Something for the Pain

by Gerald Murnane

  Grenville Hughes was described as a leading New Zealand jockey, but I would have described his ride on Elkayel as incompetent. (That would have been my description during the days after the race. Later, when I had begun to entertain certain dark suspicions, I might have said that Hughes had ridden a perfectly judged race.) Hughes allowed Elkayel to drop to the rear of the field of twenty-six. At the far side of the course, halfway through the race, Elkayel was a hundred metres and more from the lead. Admittedly, the leader was a tearaway outsider, but I never expected my horse to win. Elkayel was still nearly last at the top of the straight. He then began to pass horse after horse with a strong run wide out, but I could still see that his task was impossible. While all this had been happening, Polo Prince had stayed near the lead. At the top of the straight, while Grenville Hughes was angling his horse, without any seeming haste, towards the outside of the field, Polo Prince dashed clear. He was still in front at the post, but Elkayel had got to his rump after having given him an impossible start.

  That might have been the end of the story, and those might have been the only facts available for my pondering in all the years since, but a few months after the Cup I met at a social gathering a man who worked for a rails bookmaker. The man told me—not as though he was revealing some dark secret but as though he was repeating what was already common knowledge in the circles he mixed in—that yes, a great deal of money had been won at long odds on Polo Prince, and that the people who had won the most were what he called the Elkayel connections.

  21. Summer Fair and Mrs Smith

  FOR MANY YEARS, I read Time, the weekly newsmagazine, from cover to cover every week. I stopped when Time-Life, or whatever they called themselves, came up with an Australian edition. I could learn all I needed to know about Australia from newspapers or from magazines such as the Bulletin. What I had especially enjoyed in Time was the coverage of people and events far from Australia, but this was much reduced in the Australian magazine, and they lost my custom for good. But in earlier years, I read everything in Time: everything from reports of military coups in Togo or Equatorial Guinea to descriptions of new art galleries in Tucson or Baltimore or new trends among football cheerleaders in Austin or Green Bay. I mostly read the magazine when I was on trams or trains during the years when I preferred not to own a car. I was reading it one evening on a crowded suburban train in the early 1960s, when a sentence at the end of an article in the Books section brought on a fit of giggling. I was a man in my early twenties, but I had to cough and frown and bite my lip and to think of serious things so as not to make a fool of myself in the crowded compartment.

  I had been reading a review of a book called The Bachelors. This work would have been the book-length equivalent of those articles that appear often in women’s or men’s magazines describing some or another emerging trend or some increasingly popular lifestyle. The author had filled chapter after chapter under such headings as ‘Bachelors and Interior Design’, ‘Bachelors and Sex’, ‘Bachelors Who Live Together’—that sort of thing. The reviewer had found the book interesting enough and had enlivened the review with some witty observations of his own. He had tried to end on a light note, and it was his last sentence that had set me off in the train. The sentence was roughly: One quirky custom unites all the many and varied sorts of men described in this book; all bachelors, it seems, urinate in sinks and washbasins.

  I lived at the time in a tiny place that had been advertised as a flat but was really a single room with a gas ring and a stainless-steel sink concealed behind a door in the corner. I lived there during all of 1961 and part of 1962, and through all that time I urinated in the bowl of my kitchen sink, but there were mitigating circumstances.

  My room was a converted back veranda behind a double-fronted solid-brick house that still stands today and is still numbered 50 in Wheatland Road, Malvern, near Tooronga Road. One wall was part of a rear wall of the house with the bricks painted over. The gas ring and sink were at one end of the room, at about the midpoint of the rear of the house. A small window was above the sink, but I kept the curtains drawn across it because it came close to making a right angle with a much larger window in the rear wall of the house. This large window, I guessed, was the kitchen window for the occupants of the house.

  The occupants of the house were not the owners. The whole place belonged to Mr and Mrs Jakubowicz, a middle-aged couple who lived somewhere in Windsor and who called at Wheatland Road every Sunday morning to collect the rent from their tenants. They had told me from the first that the rent must be paid in cash, and I always obliged them, but Mrs Smith, co-tenant of the house with her husband, John, told me once of her attempt to offer Mrs Jakubowicz a cheque. According to Mrs Smith’s account, the landlady had gone all funny.

  The landlords had three rents to collect every Sunday. In the backyard, not far from my covered-in veranda, was a tiny bungalow that served as a bedsitting room for the Ortlieb couple, a young husband and wife who had come to Australia as children of German migrants and talked often of going back to their homeland. They worked as cutters or machinists in a lingerie factory. The Ortlieb couple, unlike myself, had no gas ring or sink in their bungalow. Their kitchen occupied a third of another building, little better than a shed, at the rear of the backyard. The kitchen made up the central third of the shed, as I prefer to call it; one of the outer thirds was a bathroom and laundry that I shared with the Ortliebs. They and I shared also the other of the outer thirds of the shed. This third was a toilet, clean and serviceable but separated by only a weatherboard wall from the Ortliebs’ kitchen. Sometimes, of a Sunday morning, when I was taking my week’s washing towards the laundry, I would see the Ortliebs still at the breakfast table in their tiny kitchen but would not hesitate to fill the washing machine and set it going. Sometimes I showered while the Ortliebs were on the other side of the wall. Never, during the year and more while I lived in Wheatland Road, did I go into the toilet while the Ortliebs were in their kitchen on the other side of the weatherboards. I somehow managed to regulate my bowels so that they never needed to be relieved during the Ortliebs’ mealtimes. As for my bladder, I relieved it as often as needed—in my sink beneath my little curtained window, making sure always to run the tap at the same time and for some time afterwards.

  I kept away from the Ortliebs and their endless grizzling about the poor pay and conditions in their workplace. I would have kept away from Mrs Smith too, but she seemed to know in advance when I would be at the letterbox or walking down the side path and would come out of her front door and keep me talking. She and her husband, John, were a childless couple in their forties or fifties. I saw him sometimes leaving early for work. He was certainly not a white-collar worker but I never learned what humble job he did. She stayed at home all day and had hardly any visitors. I wondered why they rented a house much larger than they needed. I gathered from things she let slip that she had inherited a large house and, perhaps, even a farm in the Shepparton district and intended one day to return there. When I think of her now, I think of the phrase old-fashioned. Perhaps because she had never brought up children, her ways and manners seemed to belong to an earlier decade. I’m pretty sure she addressed me by my first name, but she was always Mrs Smith to me.

  Mrs Smith alone was not at all hard to put up with, but I began to think of moving elsewhere whenever Glenys was around the place. I don’t know whether I’ve spelled her name correctly but Glenys was a girl perhaps a few years older than myself who sometimes stayed with Mrs Smith of a weekend. Glenys, if you’re reading these pages more than fifty years after we last met, you’ll probably be offended by my describing you as a plain-looking young woman, but you’d surely concede that you were never going to offer yourself as a Miss Australia candidate. Yes, I’ve written my harsh words now, and I’ll have to let them stand. Glenys was a plain-looking young woman. She was also like me in being something of a loner. When a person from Glenys’s and my age group spent Saturday evening alone, it raised the strong poss
ibility that he or she was without a boyfriend or girlfriend. Glenys seemed to turn up every few weeks at Wheatland Road and to spend the Friday and the Saturday evening alone with the Smiths. Mrs Smith would surely have observed that I myself was alone on those evenings. I was without a girlfriend during the whole of my time at Wheatland Road, although I had occasional visitors—mostly solitary males like myself but sometimes an engaged couple that I knew and once, for a few hours, a young woman that I had hoped might become my girlfriend. I should add that although I spent most of my weekends alone, I never considered myself an object of pity whereas I tended to feel sorry for Glenys. I went to the races every Saturday. I had no fridge where I could keep beer cool, but I bought supplies of rum and mixed it in equal parts with Schweppes lime cordial to make a palatable and heart-warming drink. I spent my evenings sipping my mixture and reading. Sometimes I even wrote a little. I would never have said that I was living my ideal life, but after I had drunk a certain amount of my rum-and-lime I supposed I was very soon to meet up with a compatible young female person. I even supposed she might have been sitting just then as I was—alone and in need of company. But I never supposed that she was Glenys, who might have been sitting just then on the other side of our dividing wall.

  I spoke to Glenys once—more than once. Mrs Smith caught me with my guard down on one of the first occasions when Glenys was visiting Wheatland Road. Before I could think of an excuse, Mrs Smith had got me to have afternoon tea on her front veranda with Glenys and herself and—strangely, it seems to me now—a young woman from next door. The surname of the young woman was Monk, and whereas Glenys and I were introduced to one another by our given names, the neighbour and I were introduced to one another by our surnames, and even Mrs Smith addressed her as Miss Monk. As I said earlier, Mrs Smith was oddly old-fashioned.

  I have no recollection of what was talked about at the tea table but nor do I recall any uncomfortable silences or embarrassing gaffes. Still, if Mrs Smith had hoped that I might afterwards have asked Glenys to take a turn with me around the front lawn and might have asked Glenys while we walked if she cared to go to the races with me next Saturday, nothing of the sort happened. Though Glenys returned every few weeks to Wheatland Road, she and I remained as far apart as ever.

  This book is supposed to be about horse racing, and yet the races have hardly been mentioned in all the preceding pages of this section. I’ll shortly introduce Summer Fair, winner of the famous leg-pull AJC Derby at Randwick in October 1961. Before then, I have one last thing to tell about Glenys. One fine and warm Sunday morning after Glenys and I had each slept alone in our solitary beds on the Saturday night under the same roof but separated by several walls, I heard from just outside the window over my sink the sound of the back door opening—Mrs Smith’s back door. Next, I heard the clattering of high heels on the concrete path leading to the clothesline that all three tenants shared. The line was bare at the time. I must have brought my own washing in earlier. Perhaps I was leaving my washing until later in the day. Anyway, the high heels belonged to Glenys. She clattered to the line and then used a pair of pegs to suspend from the nearest wire a pair of ladies’ pants, briefs, whatever you want to call them. That was all. She hung the things there in the backyard, on the otherwise empty clothesline, and then clattered back to the house. She had on her face the sort of fatuous half-smile I had sometimes seen there. It was one more of the things that prevented me from becoming interested in her.

  So, now I had something novel to look at: a centre of attention in what had been an empty backyard. Now, there dangled in the breeze this cute little item of ladies’ underwear. As I recall, the colour of the item was steel grey or, perhaps, pale blue. There was not much substance to the item. I mean, they were a brief pair of pants, to put it plainly. They were not exactly opaque, either. In another context, they might have been described as revealing. Anyway, there they hung, somewhat to the mystification of the solitary young man who was staring at them from his bachelor’s lair. I’ve mentioned already in this book that I’ve always had the greatest difficulty understanding the behaviour of females, especially when it has to do with romantic or sexual matters. I could not even be sure whether Glenys’s hanging out a pair of pants on a Sunday morning was any sort of message. But supposing it was a message, what sort of message had she hoped to get from me in return? Not that I had the least intention of replying to her lingerie-bunting. I had been trying for months past to make it clear to Mrs Smith and to Glenys that I was not interested in the young woman. But this seemed an opportunity to improve my skills in dealing with young females. I felt obliged to consider what I might have done if I had been interested in Glenys and wanted to respond to her message.

  What was I expected to do? Should I walk out to the clothesline and stare up at the things as though imagining them clinging to the hips and groin of their owner? Should I feel them? Should I steal them—lift them down from the line and carry them off to my room, there to wait for her to claim them and not to return them until she had paid the price of a kiss? Perhaps I should rinse out a clean pair of my own Jockey underpants and hang them on the nearest line and parallel to her undies, so that the breeze lifted each item towards the other in a series of airborne pelvic thrusts? It was all so crazy. I drew the curtains across my windows and went on with my reading or writing.

  And now for Summer Fair! I’m somewhat ashamed to report that I can’t recall his colours. I recall only a predominance of red with markings of white or pale blue. I don’t even know whether he was a gelding or a colt but, like every other person who followed racing in 1961, I recall that Summer Fair won the AJC Derby of that year on protest. He had been beaten across the line by Blue Era (Red, black-and-white striped sleeves, black cap) but his rider, Tom Hill, had protested that the rider of Blue Era, Mel Schumacher, had held him, Hill, by the leg as the horses approached the line. This was verified by the stewards after they had seen film of the race. Summer Fair was promoted to first, and Mel Schumacher received a long suspension for foul riding.

  At that time, I had a friend in a senior position in the Victorian Railways. He told me, soon after the AJC Derby, that the Railways had been asked to provide customised transport between Sydney and Melbourne for the young racehorse Summer Fair which, for some reason, could not endure road travel. My friend told me in addition that someone connected with Summer Fair had whispered to someone in his, my friend’s, office that Summer Fair was coming to Melbourne to contest the Caulfield Guineas, which he would not win, and afterwards the Caulfield Cup, which he would most assuredly win. I thanked my friend for his information and resolved to have a small bet on the three-years-old in the Cup. My friend was not a racing man, and I had never put much faith in second- or third-hand tips.

  Summer Fair ran well in the Guineas without winning. That need not have meant that his connections had had the horse deliberately beaten. The Guineas was a race over 1600 metres. The AJC Derby, run not long before, was over 2400 metres. The large difference in distances could easily have caused Summer Fair to be beaten on his merits in the much shorter Guineas.

  On Caulfield Cup Day, 1961, I was in a reserved box in the grandstand. I had been invited there by a former colleague at the Royal Mint, where I had worked four years before. Warwick Murray had known nothing about racing but had become a part-time punter after noting the achievements of Martin Dillon, whom I’ve mentioned several times already. Reserved boxes were a recent innovation at several Melbourne courses. They seem primitive now, when diners sit at terraced tables behind glass, but I felt I was sampling the latest in luxurious living while I lolled against the canvas walls of our little enclosure and sent the waiter scurrying for cold beer after cold beer. Before the Cup, I went down into the ring and had a pound or two on my fancy, whose name I’ve forgotten, although I remember that its rider was George Moore; its colours were predominantly purple, with orange-and-white markings; and its odds were about six-to-one. I recall also that it finished near the rear in the
Cup. The horses were on their way to the barrier before I remembered Summer Fair. I had come to the races intending to have five or ten shillings on the three-years-old but had forgotten all about the bet. I went in search of the nearest tote window. When I found it, the young woman across the counter told me that the minimum bet was a pound. This was in the part of the grandstand occupied exclusively by reserved boxes. We loungers in the boxes were deemed by the club, it seemed, to be above betting in shillings. I must have had a fair amount of beer by then. I was not going to be thought a cheapskate by the young tote employee. I bet a pound win-only on Summer Fair. The young horse had been about twenty-to-one with the bookmakers, but, for whatever reason, he lacked for support on the tote. He won the Cup with not much trouble and paid forty-to-one on the tote. I had won the equivalent of three weeks of my teacher’s salary on him.

  Summer Fair was not my only winner that day, and I left the course more than fifty pounds better off than I had entered it. My lean-to in Wheatland Road was less than two kilometres from the grandstands at Caulfield. My custom was always to walk to and from Caulfield on race days. I walked without interruption to the racecourse but on the way home I stopped for two or three or four or five beers in Macnamara’s Caulfield Club Hotel. If I had won a goodly amount, I sometimes bought the smallest crayfish on sale in the fish shop near Macnamara’s and devoured it soon after arriving home. The crayfish had to be small, and I had to devour it soon because I had no fridge in my quarters.