Work in Progress

by Paul Thomas

  Patricia was right about one thing: as a child, I was instructed not to judge others by myself, a trick that requires more imagination and less ego than many of us possess. The message drummed into little Aussies, I decided, was that sticks and stones can break your bones but names will never hurt you.

  Keen for us to settle on their side of the harbour, Ginge and Lynne lobbied hard for the inner north — the likes of Neutral Bay, Crow’s Nest and Cremorne. Kate finally broke it to them in language Ginge could understand: ‘There’s no fuckin way we’re living on the North Shore, okay? I’m not going to cross that fuckin bridge twice a day and I don’t want Max to have to go to a fuckin shopping mall to feel part of the human race. So can we please drop the fuckin subject once and for all?’

  We chose Darlinghurst for its centrality, Italian cafés, cheap restaurants and louche street life. Same city, different world.

  I’d never been to Australia before, never had any interest in doing so. Growing up in New Zealand, I cast longing glances towards Europe, the land of antiquity and a millennium of momentous history, the centre of the civilisation of which we were the last, loneliest outpost. Australia, I assumed, was just a family-sized version of New Zealand. What did it have that we didn’t, apart from poisonous snakes, marsupials and continental vastness, mile upon soul-crushing mile of uninhabitable moonscape? And what was Sydney if not Auckland with a trailer-trash accent and one piece of zany, postcard-friendly architecture? Both had a harbour, a harbour bridge and rather too many philistines per capita.

  It took a month to turn those preconceptions on their head and make me burn with embarrassment when I recalled the times I’d held forth on this theme. Auckland was an overweight, immature teenager of a town, growing out but not up. Sydney was the real thing — a plantation of granite; a humming, restless, new-world metropolis embedded in the edge of the continent like a precious earring. Unlike Auckland, where virtually every structure of any age and distinction had been put to the wrecking ball to create space for the neon-lit façades of merchant capitalism or monuments to foxy property developers, Sydney had preserved at least some of its graceful and ambitious heritage.

  Auckland had Karangahape Road, a scruffy stretch of inner-city decay where the vice scene just plugged away, not underground enough to suit the old maids and political Christians nor bold enough to come right out and say, ‘Sin is our business: show us the colour of your money.’

  Sydney had Kings Cross, a few lurid blocks strategically located among the CBD, Woolloomooloo wharf where the US naval ships disgorged their complements of cashed-up gash-hounds, and the eastern bays where plutocrats luxuriated in glossy-magazine high style, counting their money, old and new, and chuckling over the fact that there were people out there, millions of them, who genuinely believed money couldn’t buy happiness.

  Like an obscene tattoo, the Cross demanded your attention whether you liked it or not. Teenage junkies and lanky transsexuals jostled for prime position, and pimps lounged in doorways, inviting passers-by into anonymous back rooms for watered-down drinks and other costly disappointments. A block back from the strip, heroin dealers conducted business from their double-parked Mercedes, brown paper bags full of cash under the passenger seats awaiting collection by the drug squad.

  When a red-light district becomes a tourist attraction, everyone’s a winner. Even Rotarians and their wives can rubber-neck with a clear conscience.

  Sure, there was the dross, the endless dormitory suburbs differentiated only by name and post code, where people subordinated their identities to their jobs, their kids and their TV sets. And there was worse: there was first-world poverty, mini-ghettos where the mighty cockroach roamed and social workers checked children for cigarette burns. But all great cities have their dreary swathes and wastelands, where the underclass breeds and bickers and rots. When people who don’t live there talk about Paris, they mean the core, a few gorgeous arrondissements. They don’t mean the weedy, graffittied suburbs where working-class fascism brews in the tower blocks or whole streets bow towards Mecca.

  The Lucky Country lived up to its billing. I found hard-case humour, winter sunshine and the best cheap red wine, but not in the hayseed setting of my uninformed imagination. Auckland was only a two-and-a-half-hour flight away (long enough by European standards but a commuter ride for the global traveller), but that sense of being an extra on the world stage, a spectator to history, always the last to know, was conspicuously absent. Australia was plugged into the global community and the Zeitgeist; Sydney was a jetset city whose residents expected every visitor, no matter who they were or where they came from, to depart in a state of envy.

  During this eye-opening familiarisation each day provided a new reason to congratulate myself for making the move. I was so busy congratulating myself that I failed to draw the obvious conclusion: I’d been wrong about Sydney in every other respect so it followed that I was wrong to assume I’d take it by storm.

  The penny would drop eventually.

  Kate and I were resigned to some belt-tightening now that we had to pay our own way. We’d almost talked ourselves around to the view that self-denial and the quiet life would be good for us. In our sillier moments we even discussed, with due solemnity, going on a full-blown health kick. This fantasy came complete with home-made muesli, alcohol-free weeks, gym membership and crack-of-dawn canters around Rushcutters Bay. But I didn’t realise — and after two years in all-expenses-paid exile Kate had forgotten — that money went a lot further in Sydney. And after months of ominous shiftiness and equivocation in head office over whose shoes she’d step into on her return, Kate was put in charge of an about-town column that recorded the extravagances and vulgarities of the rich, famous and notorious. It came with a no-questions-asked expense account, so before you could say ‘It’s on the company,’ the gravy train was rolling again.

  Her friends were mostly journalists, as merry a bunch of cynics and self-promoters as ever sexed up a CV. Our non-columnar social life revolved around journos’ pubs and raucous dinner parties, which either went swimmingly or horribly wrong. But the dramas were short-lived. The propositions welcome and unwelcome, the reckless insults and blistering denunciations, even the invitations to settle things outside floated away on the warm west wind or evaporated in the morning sun. Names didn’t hurt them.

  Like many Australians, Kate was both hard-bitten and sentimental. She’d kept in touch with her childhood friends, who still lived out in the northern beaches and were married to men called Wayne or Shane or Duane who had heavy-metal hair, wore stubbies to work and supported the Sea Eagles. And while I felt obliged to make an effort with Kate’s family (although, to be fair, Ginge’s demented soliloquies on the issues of the day and Brad’s laconic accounts of crime-fighting in Dubbo — whose underworld was handicapped by quite phenomenal stupidity — had a certain entertainment value), I regarded anything more than cursory contact with these bleached-blonde sheilas and their bodgie husbands and semi-housetrained children as above and beyond the call of duty. And Kate, sensible woman that she was, concurred.

  Shelley (remember her? — my agent) secured a reasonable advance on a two-book deal with the Australian arm of my UK publisher. Kate and I celebrated at a voguish restaurant. As I was flipping through the winelist in search of a dessert wine, she suggested that we get married.

  Her laugh had a self-conscious rattle. ‘You didn’t see that coming, did you?’

  I shook my head, realising — too late — how she’d interpret my silence and demeanour of prick-eared alertness.

  ‘Listen, forget it,’ she said, swivelling her eyes as if there was a mosquito in her airspace. ‘Forget I ever mentioned it. I don’t know why I brought it up. You tried marriage and didn’t like it; I know that. I also know that if it ain’t broke, don’t fuckin fix it.’

  It had come out of the blue, in the sense that there had been no softening-up process, but not as a complete surprise. I knew she fretted that time was picking up speed and lif
e was getting away from her. If by saying nothing I encouraged her to retract, what would her fall-back be: the ‘if it ain’t broke’ mantra or gnawing insecurity? Or would her thoughts turn to a pre-emptive strike to forestall heartbreak down the track and give herself one last shot at finding Mr Right before she hit forty and all bets were off?

  There was nowhere else I wanted to be; there were no particular cons and some persuasive pros. It would make her happy and I very much wanted to do that, partly because she deserved happiness and partly to relieve the faint, slow throb of guilt I felt for not loving her back — and, of course, for the lie I told every time she said, ‘I love you.’ All I can say in my defence is that I lied out of tenderness rather than calculation.

  I said, ‘If you want to get married, it’s fine by me.’

  Her smile was uncertain and short-lived. ‘That implies you don’t.’

  ‘No, it means I’m relaxed either way. So if you want to do it, fine, let’s do it.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘You realise what you’re getting yourself into?’

  ‘I think so: me husband, you wife, happily ever after.’

  That night as I lay in bed listening to the ceiling fan creak, I pondered the implications of marrying a woman I didn’t love. It meant I’d given up on romance and where did that leave me? At the end of the line, that’s where. Then I thought, what’s so wonderful about romance? What the fuck has romance ever done for me? It’s not the end of the line at all; it’s the end of adolescence, the end of illusion. Congratulations, mate, you’ve finally grown up.

  We kept it simple — a terse exchange with a celebrant and a piss-up at Ginge and Lynne’s — preferring to splash out on the honeymoon, a lavish fortnight on a Fijian island. My mother and sister came over from New Zealand. By that stage my mother was herself exhibiting an eccentricity that wasn’t always endearing. She could be roguish or she could put on airs and graces. Predictably this homely occasion brought out the grande dame.

  Late in the evening Ginge pulled me aside. ‘Mate, your old sheila — what’s the fuckin story?’

  ‘Beats me, Ginge. She’s a farmer’s daughter from the back of beyond but you’d swear she’s third in line to the throne.’

  ‘No offence, mate, but it’s no fuckin wonder your old man’s putting in time at the loony bin.’

  ‘None taken. You’ve just got to hope it doesn’t run in the family, eh?’

  ‘Don’t worry, mate, if you go troppo, we won’t let them bung you in the bin. Me and Brad’ll take you out into the bush and put a fuckin bullet in you.’

  I never met Myra. She’d been the head librarian when Kate started at the paper. She had nothing much in the way of family and friends so she’d dreaded retirement and postponed it for as long as she could. Although my wife wasn’t in the habit of bringing home strays or doing good works, she didn’t let Myra shuffle into a lonely twilight, ringing her every second day and dropping in on her at least once a week.

  Kate wasn’t holier-than-thou about it. Myra could be hard work and once or twice Kate was moved to say that if she’d known what she was letting herself in for, she would have put a few more bucks in the kitty for Myra’s farewell present and left it at that. But she did it and did it selflessly, expecting nothing in return, and when Myra died she was distraught.

  Myra left Kate her mortgage-free two-bedroom apartment in a landmark Art Deco building in Potts Point. Having arrived in Australia with practically nothing, I was now the joint owner of a property that, as Kate’s pal who covered real estate repeatedly and enviously told us, with a coat of paint and a renovated kitchen would fetch upwards of half a million dollars.

  Just when my life was on as even a keel as it had ever been, I met the pornographer.

  nine

  There’s one at every party: the needy misfit who interprets pro forma pleasantry as an invitation to make himself at home in your life, the social burden you try to offload, the killjoy those in the know steer well clear of.

  He stood in the corner, alone and ignored, blinking behind his spectacles. Everything about him said fish out of water. This was a jeans and T-shirt scene; he wore chinos with a knife-edge crease and a long-sleeved Oxford-weave white shirt with a button-down collar. He was the only person at the party who had used both an iron and a hairbrush.

  I felt a bit sorry for him. Ten minutes, I told myself; it’ll be your good deed for the week.

  I walked over and stuck out my hand. ‘G’day, I’m Max Napier.’

  He smiled uncertainly, as if he couldn’t — and didn’t — believe his luck. ‘Walter. Walter Cribb.’

  He had a spongy handshake and an American accent and looked overfed, under-exercised and unworldly, like many of the white US navy guys who filed past our apartment building in search of stuffed koalas, plastic boomerangs and the mythical whore with a heart of gold. They were probably the techno-geeks, the remote-control killers who programmed cruise missiles to fly through a certain window in a certain building in downtown Khartoum and take out a terrorist mastermind and his cleaning lady.

  ‘You wouldn’t be a naval man by any chance?’

  ‘Do I look like a cornholer?’ he asked mildly.

  ‘A what?’

  ‘You don’t know what a cornholer is? Here’s a clue: Sydney’s full of them; Sydney’s Cornhole City.’

  ‘I guess I shouldn’t overlook the obvious,’ I said. ‘By cornholer I presume you mean a member of the gay community?’

  ‘You call them gay; I call them cornholers; my father calls them spawn of the devil and my brother, who I used to share a bath with, calls them girlfriend.’

  I took a closer look at Walter Cribb because it seemed I’d missed something the first time around. He looked back at me with polite expectation, like an airline steward waiting for me to choose between the rosemary lamb with gratin potatoes and the chicken with pilaf rice.

  ‘So you’re not in the navy …’

  ‘No, sir.’

  I waited for him to tell me what he did for a living but he just smiled his I-can-do-this-all-night-if-I-have-to smile. Most people don’t need much encouragement to talk about their work and the more limited their outlook, the more eagerly they seize the opportunity. The fact that Walter passed on it suggested he wasn’t a bore or unduly bothered about being alone in a crowded room, which in turn suggested he wasn’t the social cripple I’d taken him for.

  I was moderately intrigued. ‘What’s your connection to the hosts?’

  The hosts were a media couple. She nattered inconsequentially on the radio and was, by all accounts, adored by her audience, mainly middle-class women with empty nests and a belated interest in broadening their minds. He was a columnist on Kate’s paper, a bottomless pit of moral outrage which he vented in prose that clanked and droned like a battletank in bottom gear.

  ‘Who are the hosts?’

  ‘I get it,’ I said. ‘You crashed the party.’

  He made a slow 180-degree sweep of the room, as if he was looking for someone to cadge a cigarette from. ‘Who the fuck would want to crash this party?’

  I mimicked his survey. ‘You know what? I’m pretty sure that if you decided to leave, no one would try to stop you. At least not physically.’

  His smile broadened. ‘You’re probably right, Max, but I figure why take the chance?’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s been nice trying to talk to you.’

  ‘Whoa there,’ he said. ‘What’s the rush? We’re just getting to know each other.’

  ‘No we’re not. Getting to know each other would involve exchanging a certain amount of low-grade personal information, which you seem disinclined to do.’

  I wasn’t sure how or why I came to be prodding Walter Cribb into telling me about himself, especially as I had the feeling he was having private fun at my expense, paying me back for my patronising assumptions by playing hard to get to know. If so, he hadn’t finished with me.

  ‘Ok
ay, let’s start over,’ he said. ‘And let’s do it properly this time.’ He produced a silver flask from his hip pocket. ‘Care to join me in a taste of Kentucky’s finest? Let me tell you, they don’t serve this at your local titty bar.’

  ‘Why not?’ Why not indeed? By now I was reasonably sure that meeting Walter Cribb would be the high point of my evening.

  He had a bottle of Evian stashed in the corner. He rinsed out an abandoned wine glass, emptied it into a pot plant, poured some whiskey and added a splash of water. I took a sip. I wasn’t a big fan of bourbon but this wasn’t bourbon as I knew it.

  ‘You like that?’

  I nodded. ‘I do.’

  ‘Lovingly made by some courtly old southern gentleman who probably bankrolled the hit on Martin Luther King.’ He shrugged. ‘Still, as I always say, we can’t let politics and such get in the way of a good time. Now, you were interested in knowing how I weaselled my way into this fabulous soirée. Well, I’m here as the guest of Lorraine, whose second name escapes me; she’s a journalist, like most everyone else here as far as I can tell. A year or two back she got a scholarship to Columbia University in New York City. My kid sister Joelene was on the same course and when she heard I was going to be in Sydney, she asked me to give Lorraine a call. I made the mistake of telling her the truth — that my plans for the evening amounted to a room-service meal and whatever’s on TV — and she insisted I come along here to meet her interesting friends and update her on where Joelene’s at. Well, as it happened we ran out of conversation within five minutes, at which point Lorraine developed a powerful need to go to the can. I haven’t seen her since.’