by Thea Astley
He’d trudged the streets of Manhattan looking for a job in publishing, which was all he knew, and found nothing as the city built up for the big crash. He was a foreigner, wasn’t he, despite the language—his accent marked him!—and perhaps even then the publishing houses could detect the stench of the Depression coming up the East River. Finally he landed a come-down job as proofreader in a fly-by-night firm on West Twenty-third that published cheap westerns and romantic novels (Wuthering Heights with tits, his literate boss told him). Three weeks later they went down the drain together, a terse note from his vanished employer gummed to his locked cubby-hole, and he took a train to the west coast, jotting down notes for the book he was never to write. Mourned, he told himself, dragging savagely at the oars, by those jolly black train stewards who might never read about themselves and the mid-west towns the train rattled through, towns with their lovely clapboard houses and elm-lined streets that would remain the mirage in his skull rather than the adumbration on paper. Ah shit! he shouted to a nagging gull. Shit!
What about now?
There was nothing for him in Los Angeles either, that slick coastal city plunged into its affair with celluloid dreams. He shook his head clear of links with the written word and took a job as a hotel doorman in Beverly Hills, capitalising on the flair of his accent. They liked that and he liked the climate, the unbruised days of sun and sea-waft and hoyden blue above the coastal range.
One day as he swung open the door of a limousine that slid in under the porte-cochère, he was surprised to find himself face to face with one of his authors, a self-confident scribe who had never understood the folly of the dangling participle. Eyes met, held. ‘Good lord!’ the pukka British voice called ripely. ‘It is—isn’t it—Gerald? Gerald Morrow?’
He had tightened his doorman’s aplomb against intrusion and murmured, ‘This way, sir,’ and snapped gloved fingers (My God! Mickey Mouse!) for a bellhop to take the bags, staring out from the indignity of his epauletted uniform and garishly decorated cap at the palm trees along the avenue.
‘Sorry, old chap,’ the British voice persisted. ‘My mistake.’ And winked.
He found he had been tipped a quarter.
But—cheers!—that was the one, the very one who, it had been reported at one of those nasty book launchings (stale cheese nibbles, cheap wine), had stated loudly over a glass of rough red that he was considering moving to another publisher who would at least bring out a second edition. That portly traveller who vanished behind swing doors looked as if his bank balance realised fourth and even fifth reprints. Morrow wished he had shouted after his retreating insolent saunter, There must be a million readers out there who crave boredom! Who love the dangling participle! Who wallow in truisms and fatuous theorisings! You tell ’em, Rim! You tell ’em. Slap in your popular political aphorisms, buddy, but don’t make ’em think!
He glared at the frantic glassy morning of Beverly Hills, the boulevard already packed with characters who looked like extras, girleens longing to be discovered, fluttering in deliberately contrasting pairs, brunette with blonde; muscular young men with simulated cowboy rolls (Ah sit easy in the saddle!), and the cruisers in stretch cars examining the scene. One morning on his day off he had gone to a popular breakfast bar patronised by the rich, the gossip columnists, the stars, the would-be stars and the writers who worked for the moguls. The brash self-exposure sickened him. The shrilling from table to table. The self-importance. The dropped names. He couldn’t even find it funny. The sadness of it made him gag.
Impulse!
Swing dip drag.
He had, he remembered, slashing at water, looked up and down the boulevard checking taxi and car movements under the porte-cochère. The hotel was bustling with guests arriving, departing, under coils of noisy greetings. Almost involuntarily he found himself abandoning his post to walk steadily and flint-faced past reception and head for the small change-room in the basement where he peeled off those Mickey Mouse gloves, tossed cap, circus coat and trousers onto a chair and pulled on his own worn flannels and jacket. Then he stalked back to the front desk and dumped his fancy dress in front of the reception clerk.
‘Checking out,’ he said. ‘Or as you people so quaintly put it, I quit.’ To mutterings of outrage, muffled before guests, he strolled casually out the front door past the potted palms, out under the canopy and along the boulevard with the other wackers.
Madness is contagious.
Petrifaction of the spirit. His own diagnosis. Begun, that stony crusting, in the upstairs London offices of that second-rate publishing company on the Great Portland Road, his heart brain soul whatever metastasised as the years whined by, each year itself calcified by bad weather and failed ventures. He burrowed beneath books. The words he shovelled about and out during his working hours were not those he heaped on himself. You and me, Tristram, he often murmured, hauling unwilling feet along the pavement.
Rereading Sterne he identified with the delicacy of mania that could extract magic from banality. ‘You and me, friend.’ And he whispered it now, heaving his dinghy through the furrowed blue of Halifax Bay. Shandy lay, perilously soggy, on a pack in the bows. This should make the old parson feel good, taking a sea voyage in the Antipodes. All this ozone and salt wind. Just the thing for that groin-stricken uncle!
How he had tunnelled under that comforter of words, or plunged into travellers’ tales from antick lands, madmen’s memoirs of the South Pacific, the while his wife (yes, he had one of them in those days—inner-London sophisticate with a wild Ancient Mariner eye and flawed morals) chided his dullness, chafed against the cramped flat in Earls Court and the unhoggish quality of his lovemaking that quickly degenerated into a dreaded marital obligation.
He met authors.
He found them a self-adulating crowd, especially those suffering from the print-fever of a first novel, pressing on with febrile flushes that abated only after years of vicious reviews or no reviews at all or the realisation that perhaps it was merely a jobber’s drudge and that any glamour attaching to the daily tedium of rubbing words together and organising them into attractive patterns was a glamour created by newsprint about those rare and mythic figures who created blockbusters or intellectual marginalia.
Ooh woo woo! What a little Remington can doo ooh ooh!
Blockbusters, he snarled, rowing. I have invented a new word! Thinking of the mediaeval wooden blocks for the painful processing of religious text upon text. Ars moriendi! What a joke! This story, this journey, would crack the wood apart.
He attended readings. He heard poets with poetry voices awed by their own genius.
Godalmighty, he had said, reeling home from that first contact with Sanford Rim still brimful with Pacific island strategy, a latter-day Pierre Loti (where was his poor bugger of a wife?) who was later to greet him in a flash hotel on Sunset Boulevard.
‘Really!’ his own wife reprimanded. ‘Language! You know I simply cannot bear such…’ She was busy burning kippers.
He had glared at her. Already he knew her moral scruples extended no further than her tongue. He suspected infidelity but could never be sure. Not until one evening in spring when he returned home a day early from a publishers’ conference in Manchester to discover his wife writhing in the arms of Sanford Rim himself.
‘And who the hell are you?’ he had asked, feigning offensive ignorance.
Rim was struggling with bedclothes and undergarments.
‘I could well ask the same thing.’
God! The insolence!
He listened to his wife bleat. She was needing help with knickers. She had wanted, she said, to dissuade Rim from leaving the firm. Her actions, she explained, were more in the nature of public relations. She said.
‘You never could spell, could you?’ he had hissed.
‘I have no idea what you mean.’ In snowstorms of bed linen.
‘Oh for Christ’s sake!’ he cried. She was so thick.
He emptied his wardrobe and crammed clothes into
bags while Sanford Rim slipped quietly downstairs and the outer door banged after him.
His wife sobbed in triplets. ‘He means nothing to me!’ she kept saying. ‘Absolutely nothing.’
Her words weren’t worth answering.
A bachelor flat with a stunning view of gasometers. Divorce. (That was in the whispering days!) He wasn’t tempted to remarry. Perhaps his wife had summed up his libido accurately after all. When the divorce was finalised (his presence only in court) he learned that she had joined forces with a soft-goods salesman from Glasgow who had run away from his wife as well. What a coupling! He made no further enquiries. And he didn’t see Sanford Rim until ten years later on that hard yellow morning in Los Angeles.
Flight number two.
This was predating airline terminology.
This was getting to be a habit.
He signed up as galley-hand/steward on the first cargo boat heading west, a lumbering rust-bucket shipping building materials, pumps, generators and primitive refrigeration plants to the Pacific Islands. He resisted the siren quality of Hawaii; he ignored with some difficulty the lush invitations of Pango Pango. He stepped ashore in Brisbane, the first landfall on the great flat plate of the southern continent, surprised that the unfinished quality of the place delighted him. After flashing his British passport and banking accrued pay, he set about exploration in a town that was sticking like a rash along the banks of its river, houses pasted on roller-coaster hills. While he decided what he might do he rented a cheap room in a boarding house in Spring Hill. Really he didn’t want to do anything.
He was drunk with anonymity, with being where no one knew him or even cared to know. The heat that October in Brisbane town induced torpor. No one hurried. People dragged themselves off and on the rattling tramcars, straggled across streets, leaned across bars, hunched over café tables. It was a braces-and-singlets town. He thought of Los Angeles and its scurriers with their grim and manic race towards personal destinies. Here, no one was waiting to be discovered. Not even the horses waiting with their anachronistic hansom cab outside the law courts. They suitably drooped.
He caught buses south to Cleveland, north to Shorncliffe. He ate fish and chips in seedy eateries on the beachfronts and found his restless and curious eyes seared by glinting water, broiling sky. Once he hired a rowing boat and took himself out to the muddy islands of the bay and paddled along mangrove-fringed shorelines, his senses rinsed clean by a rawness of salty air and the Trades scented with supple landfalls. But after, it was always back to the boarding house, now filling up with jobless men who couldn’t pay their rent, who sat staring hopeless as they listened to the wireless each humid evening after a day spent tramping the streets.
He felt guilty because he was still solvent.
All day, walking past the soup kitchens, the public halls where community singing was conducted to keep the jobless chipper and their minds off empty stomachs. All day, past the tatty ill-patronised corner stores, and his feet limping under/over blankets of heat down to the Valley and the trains, the deadbeats waiting for the pubs to open, and then the long walk out past the peeling houses to New Farm and the park beside the river where the bums rolled over on the grass under the trees, chasing the shade and wondering behind the bony structures of their starved faces what the hell it was all about. Now and again they remembered fighting for a myth known as king and country. King and country weren’t doing too much for them now.
Those who still could hawked up phlegmy gobbets of Flanders and the Somme.
There were no jobs and sometimes when he squatted under the trees with them and talked about it he knew himself a hypocrite with money still in the bank, even though that money was shrinking. But it shrank slowly because he was a careful man and all the time, all the time, there was that itch, the urge to move on, away from the groans and the snores through the thin partitions of his boarding-house room, the mealtime gobblings, the hopelessness of bodies crammed into and with despair.
On the train north he had a compartment to himself during the day, but at night the soot-filled carriage filled up with men who had been riding the roof or the goods van and who sneaked in to stretch out for a few hours. They had to keep moving or the sustenance allowance was refused. Some of them lay awake all night, eaten by hunger, smoking the painfully thin rollies they made with careful skinny fingers. Most of them didn’t want to talk. It was the same old story that bored even the tellers.
When Morrow got off the train in Townsville on a wide-eyed November morning, it was into a heat brilliant as glass. Jesus! he whispered under sweat. He found a room at the Exchange opposite the creek and for the first couple of days spent his time in a settler’s chair on the wide verandah watching the few cars and the horse-carts rocking along Flinders Street.
Work. He had to keep repeating the word, whipping reluctance.
The local newspaper didn’t want him. The one lending library regretted. He began searching the columns of the daily. The pickings were small.
Here he was, a silly bookish fellow, roosted on a pub verandah in a lost town of a lost continent.
One advertisement drew his eye again and again. On an island group thirty miles north there was a vacancy for a works’ foreman. Why it had not been seized at once in this town of jobless men jogged enquiry. A kind of island hell, he was told. Almost a prison. Boongs, one man explained contemptuously. If you like that sort of thing…Should I not? he asked himself, looking at his useless grammarian hands, looking at his age looking back at him in the mould-spotted mirror above the communal hand-basin at the Exchange.
He filled in the requisite forms. (It was a state government position.) His accent was educated. He lied, just a little, about his experience. After all, were would-be writers in that first flush of publication even as intelligent as those despised indigenes? They were all turning out primitive carvings.
He would never know whether it was desperation or departmental snobbery on the part of the interviewing officer that gave him the job. (Desperation, came the snarled answer as he rowed into late morning across Halifax Bay. And there’s a story in that, by God!) For within the week he found himself and his suitcase on a government launch rocking up the coast to Doebin.
Ah, paradise enow! Yessir!
Ashore was syrup-thick with shade trees exotically unfamiliar. Behind, blue acid. Dazed with newness he was guided along jetty and up sandy tracks to the hutlike administration centre by a weedy man with a ginger moustache that so filtered the offered name he forgot it immediately. A frowning black boy toted his bag.
So much newness would splinter memory. Bits. Pieces.
But this was only the beginning to the story.
Swing dip drag.
Should he change to present tense? For trendy immediacy? In his burning swollen paw one oar skidded. He nearly lost it. He decides on the change.
Captain Brodie, superintendent of Doebin reserve, is a twitchy youngish man with a—is it kingly?—assured manner as he stares across his desk at the new arrival and his splendid vowels. The verbal splendour appears to irritate. There is no moustache, but the phantom of it. There is no swagger stick. But there is the phantom of that.
‘I don’t know whether,’ the dapper superintendent says, measuring his words, ‘you are really the man for…What I mean is, did the interviewing panel tell you what it’s like here? The nature of the work?’
‘Not precisely,’ Morrow answers, trying for charm. He gives the regretful twisted grin he had once used on rejected authors. ‘No brochure. No pretty pictures.’
The superintendent emits a sharp sigh rather like a hiss. His face is beginning to redden. ‘Not just organisational skills,’ he tells Morrow, ‘but practicality. It needs practical skills. Practical.’
The flush deepens. The fingers clench and unclench fascinatingly on the desk edge and embarrassed Morrow takes time out to observe the room, the wooden shutters that slice a leaf-spattered seascape, the curved shining back of a native hoeing a garden bed
, the photograph of a tired woman (wife?) watching them from the top of a filing cabinet.
He murmurs deprecatingly that he thinks he could cope. Does he want to cope? Again he sees the grass houses of the settlement glimpsed as he had walked from the jetty, the black faces of women turning their shyness aside. ‘I take it the job is merely supervisory?’
Captain Brodie begins a syncopated and impatient tapping. ‘Good Heavens, man! You’ve got to have some practical experience in a place like this. My God, the things they do to me, those government bastards! Sorry. Not your fault. But do you know anything about road building, carpentry, drainage? Well, do you? Be honest now.’
Morrow coughs and looks directly into the superintendent’s crazy blue eye.
‘I rather gathered they couldn’t find anyone else willing to come here. Perhaps that’s—’
‘Are you a penitent?’ the superintendent demands. His voice becomes terrifyingly soft. ‘Oh God, what a shambles! Are you after martyrdom, sainthood?’
Is he? Morrow watches Brodie swallow unpalatable lumps of departmental gristle before he manages, ‘Well, not your fault, Mr Morrow. We’ll simply have to make the best of it for the time being, until we can get things sorted out.’ He repeats the words ‘sorted out, sorted out’, seeming to become lost for a moment in mumbles. ‘Paperwork, perhaps. Returns. Just do your best, eh? You know,’ the superintendent leans forward becoming stagily confidential, ‘they leave the whole damn thing to me as it is, anyway. I’ve made this place. This entire place. Created it. It’s my…well…my little kingdom as it were. You understand? That’s why I…’
The words he might have said ghost out through the shutters.
He met (opting for the past) the other white workers: the doctor, the matron, the teacher, the storekeeper. ‘And you know my deputy, Leggat.’ Their features, like those of the missionaries, were defeated by the newness of landscape.
