Jacko

by Keneally, Thomas

  Chloe went to the screen door and looked out at the same morning star which, on first waking, we’d thought she might bring indoors with her.

  —Well, I reckon it’s not good enough to write great work and leave your readers hanging for a bloody explanation. Maybe you could look into it for me eh. He might hate women but he knows us to the last atom of our bloody wishbones.

  —That’s how unfair the distribution of talent is, Chloe. Say you use the crappy old term muses. They don’t give a damn whether you’ve got an ounce of human kindness.

  Larson said, You’re right there.

  Chloe kept talking though, saying that she had to see him and she knew I could arrange it all if I wanted to. She half-suspected still that it was her criticisms of the night before which made me deny her access to Michael Bickham, that megalith of the Antipodes.

  —Anyhow, she said, we’ll be discussing this further eh. Because you say you’re coming back. I really need to talk to him. Before he dies.

  —Yes, we’re coming back, said Larson. We want to talk to your husband. And maybe go out mustering.

  —Yairs, she growled. Let’s hope he’s over his sulks by then.

  Larson said, This is a great place. For atmosphere. And for light.

  —Christ eh, said Chloe. If you write me up as a quaint bloody bushie, I’m going to be ropable.

  Larson said softly, I think you’re great. You exceed the sum of our expectations. You ought to trust us, Chloe.

  It was a reckless proposition of Larson’s. But Chloe stopped arguing with me, and we kissed her goodbye.

  I left promising that I would see what I could do with Bickham. But I knew I could do damn-all.

  Three weeks later, I had the honour of giving Larson’s eulogy in a chapel at the Northern Suburbs Crematorium. A great crowd came, for, in the world of tricky and crooked images, Larson was considered an honest man. With his intimate eye, he had photographed Australia so extensively that advertising people went to his enormous stills library whenever they were stumped for an image. And so now they too came to his funeral, along with all the people who’d worked with him in live footage – in commercials, documentaries, features.

  The crowd spilled out onto the lawn cemetery.

  People who work at such visual tasks have a particular look. This made it easier for me – just as I was praising Larson quite accurately for his openness, his generosity, his powers of observation, his lust for Australian light, his vision, and the range of his gifts – to see Mrs Chloe Emptor, in a black dress and a broad-brimmed straw hat, standing by the main door of the chapel, being killed – I was sure about this – by her pair of unlikely, stiletto-heeled black shoes.

  She looked, nonetheless, a fully paid up member of this union of grief. Beside her was her great moon-faced son, Jacko Emptor, looking something of an outsider in this serious film congregation.

  More so outside afterwards, when everyone was remembering Larson and consoling each other with anecdotes and falling on each other’s necks. Jacko approached wearing the sort of shiny, pristine suit only television people and cabinet ministers wear.

  —Sorry for your loss, mate, he told me.

  The corners of his mouth pulled deep into his cherubic cheeks.

  Chloe Emptor said, Boomer – you know Boomer the heli pilot – he had to fly the machine to Mount Isa for maintenance. I came on down to Sydney by commercial jet.

  With breaks for re-fuelling, it would have taken them a day in the mustering helicopter to get to Mount Isa. Then another two thousand or so miles to Sydney. A Burren Waters commute.

  —I couldn’t believe it, Chloe murmured. When I heard the radio news eh. I mean, you blokes were due back to interview that mongrel of a husband …

  —I’ll still come if you’ll have me.

  —Course.

  She turned to her son.

  —Our friend here’s going to try to arrange for us to have lunch with Michael Bickham.

  —Shit, said Jacko. Yeah?

  The lips hung part open in the kind of speculation I’d seen in Chloe.

  —The only one of our family who’s met him is Frank.

  —That’d fit, said Jacko, and he turned to me, keen to make things clear.

  —Frank’s my poofter brother, he told me with a mixture of gaugeable ill will and affection both. Lives in the Eastern Suburbs. The opera. Makes sense Bickham would’ve met him.

  Jacko put his giant arm around my shoulder.

  —Listen, maybe you could tell me. What’s the connection between Banjo Paterson and Michael Bickham? You know? What’s the line of succession? Is Bickham Banjo Paterson gone sour? Or does Banjo not even appear on the same planet as Bickham?

  And as if he had his own answer he began to recite Banjo Paterson’s famous mythologizing verse Clancy of the Overflow:

  —I am sitting in my dingy little office, where a stingy

  Ray of sunlight struggles feebly down between the houses tall,

  And the foetid air and gritty of the dusty, dirty city,

  Through the open window floating, spreads its foulness over all …

  And I somehow rather fancy that I’d like to change with Clancy,

  Like to take a turn at droving where the seasons come and go,

  While he faced the round eternal of the cash book and the journal—

  But I doubt he’d suit the office, Clancy of “The Overflow”.

  I said, Your father’s Clancy of The Overflow. Your brother Peter is. You could have been.

  —Oh, I know, mate. I’m pleading guilty right now to not liking the cattle station life. You meet a very limited range of people, don’t you, Chloe? But you know, Banjo stated the Australian equation. He said you can go for A, or you can go for B. With Bickham there’s only Z, and most of us poor bastards don’t get to Z.

  He shrugged, made that winking motion of the head without actually winking (one of his trademark gestures) and quoted from Banjo the balladist again:

  —And an answer came directed in a writing unexpected,

  (And I think the same was written with a thumbnail dipped in tar);

  ’Twas his shearing mate who wrote it, and verbatim I will quote it:

  “Clancy’s gone to Queensland droving, and we don’t know where he are.”

  And then, finally, he did wink.

  5

  Early in our friendship, I found myself questioning Jacko on the basis of what I knew of his abnormal childhood. How, from Burren Waters, did his fervour for the television medium derive? The medium had lain in wait for him in his babyhood, yet let him have his childhood before declaring itself to him.

  From these questions, I built something like a history of Jacko’s infancy. I am touched to think of little Jacko, yearning already for secrets which the landscape doesn’t hold, beginning his education on the radio telephone with School of the Air. The teacher would be sitting in a broadcast booth in Alice Springs, while baby Jacko sat some four hundred miles away in the radio booth of Burren Waters, wearing his headphones, listening to his class, reading aloud for them when the teacher pressed his button on her switchboard, competing with other members of the class to answer questions such as: What is four multiplied by two minus one?

  The classmates, spread all over the Northern Territory, were involved in competition with children whose faces they could only guess at. Jacko Emptor of Burren Waters, Sharon Tinsley of Apsley Waters, Robert and Timothy Cartwright and Catherine Ryan of Victoria River Downs, Astrid Kravitz of Morgan Waters, and so on. All their doors and faces locked to him by outrageous distance.

  When he was eight there was a boom in cattle prices, and the rainfall was a phenomenal two and a half inches above average. Stammer Jack expanded into the quarter-horse trade, and, at Chloe’s insistence, a school was founded at Burren Waters to provide an elementary education to the children of all the new men and women Stammer Jack and Chloe needed to employ.

  But there was still the question of high school. Petie had already been
sent to the same school which had given Stammer Jack his polishing, a vast boarding school in a leafy suburb of Sydney designed especially for boys from the bush of vaguely Catholic persuasion. St Kevin’s was in some ways a factory farm for Rugby internationals, but when Jacko went there in his turn he showed a lack of commitment to the football code whose promoters called it the game they play in Heaven. Jacko was accused of poor teamwork. His lack of focus was all the more blameworthy in contrast to his brother Petie, who had been a great line-out specialist and had so much teamwork as to be a notorious inflictor of gashes to the forehead and eyebrows of those who got in his way when the winger threw the ball in.

  The adolescent Jacko nonetheless harboured a sense of being a great team-worker. It was simply that he had not yet found his team. He made friends with a boy named David, an extraordinarily delicate beauty, too fine a flower of a boy to be lost amongst the Rugby warriors. I have seen their class photograph: David’s delicate stalk of a neck, his chin thrust forward as if he knows that someone who sees the picture will love him, whatever sort of pariah he is among his own herd. The teachers kept an eye on both of them, aware that Jacko’s heart, or at least his testosterone, was already at war with the pale and immaculate mysteries of faith.

  David’s parents lived in the city. They were both doctors, honest technicians who did not know where their heavenly son had come from. Jacko used to go home with David on weekends out of school. They would be left alone on Saturday evenings, when the doctoral spouses had dinners to go to. It was on these Saturday evenings with David that Jacko first saw Fred Gudgeon, a television comic. His impact on the young Jacko was all the more marked by the fact that Jacko had been eccentrically protected by distance from an earlier sighting of television clownery. Jacko was stunned and captivated and converted at a stroke, or more accurately, at the appearance of that one angelic creature of light named Gudgeon. Yet to some people all Gudgeon did was stick pieces of toilet paper on his face as if he had given himself frequent cuts shaving and then, with tape recorder and mike, gatecrash the Sydney airport press conferences of arriving stars and cabinet ministers. With ingenuous questions, he made the wise seem fools.

  Jacko understood that taking-the-piss idiom of Gudgeon utterly. It was the idiom of Burren Waters.

  When Gudgeon did not gatecrash press conferences, he intruded into homes and interviewed bemused people. Even in the cities of Australia the doors were sometimes double-locked, barred and heavily panelled. But Gudgeon got mysterious access. It was delicious even when he didn’t.

  One Saturday night while David and Jacko watched, a gatekeeper at the Royal Australian Golf Club asked Gudgeon where his authority to enter was, and Gudgeon faced his own camera, the other side of the tube and mirror at which David and Jacko gazed, and tapped what seemed to Jacko to be the inside of the television he and David were watching, and said, This is my authority.

  The idea of such kingship filled Jacko with ecstasy. Nor could he stop choking with laughter. He and David mutually choked for Gudgeon’s sake. Their supply of love for Gudgeon united them, for a time, in a sort of love of their own.

  Until one weekend Greggie Emptor, a cousin from Port Macquarie, a twenty-year-old who had gone straight from school into horse breeding, came and took Jacko to dinner at the Cross, and then to a massage parlour where a Chinese girl functionally demonstrated how Jacko’s affairs might be arranged more to his liking. And the next time David asked, Jacko said, Mate, you should be growing out of that by now!

  As well, Chloe had written to Jacko to tell him that a satellite dish had been installed at Burren Waters. He would be able to watch Gudgeon in the holidays. His spiritual dependence on David had been lessened.

  Jacko wrote the script for the annual revue at St Kevin’s, and a former New South Wales breakaway called Matt Henessey, who taught mathematics, toned it down so that parents wouldn’t be affronted. Six-foot-two, fifteen and with the beginnings of a moustache, Jacko now talked himself into work around radio stations, and sometimes read news or filled in for late-night announcers who had flu. Gudgeon came to the station where Jacko was working in his sixteenth year. They drank coffee together and Gudgeon sombrely told him how it was done. Act innocent, said Gudgeon, flashing sad eyes, and don’t take a backwards step.

  Jacko studied law at Sydney University. Chloe and Stammer Jack wanted it, and Jacko did not fight too hard. He believed the law gave him an extra dimension, women liked that, and being liked by women had taken on the importance it would thereafter retain. He was, in any case, interested in the constitution, and the laws of trespass and privacy. But he was also hosting television variety shows by the time he was eighteen.

  Meanwhile, and at last, Gudgeon’s device wore thin with all of the public except Jacko. Gudgeon’s creator, the man who had advised Jacko in such cogent terms, went away to try to make comedy films.

  In his young manhood Jacko was looking for a chance to reinstitute the genre of comic trespass, the whole Gudgeon act, but the Australians weren’t interested.

  —Done to death! the television executives told him.

  Introducing the Logan sisters on morning television, under the direction of Ed Durkin, Jacko knew in his blood that the Gudgeon day would dawn at some time, and in some perhaps unimaginable place.

  Then, as we know, Basil Sutherland called Durkin and brought him to New York to plan assaults on public taste. Durkin missed Jacko and called him from Australia. It was the most liberating call of Jacko’s life. He knew now there was a chance to cut loose in fresh fields with the rites of intrusion.

  Now, in his days as a transplanted Gudgeon, Jacko lived with Lucy in a loft in Thomas Street, Tribeca. Tribeca ran more bars per square mile, said Jacko, than Burren Waters ran cattle. There was one downstairs from Jacko – Mary O’Reilly’s – a sentimental Irish pub where you could leave letters and packages for collection by Jacko. Across the road was a more hard-edged, Belfast and Derry pub, Coghlan’s, which took up collections for the families of men in the Maze in Belfast, and where Irish-named cops from the First Precinct could sign letters of support for hunger strikers. The cops who drank at Coghlan’s felt paternal towards Jacko. The times that I waited in Coghlan’s for Jacko or Lucy to come home, they would say, Oh yeah, the big Australian guy, Jacko! All in a way which implied that the world needed more of Jacko’s kind of innocence and cheek.

  And then they would recount their versions of the morning Jacko talked his way in through the door of a racketeer’s house in New Jersey. This had occurred some six months before Jacko began his search for Sunny Sondquist, the Anodyne kid. The microwave truck had gone out, followed by Jacko and Dannie, and picked up the signal from Manhattan on a street of unwalled mansions in Bergenfield.

  I was watching that morning, in our sweet little apartment – what I insisted on calling a flat as a token of Australian nationalism – in the narrow Cotton Building on the corner of East Fourth and Broadway. From the window of our bedroom we could see the World Trade Towers to the south. From the window of our living room we could look north up Lower Broadway, a thoroughfare of astounding liveliness.

  Every morning a saxophonist who would have been hired by one of the better hotels in any other city than this one used to play for three hours on the corner by the Bottom Line, the famed cabaret where the young queued two blocks on Friday nights for the right performer. Under the violet flags of NYU, an Ecuadorian band played high Andean music full of images of big-hatted, coca-leaf-chewing mountain folk and of llamas and condors.

  And I watched Jacko acting the goat in Bergenfield.

  Jacko is therefore in the street of unwalled mansions. He walks up a pathway through the snow, past a freshly delivered copy of the Jersey edition of the New York Times wrapped in blue plastic. It is an encouragement to Jacko since it promises occupancy, and he knocks on the broad, double-leafed door panelled in an Italianate manner, looking somehow reinforced like the door of a bank.

  When there is no reply, Jacko tells us he su
spects someone is hiding within.

  —As is of course their right, he assures us, making a face which implies otherwise. And then in vengeance, or perhaps because his producer Dannie is urging him to, he tells the cameraman, who is in this case his friend Clayton, to put the muzzle of the camera up against the glass side panelling of the door. Hence we see, through Clayton’s lens and the further lens of armour glass, someone’s dream of opulence: a floor of creamy marble, a broad swathe of stair arising with gilt banisters and a lit chandelier fit for a casino.

  —Let the people enter, roars Jacko, rapping on the window of this Jersey version of Versailles.

  —Okay, Clayton, says Jacko, no sport this side of the road.

  Clayton’s camera swings and takes in the rest of the street. There is a glimpse of Dannie skittering away from the frame.

  —Identical place across the road, roars Jacko. We’ll give that one a burl next.

  And then he returns us to the studio, where snide Maloney, the anchorman, says he was sure all viewers wished Jacko better luck on the far side.

  When at last, after a lot of video persiflage, we were returned to Jacko, he was positioned by a door identical to the one he’d tried across the street. This time we got a sense from his face that his knock was almost immediately about to be answered.

  —Somebody coming, somebody coming, he told us with his great oafish grimace.

  The door was opened by a young man, barefooted, dark-haired, a little overweight, but wearing a track suit as if he intended to do something about his obesity.

  —Mornin’, he told Jacko, a thorough greeting.

  Jacko went into his spiel. He was Jacko Emptor, boy from the bush, somehow associated with a microwave dish truck and a camera crew, wanting a little succour and warmth at a New Jersey hearth.

  The young man could hardly wait for Jacko to be finished. He yelled, Come in! I know you.