by David Malouf
‘On’y ’e wouldn’t be worth a ball a’ nine-ply if they took up that wool business. Wouldn’ hardly make a cover for a coat-hanger or the left side of a kiddie’s cardigan. Sorry, mate,’ he told Digger, ‘but you’re in trouble. Here, gimme that!’
He took the can, spiked it twice with his jack-knife and flipped it back. ‘Ta, Vic,’ he said, on Digger’s behalf.
Digger took a good swig.
5
DIGGER’S REPUTATION AS a fighter had been established their first week in camp. He had gone three rounds with a state amateur champion, then fought for the unit in the battalion titles. It was Doug who put him up to it. He didn’t let on to them, or not at first, that he was a professional.
For eighteen months before he joined up he had been working the country shows with a boxing troupe, in a street of gaudy sideshows and circus freaks that included a pin-headed Chinaman, a strong man who also ate swords and swallowed fire, a couple of daredevil motorbike riders (a husband and wife team who three times nightly faced the Ring of Death), a fat lady and the Human Torso, a fellow who was just a head and shoulders on a mobile tray. Digger’s job had been to stand among the crowd and, if no other mug did it, offer himself up to go a round or two with one of the troupe.
He had always been a follower of fairs. The sound of a merry-go-round and the wheezy music it pumped out, the sight of a dozen men in shorts and blue singlets with sledgehammers and guy-ropes raising a tent, turning a bit of waste ground into a carnival site, was enough to draw him away from any message he was on. More than once he had got a good box on the ears for slipping under the canvas and getting in late for tea, or for hanging around outside to hear the spruikers and coming home with a mouthful of nonsense (he could learn off the most intricate patter in just minutes) that filled Jenny with a wailing desire to experience these wonders for herself.
He loved the lights strung from pole to pole, red and blue and orange, casting weird shadows where the warm breeze struck them, the smell of animal shit, the satin and spangles the showies wore, which could be grimy when you got up close, but under the lights, and in the glow that was created by the spruikers’ empowering descriptions, took you right out of yourself.
Toddlers swung up high on their fathers’ shoulders would be dazed or crowing. Noisy youths with slicked-down hair and a fag in their mouth would be lining up to fire at a row of ducks or to swing a hammer and ring a bell, their girls, all permed and lipsticked, looking on and pretending they weren’t bored. Only later, with a kewpie doll or alarm clock or plaster dog under their arm, would these girls find something at last that really touched them. Looking out from the vantage point of a rough normality they would feel a pricking fear run up their arms at the sight of the pin-headed Chinaman drinking tea from a dolly’s cup, or a poddy-calf sad-eyed and huggable on its six legs.
Digger, who had been haunting such places since he was ten years old, would move about in an excited trance, taking in the noise, the sweat, the colour, the cruelties. And always at the centre of it all, not quite a freak-show but drawing to itself some of the loose emotion the freak-shows generated, was the tent with the boxers; half a dozen fellows, not all of them young, but all dark – half-castes or Islanders – lined up on a board in front of a painted flap.
The flap showed two boxers, taller than the real ones, shaping up. On a separate platform to one side was a spruiker to stir the mob. Already gloved and booted, in silk shorts and dressing-gowns that proclaimed their fighting names in letters of gold, the coons would be dancing about just at head level, jabbing the air, hissing through their nostrils, looking terrible.
They were there as a challenge. To question the toughness and assumed manhood of the farmhands and counter-jumpers who stood about with a girl on their arm and a stick of sugarcane or a cornet of fairy-floss in their fist, asking themselves, but secretly, if they measured up. Mugs, they were.
Telling it over later to Mac and Doug, Digger would laugh, a little shamefaced before these new friends of the role he had played, but carried away by the sheer fun of it. He would do a take-off of one of those muscle-bound farm-boys standing with his arms bared and his mouth open, breathing through his nose; or the others who cat-called and chiacked, too fly themselves to step into a pounding, but quite willing to urge on their mates.
There was, after all, something very stark and simple in it that appealed to fellows whose fathers and grandfathers had cleared the country, fought off blacks, made themselves a reputation in a war. It was over, all that. Life now was a tame affair of scrounging for a living and worrying always how to pay the rent and feed the kids, or, worse still, of lining up for a hand-out; and with the vague suspicion always that you had been let down and betrayed – only who by? – and a gnawing resentment in you that needed something out there you could nail and take a poke at.
What was on offer here was a real fight: amateur against professional, white against black, an ordinary man’s muscle and skill, a dairyman’s or meat worker’s, against forces that had to be pushed back every now and then, flattened and shown their place, or you wouldn’t know what you were worth. Those were the terms.
Partly it was what the spruiker put into their heads with his quickfire clever patter. But mostly, and especially after a few beers, it was the sight of the coons themselves looking so flash up there in their leather gloves and their maroon or green silk gowns with the stitched-on lettering. You could smell them. For all the showy material of their get-up they were just abos, coons.
It was a put-up job. That’s what the mugs didn’t realise. But once it got going there was enough bitterness on both sides to make it real. Blood, that’s what the mob wanted. To see one of the coons get laid out with a cut lip, or, if the mood took them, to see some swaggering lair, a local bully, get done over by a black. The crowd was unpredictable. It could switch sides just like that.
Most of the challengers in fact were no match for the fast-footed members of the troupe, even those of them who had seen better days and were soft-headed with grog or from the beatings they had taken in real fights. They were professionals and knew all the dodges. They had been in this game, most of them, since they first learned to shape up, and were wily and tough. All the challenger had was brute strength, his hatred of flash niggers, and the wish to impress the girl he was with or his mates.
Digger’s job, standing in his shirt-sleeves in the warm night air, while the music of the merry-go-round rose and fell and beetles hurled themselves at raw bulbs, was to make himself one of the crowd, a country kid like the rest (which he was of course), and to appeal to the spirit of emulation or savagery in them.
‘That big bloke don’t look so tough,’ he would remark to one of his neighbours, ‘waddaya reckon?’ and he would begin to urge this or that man on. Only if no one else would be in it would he step forward himself.
‘You sure about this?’ the spruiker would ask as he climbed the stairs to the platform. ‘Yer mother knows about it, does she? You are sixteen? – Nice lookin’ bloke, isn’t ’e girls? Shame about that nose. Well then, son, yer on! The rest is your lookout.’
The first time, carried away by the noise and excitement and the certainty of his own skill, he had just gone up like any other mug and got floored. But he went two rounds and was good. The crowd liked his clean looks, his keenness, and the manager, seeing the possibilities in him – he was slight and boyish but surprisingly tough – had come out while he was washing up and offered him a job. He was to do, for three pounds a week, what he had just done for the heck of it; only from now on it would be play-acting. He would live with the troupe, travel with them from town to town, and be part of the show. What did he think of it? He jumped at the offer.
It wasn’t just the three pounds, though that too was a consideration when so many thousands were out of work, or the chance to be one of the show folk, or the prospect at last of seeing the world. It was the chance it offered (he touched on this very lightly, hardly confessing it even to himself) of stepping aside from w
hat fate, or his mother, who claimed to be its agent, had set up for him. Of getting away.
He kept the news to himself for a day or two and made his plans. Then he told his father.
‘Good on yer, mate,’ his father said, delighted to see Digger show a bit of fight and to be part of a conspiracy. ‘Don’t you worry, I’ll cover for ya. You get away while the going’s good. Wish it was me!’
He was young and took things lightly, including the bruises. It was an education. He had eighteen months of it and saw every town from Albury right through the west and up the coast as far as Bundaberg. Bought himself boots, a kangaroo-hide belt, a couple of flash shirts, and soon got to know the other showies on a neighbourly basis.
The fat lady had started off in a pet shop in Vienna, selling larks: they put their eyes out, she told Digger, to make them sing. The Human Torso was an accountant. But there was a market out there whose values prevailed, so they had decided, with only a little urging on the part of a manager, to cash in on their advantages and put themselves on show.
The fat lady read cheap romances, in French, and had a little gramophone in her wagon on which she played gypsy music. She gave a lot of attention to her nails. She did in fact have very pretty hands, which were the most diminutive part of her, except for her ears. She kept a black velvet glove on her dressing table that was stuffed up to the size of a real hand and covered with rings; but she had too much refinement herself to wear more than two at any one time. Her favourite film star was Edward G. Robinson, whose features, heavy with menace and the promise of soft violence, looked down in a dozen poses from her dressing mirror. Her only female pin-up was Hedy Lamarr. ‘She’s from Vienna,’ she told Digger. ‘Like me.’
The Human Torso was a gambler. He spent all day, wherever they were, poring over the racing sheets and drinking Beenleigh rum. He had a system. The rumour was that he had thousands of pounds stashed away in banks all over the country in different names. An American by birth, he was a loud-mouthed coarse fellow, but when you caught him sober he wasn’t. He lent Digger a book by Theodore Dreiser, told him Europe was finished and that all the world’s troubles were the fault of the Jews.
They were happy days in spite of the misery of the times. He did not mind living as he did.
The war came and his father went to it, changing his age again but putting it down this time. They had a drink together in Sydney.
‘You should be in this, Dig,’ his father told him, looking smart in the uniform of the Light Horse.
But Digger did not think so. Living with the blacks had made him see things in another way: from the side and a bit skew, but with a humorous scepticism, as they did. He wasn’t one of them, he knew that; but after a time they were as open with him as if he was. ‘You’re all right, Digger,’ his mate Slinger told him, but you could never be sure with Slinger that he wasn’t having you on. ‘Maybe yer a blackfeller on the other side a’ yer skin.’
Then one day in Newcastle, when he was just hanging about looking at shop windows and considering the picture ads, he came upon a mob of fellows who were in a line to join up. A recruiting platform had been set up right in the street, flags and all, English and Australian. Men in their shirt-sleeves, and in suits too, some of them, were moving one behind another towards it. At the back of the line a fellow was putting on a turn to keep the others amused, and Digger stopped a moment to listen to him. The other men laughed, but self-consciously, and looked at one another, a bit leery of the line he was taking. He talked like a Communist.
He was a big fellow in a woollen shirt, a blusterer, but for all that there was a kind of lightness to him. If he danced you felt he would be very light on his feet, and his talk was a kind of dancing. He played up to his audience, keeping them always in tow, and after a time his play began to take in Digger as well. When Digger laughed outright once the fellow turned to him and said, as if they had known one another all their lives, ‘Givvus a fag, mate, willya?’ Digger stepped from the wall where he had been leaning, gave him the fag he had been rolling and rolled another. ‘Ta,’ the man said, dipping his head, when Digger was ready, to take a light. ‘Bramson’s the name. Doug.’
The others stood watching, not knowing what to make of it and hanging still on his words. He knew it and held off.
After that Digger too stood openly listening. It was all nonsense really – Digger was reminded of Farrah, the spruiker; just the sort of thing to pass the time while the line shuffled on. ‘This feller could talk right through a world war,’ Digger thought. ‘The time’d pass pretty easy, too.’
At last he turned to Digger and said: ‘You in this line, mate?’
‘What?’
‘Are you joinin’ up or just considerin’?’
Digger was nonplussed. He hadn’t been doing either, in fact, just passing the time. He looked at the pavement, ground the butt in with his heel, then glanced up under his brows, but Doug had already turned away. The question had been put, that’s all, offhand. It wasn’t a test.
But, standing in line with these men, he felt something. The warmth of being, in the easiest way, one of a mob, as on nights back home when he had stood round a burning log outside a dance-hall, smoking, yarning, listening to bits of local gossip, or to jokes that might have needed explaining if you didn’t know the lingo. That’s what he’d missed these last months. Suddenly he felt homesick. There was an easy pitch to it that was different from the one he had been living at.
The coons were touchy. He was in their world and they accepted him, but only provisionally; and there were times when he felt he would never really understand them, not even Slinger. He had never faced the indignities they had, the humiliations. He had no idea in the end what kept them going.
These fellows he did know. They were the same ones he stood among each night playing his part. He could join them now and they wouldn’t see any difference in him – he hoped they wouldn’t; unless he had picked something up from Slinger and the others that he didn’t know about; a way of leaning maybe, or holding his shoulders, a smell, but he didn’t think he had. He felt a need suddenly to be taken back, to share whatever it was these men were letting themselves in for, to be relieved of putting on an act. He turned himself inside out again and came out white.
The others hadn’t noticed anything. Their attention was all on Doug. He was the star here.
As Doug went on with his patter new chaps kept coming and falling in behind, till at last it was Doug’s turn to step up and sign on, and after that, Digger’s.
‘Listen,’ Digger told Slinger that night, ‘you won’t believe this. I joined up.’
It was after the show. They were pouring scoops of cold water over one another’s shoulders, dousing down in a rigged-up showering place behind the camp.
Slinger was an Islander, a big shy fellow, over six feet, a heavyweight. He paused now with the scoop of water, then slowly let it pour over his head.
‘Done it this arvo,’ Digger said. ‘I was a mug, eh?’ He took the scoop and dipped it.
‘Shit, Digger.’ Slinger looked genuinely upset. Digger was pleased by that. ‘Whatt’d ya do that for?’
Something in Slinger’s voice made him think of his mother, but it was only when he sat down later to drop her a line that he saw how she would see it: that what he was doing was taking himself further away.
He sobered. The water running over his chest was cold.
‘Must of been a mug all along,’ he offered.
‘Yair,’ Slinger said, ‘you must of. An’ I thought we’d learned you something.’
6
‘CHILLY, EH? ONCE the sun’s gone.’
Digger looked up, startled. He had been miles away, years; feeling the shock of cold water as it poured over his head, plastering his hair down over his eyes, all his white skin goosepimpling, his cock and balls shrivelling up as he danced on the boards of their rough and ready washing place and reached for a bit of towel they were sharing.
Vic shifted his gaze to the
river. ‘What about that cup of tea you mentioned?’
Watching them come up the path towards the store Jenny began to fluster. This was the third time he’d been in here in not much more than a week. He’d never done that before. He was after Digger for something and Digger was worried. She’d heard him at night through the wall, tossing and turning, but he wouldn’t let on to her what it was.
That last time, Thursday, he’d turned up with a present. He was always bringing her presents. It was his way of getting round her. He’d been trying it for years. He never learned.
In the early days it had been little things. A plastic hair-clip in the shape of a bow, it was once. Pink. Another time scent, ‘Evening in Paris’. ‘Ta,’ she’d say, and put the thing aside. She wouldn’t even look at it. She didn’t want anything from him. He’d put some sort of a spell on the thing, that’s what she thought, and if she used it, put it on, the hair-clip for instance, he’d have her just where he wanted.
Later the presents got bigger and came with a lot of packaging. ‘Here,’ he’d say, offering to help. ‘I can do it,’ she’d tell him fiercely, shoving him off. She was only opening the thing to be polite.
A jaffle-iron, that one was. Useless! Then a pressure cooker that scared the wits out of her and which he was probably hoping would blow her to buggery. Then a special pan for doing poached eggs, which Digger never ate anyway. Then a tin-opener you stuck to the wall. He came in all ready with a screwdriver and in two minutes flat had it fixed to the wall beside her sink. ‘Here, I’ll show you how it works,’ he said, and opened a half-tin of apricots – what a waste! – when she’d already made a bread-and-butter pudding.
They were always things that were no bloody use, or that she couldn’t use anyway without a lot of showing.
‘Honest,’ he complained once, ‘you’re a hard woman to please.’
Yair, mister, you bet I am.
But once her heart almost stopped. He turned up with a little kid, a little blond fellow of maybe five or six, in jeans and a coat with buttons on it in the shape of wooden barrels. He had blue eyes and his front teeth were missing. She held her breath. What was he for?
