer,'—and they all nodded after each one to show they'd weighed the possibility of machines doing each function—‘the manager, the directors, the chairman of the board. Since,' he explained in case they hadn't got the message, ‘if those jobs can be described and if they follow rules and laws and so forth, they can be put on computers.'

The word computer was magic. They nodded.

‘And if information can be put on them, who needs teachers? Computers mark the papers now. They can diagnose illness as long as they're programmed fully enough, and that's only a matter of detail. One day they'll drive public transport, they'll even be in
charge of your car so you can't drive through a red light or crash into someone or change lanes if there's a car alongside you.' Alky Jack paused. I looked at him. He'd live to be eighty, the spunky old bastard.

‘Think of any job and I'll show you a way electronic machines can do it. Now, Ernie, is that progress?'

Alky Jack waited for an answer. I couldn't think of anything; I'm not into progress. I think there's different things, different times. New things balanced by the loss of the old things they replace, or the old ways. But I didn't want to be caught talking a lot of nonsense beginning with the two silliest words in any language: I believe.

No one spoke. We looked at Ernie.

‘Don't look at me. He was talking to you mob just as much as me. Anyway, we were talking about efficiency, not progress.'

‘Oh,' said Alky Jack. ‘The way people talk I thought they were the same thing.'

‘I think you're all commos,' Ernie said.

Me, I think there's three estates: communists, capitalists and the poor, with the third estate the most numerous. Put them all together for a day or two and there's no difference. Except you might hear the sound of munching as they sorted themselves into the two primal estates, weak and strong.

No one answered Ernie's charge. They'd be the last people in the world to go commo.

The group broke up. Ernie had to go and practise golf. The newest manager was on six handicap.

Sibley was saying, ‘Do you listen to the radio. Do you read papers or magazines. Do you write letters. Do you go to the pictures.' Someone said, ‘Do you fuck.' Sibley said yes. The voice said, ‘Then fuck off.'

Next time I saw Ernie was in the warehouse of the Reclina-Mat factory. Efficiency hadn't at that time replaced the workers and staff and consumers with one large machine. A man was walking along looking straight ahead—like the man in the ads where the girl looks up admiringly, suckering him on—and Ernie was looking up at him while the man told a story. When it was finished, Ernie stopped, doubled over with obligatory laughter. The man looked down at him, bent to one side and dated him energetically with his thumb. Ernie straightened in surprise, but carefully went on laughing.

As the traffic cleared and I drove on I wondered if Ernie suffered. I hoped not. I was headed towards the city, where my darling was. Where tall buildings stood, rich castles lit up all over like burning buildings with fire still feeding inside; where departing ships mourn out at night into the main stream.

Where older citizens pick into green tin boxes of rubbish for something of value.