The Glass Canoe, page 2
They’d bring oysters, prawns, and one man with a big wicker basket always got a good sale for his garlic sausage. A lot of sales went to hungry drinkers who’d been there since ten in the morning if it was Saturday, or hadn’t been home for tea if it was Friday.
Shirts, vegetables, fish, kitchen sinks, tyres, stoves, meat from the abbatoirs, timber, copper wire, welding rods, bolts of cloth. You could get anything, and if you wanted something you’d tell someone, who told someone else and it was there next week.
What with the snack bar, you could stay at the pub all week if you had nowhere to go. As long as you had a car to sleep in for the cold weather.
It was home. The world and history passed by on wheels. Life stayed outside. Babies were started, and born. Weddings, shootings, promotions, dismissals, hungers, past and future—all were outside.
LET’S GET BACK
Morning, like a brand new baby, would come up on broken glasses, pools of stale sick and the odd car left behind by drinkers who couldn’t make it but were cluey enough to call a cab. Not that the boys in blue were waiting outside the pub to put the bag on departing drinkers; if they did that they wouldn’t have room enough at the station for all the excess oh-eights from just one pub, let alone if they did it outside all the pubs in the district.
Let’s get away from the politics and back to the pub.
The red bar was the only bar I’ve ever been in that had no mirrors. We were busy enough watching each other, we had no time to look at ourselves.
SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY
Christmas Eve the pub was rocking with the din of voices and shouts when over all there was a tremendous crash. The din stopped. There was a mass move to the doors. Up the street a truck lay on its side and three other vehicles, two cars and a low loader, were stopped at peculiar angles to the road. In the truck was a party of do-gooders surrounded by wrapped Christmas presents for the kids’ Home, except most of the volunteers and presents were no longer in the truck.
Out of the dark figures came, and more from newly stopped cars. They crept over to the presents and began to help themselves. All the volunteer cheer-bringers were injured or dazed, but the harpies that came out of the night didn’t mind, they pulled Christmas presents from the hands of the people only just conscious enough to grip the edges.
In a body the boys from the Southern Cross ran up the street taking cover from the streetlights on factory lawns and flattening themselves against fences. They descended on the harpies and did them over, all but two good runners who left their cars in the street and headed up the steep hill to the lake.
The boys headed back to the pub, full of virtue, talk, bruised knuckles and thirst.
Much later, the two runners sneaked back, walking soft as spiders.
At night the Southern Cross often looked, even to me, an illuminated tomb. A sort of past solidified in masonry. The traffic tried to run by all the faster to stay in the present or the past might grab them. But to us, our tomb was where life was: outside was a world fit only to die in.
The dark, a live monster, leaned on the roof and tried the glass doors. Its eyes were black, fathomless as death.
FORTRESS AUSTRALIA
My mother died not long after the traffic there got real bad. We used to live in a house right on the main road, one of a row of the old Caroline Chisholm cottages—they’re demolished now and a car sale yard there instead—and when they widened the road and it got busier and busier, she got sick.
At night the house shuddered with the big refrigerated freighters, semi-trailers, low-loaders, cement trucks and all the rest. You couldn’t use the front door. Day and night it was, the sound going through you like knives in a cutter, and her dying. I held her hand once and felt her pulse dragging. Like knots in a bit of cotton, only not spaced evenly.
When I was old enough and with her dead, I got out of there and went to live up near the lake. The lake was a fresh water catchment on high ground, fed by ground still higher, so you can see the Southern Cross was well down in a hollow. The kids get in the lake area after dark and carry on. Every now and then, when they get too bad, the ranger gets police help and they go through and hunt the kids out.
I live in an old house. There’s half a dozen of us there. We all chip in to pay the rent. Most of the time I have a room to myself, and I like that.
I christened the house fortress australia, a phrase Alky Jack used. It was big and rattly, nothing fitted flush any more. No locks on the doors.
I painted the name on the front wall, in different coloured letters. The people round about don’t like the letters being so big, but they’re shy about telling us. They leave us alone.
Up at the lake the birds’ song is so clear you’d think it was words they sing.
MARKET ANALYSIS
Saturdays, depending who was cellarman, you’d have to watch out for the cocktail. The man that was supposed to come round to check had his hand out, so they forgot to put that purple dye in the slops tray. At the end of the day they’d take the pressure off the half empty keg and slip in the slops. An old guy that used to work there told me the first keg of the day was usually pretty right, but on a Saturday, say, about the third keg, they’d pull from the cocktail.
It used to get a bit cloudy.
You wouldn’t think they’d need the slops to earn more of our money. Fuse showed me the cellar one day and how the kegs are lined up one after the other. I followed the plastic pipelines with my eye and noticed a point where the beer lines met with a tap on the wall.
‘That’s the water,’ he explained. ‘Flush out the system.’
‘What if they just left the water tap on?’ I asked. ‘Just a dribble, even.’
He didn’t answer me. He still worked there, then.
Saturday the noise would rise and begin to take over before twelve and go on all day till ten with only a small lull or two in the afternoon, when the race broadcasts were on and the pub dead still.
One Saturday, two guys appeared at the door with clipboards and pens at the ready and began to ask questions of the first people inside the door. They were doing a survey, but when they asked questions and got no answers but blank faces, they looked at each other. What was this? Then the race call finished and the noise rolled back like the waters after the children of Israel.
No use asking this mob questions. They went.
The cars outside, one by one, three a second, passed like a stream of time. I tried to imagine what it was like for a deaf person watching that traffic. Maybe a sort of formal game. But creepy.
IT’S NOT THAT EASY BEING OLD
No one minded too much what others did for sex. There was a sit-down cubicle in each bar toilet and two out in an old toilet shed. One day when it was raining like a bastard and I was busting for a pee as soon as I got out of the car, I ran into the old shed and began letting it out when out of the corner of my eye I saw movement. I turned to look in case it was a hand with a bottle, but it was only two harmless old men in the far cubicle. One had his trousers down and was touching his toes. Actually his hands gripped his knees. They were just at that stage of drunk not to mind me having a butcher’s.
I don’t mean they were homosexuals. It’s not easy to be old, and still get a woman. Look at the jails. Guys inside for a few years get to like it, but when they get out they mostly go straight back to women.
Another old man came along the street every day with a sack slung over his shoulder. He picked up riches others discarded: bits of timber, bottles, wire, cans and things people threw from cars.
Once he put an airline bag in his sack and later found a human hand in it. A child’s hand, it was.
Every time I saw him the beer tasted thick and nourishing, like roast beef. One day I saw him coming and bought him one, but when I held it out to him he glared at me and spat.
Didn’t want my roast beef.
They told me he was illiterate, couldn’t write his name. He wasn’t that old, either, fifty-five or sixty. Sun, wind, rain had aged him. He looked eighty.
MY PEOPLE
These things in the past few pages are general things I put down first when I got the idea of making a book about the Southern Cross and our life here.
I think now I’ll tell you about some of the people of our tribe.
It’s raining hard and my darling’s away on a business trip.
This would be as good a time to start as any.
First they were boys, primitive hunters of fruit and adventure, skirmishing in backyards and paddocks, living in trees, spying out far hills, swimming creeks and rivers and the compulsory surf, shooting butterflies; out all day, returning to shelter to sleep. The horizon was boundless.
Teenaged, they became apprenticed to learn the pastoral world of snorting, grunting, purring machines, bikes, cars, tractors, trucks and buses, and grew among flocks, herds, whole wheat-fields of workers whose labour and lives were farmed by the powerful; learning to imitate sheep, or even sheepherders, jackeroos, slaughtermen. The horizon had shrunk.
A few years more and a job displaced them, now part of the adult herd, to the refinement of the factory-city. They were wage and small-enterprise sheep and cattle amongst the unattainable riches of civilisation; among tall, unfamiliar buildings, unimaginable processes, incomprehensible aims, scratching a living on the edge of the educated world. The horizon was work, pub, races.
As sheep they were exploitable and gave their bodies for a full belly, but the adolescent apprentice one layer down was bewildered, and the hunter boy deep inside who had never changed was a pitiable refugee, two removes from his original culture, stranded in an alien world. Stranded? Locked. In their own bodies they had travelled man’s road from primitive hunter, through herder of flocks, to our present settled-city civilisation. Where they were the sheep, the hunted.
And yet these sheep were something more when they were drinking. The golden drops stirred something inside that wasn’t human.
When that something woke up it looked like the guy was in the grip of a storm, thrashing around. Or a sort of growth inside that switched all the savage circuits to ON.
It was more than a growth—it was a live thing. Like a monster inside. Looking out through the pupils, working the controls, smashing.
Maybe it was all too human. Maybe it was the hunter and destroyer of life inside them that had never made the transition to a settled life husbanding plants and animals.
Once upon a time they were decent men, unaggressive, hardworking, tired at the day’s end. They drank to erase the ache and the tiredness.
Now there’s only a few of us do a hard day’s work, even though we’re as poor, relatively, as our grandfathers.
We drink to erase everything.
On the back wall where the clock is, above the pool tables, there’s a crack in the bricks. It goes up from floor level, slantwise, wide enough to hold our cue chalk. Guys rest cigarettes in it—it’s jagged and goes up by steps and stairs—combs, papers, and push dead matches into it out of sight. It points up at the clock like a finger.
DANNY
He had an inscribed football in a place of honour on his mantelpiece at home. He wasn’t often there, but his parents allowed the ball to stay, with its inked names all over it. It was the ball the Mead had won the under-twenty grand final with, and the team’s signatures were on it. The same team had come up through the juniors from the under-elevens and won every grand final. Rugby Union, but not rah-rah boys.
Danny knew every football statistic of Rugby League from the year dot, and a lot of the statistics of the code he played. You know the sort of thing: who was in the second-row for France in the second Test in 1953, how many tries Gasnier scored, whether Fulton grounded the ball for that second try on the ice at Warrington, how old was Gus Risman when he played his last Test for England. His memory was fantastic. He worked for the council for the basic wage and took sickies on Mondays and Fridays; Friday to start the weekend early and Monday to get over it. He held the Stop and Go signs when they had the road up.
It was part of his personal code not to make use of his memory for money. Besides, he wouldn’t work indoors. As long as he had enough in his pocket for a beer. Even this didn’t bother him. He was into blokes all over the pub for two, five, ten, any amount. One thing about Danny, he never forgot: always paid. You might have to wait a bit. He bit me once and I only had enough cash for two more drinks, it was early on and there were plenty of guys with brass and I said no. He didn’t believe me and thought I was holding out and from that day I’ve always had enough in my pocket, but he never put the bite on me again.
How he came to get the ball for his mantelpiece, he was a great player. After the under-seventeens the grog got him, and although he played great games up into the under-twenties, he was on the way down. In the local all-age team he played a few good games, but he’d be on the field and after two bursts upfield there he was crouching, bringing up his heart. And often blood. It was the grog.
He played five-eighth, he was very quick, his sidestep was fantastic, but his life was practically over.
At school he was no good at metalwork, always breaking off things and getting the lathe stuck. He stood up to the English teacher once and swapped a few punches in class, but he was good at history.
Now he’s history himself.
The folks at home didn’t think too much of him. His old man used to belt him, and to make it worse his brother was a good boy, never got drunk, saved his money, always home in time for tea, while if it was Friday Danny might start the day at seven in the morning at Dorrie’s in Parramatta until it was time to go to the Southern Cross at ten and stay there all day.
The boys said, ‘If he went on the waggon or in a convent somewhere to dry out, he’d be the best five-eighth in Australia.’
They said this sort of thing but words didn’t do him any good. Every birthday he’d down his pint in one go, no matter how drunk he was. And he had birthdays right through the year.
You never saw him with a girl, but sometimes a few of the boys would go up to this Sandra’s place and go through her. They’d give her something, or take a few cans up. She didn’t mind. Once he went up alone, gave her some drinks and was going to town, rasping away, when the others crept up outside the window, and one—Mick, I think—put his hand in the window and touched her between the buttocks. She liked that and went for her life, nearly throwing Danny. Just as he reached the vinegar stroke, Mick dated him. Danny flew off forwards, did a somersault over the pillow and landed on his back with his feet in the air against a wardrobe.
‘You rotten bastards!’ he yelled. ‘I could’ve broke my neck.’
He was very touchy on the subject for days after.
He drank more and more and finally the beer wasn’t enough to give him a glow, what with his insides breaking down and pains all the time. Fishhooks in the stomach. He got on the Bacardi and that really used to flatten him. It flattened me the only times I got on it. I fell over, out like a light. Trouble is, you get used to zotting down schooners and you try to drink spirits the same way.
Around that time he copped a load at some harlot’s place at Burwood. He was going to the doctor’s and had penicillin needles, seven in a row. He told the others it was his guts. They might not like to be drinking from glasses he’d had.
Once in the Leagues Club—he doesn’t go there now, he’s barred—he told me he’d knocked off more houses than you could poke a stick at. You know, rich places round Pennant Hills, money, jewels. Saturday night capers, on foot.
I didn’t believe him. How would he stand, let alone climb into windows, on a Saturday night? Full as a boot.
But he did get nine months once for something. Did it at Long Bay.
‘I’m never goin’ there again. Sooner put a bullet in me head. You have to say Sir to the screws every time you talk, have to get a pass to go three feet, and you’re locked up from four in the afternoon till seven or eight in the morning. Nothing to see, and here I am locked up with an idiot. How would you like that?’
I’d never been in jail, only police stations, and I didn’t even like that.
Maybe, when they stop telling him he was so good and everyone gets tired of putting up with him going off his brain every week and sympathy runs out, he’ll pull himself up. That’s what I used to tell myself.
A few of them went to Parramatta nicely pissed one Saturday night looking for trouble. They found it. During a little scrap up a dusty lane someone hit one of Danny’s mates with an iron bar. Dropped him cold as a maggot. Danny walked up the lane, hands on hips.
‘Which one a you cunts hit my mate?’
In the dark someone kneed him in the crutch and Danny went down like a bag of shit.
When he got up later, they went further up the lane and ran into another mob of guys that shouldn’t have been out on the street. Only kids and dressed like pox doctors’ clerks. Danny and his mate couldn’t help laughing until one came from nowhere, ripped a paling off the fence and cracked them both. They ran.
Straight into the arms of two large coppers standing there with their paddy waggon drawn up and doors wide open.
One said, ‘You got any money, you lot?’
‘I have,’ Danny said.
‘Drop five dollars on the ground and turn round.’
He dropped the five and turned round. The copper gave him a good kick up the arse and said, ‘Piss off.’
