by C. K. Stead
Today, while we were talking about the Bicentennial, Clarry said, ‘Course, you know—I’m descended from a convict.’
‘You talk a lot of rubbish,’ Zoe Shrimpton said. She was bringing us tea and scones—she’d knocked up a batch, and there was jam as well. As she put down the tray she said to me in a loud whisper, ‘It’s the drugs.’
‘What do you know about it?’ he said.
‘Come to that,’ she said, ‘we’re all descended from the apes. According to Darwin.’
‘Well, if you went up to Darwin you’d think so,’ Clarry said. He let out a whinnying laugh.
After she’d gone he said, ‘There’s a lot she doesn’t know. My grandmother saw the welts on his back. Thick as your finger.’
I’VE COME UP TO the Cross for a change of scene. Auckland and Los Angeles haven’t been treating me well. I remember the Cross from my first time in Sydney, years ago. It seemed like a first taste of Europe. I remember sitting out drinking coffee on the balcony of a hotel and feeling I was already there. Now I can’t find that balcony or that hotel. I walk past the strip joints and the whores in miniskirts. I think seriously about going with one. They all look blotchy-faced or knocked about in some way—but that’s not the problem. It isn’t morality either, or conscience, or concern about the exploitation of women. It’s fear. It used to be fear of VD. Now it’s fear of AIDS. They say it’s safe with a condom, but is it? And I’m not sure my machinery would work any more with one of those things.
It’s Clarry who set me off on this train of thought. He has a way of craning his skinny neck to look around at me, making sure his missus, as he calls her, isn’t coming. Then he reaches under his bed, pulls out his money tin and his race books, and tells me what to put on for him at the TAB. Or, if it’s not racing, he comes out with some ‘men’s talk’ that’s not meant for her ears.
Today he asked how old I was. I told him thirty-nine.
‘Thirty-nine eh. And who’re you rooting?’
I told him I wasn’t rooting anyone. ‘I’m separated. Getting divorced, Clarry.’ And I added, imitating his digger lingo, ‘I’m on me lonesome.’
He nodded. ‘So who’re you rooting then?’
I felt like telling him he can be an irritating shit, but I think he knows that and he doesn’t care. He has nothing to lose.
‘You know how I know I’ve got it bad?’ He pointed between his legs. ‘Because the big fella won’t stand up any more.’
‘Give it time,’ I said.
He closed his eyes and seemed to doze. I sat in the battered old basket chair by his bed hearing magpies somewhere out there. I closed my eyes too and saw green and brown river-flats. I might even have dozed for a moment. I was woken by Clarry’s voice. ‘It’s like this,’ he was saying. ‘A man’s programmed to root. All the rest’s bullshit. You root, you’re happy. You don’t root, you’re not.’
‘What about love?’ I said.
‘Love’s nice,’ he said. ‘But it’s not necessary. Rooting’s necessary.’
It made me think of a line of a poem by W.H. Auden: ‘Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.’
I said, ‘Some people would say it’s the other way round.’
‘Some people say all kinds of things,’ Clarry said.
It wasn’t that Clarry had provided me with a new philosophy, or a piece of essential wisdom. It has, really, more to do with what I’m calling the Purpose. I’ve come to think Clarry is dying and that I’m draining the last life out of him and using it in my novel. It doesn’t matter if that’s codswallop. If it works, if it keeps me going, that’s all that matters. But I’ve started to interpret what he says to me as if he were some kind of oracle uttering obscure instructions from inside a deep cave. The cave is death. What is it telling me? That I can’t create life unless I’m in some way immersed in it? What he calls rooting—I’ve hardly thought about it. Now he has made me conscious of it—conscious of a need.
So here I am at the Cross. It was a stupid idea to think I could pay some money and buy my way back into life again. But I sit out of doors under an umbrella near the Alamein fountain and drink what they call here a ‘flat white’. I’m in a mood of gentle despair I know to be dangerous—like lying on a very comfortable bed for a moment when what you need to do is to get up and get going.
I take the route to the TAB. I go down to Simmons Point and then along the foreshore into Mort Bay where the tugboats are tied up. Then up a street of ugly new townhouses and on up to Balmain shops. I don’t go to the TAB to put Clarry’s bets on. I go to find out the results, when I’ve missed the race commentary on the radio, and to get the odds. I don’t put any of Clarry’s money on the TAB. I keep it and pay TAB odds when he wins. I’ve become his secret bookie. He doesn’t know. I don’t know what he would think if he did.
It happened by accident. I forgot to put a bet on for him and the horse won. I thought it might distress him, so I pretended I’d placed the bet and I paid him the TAB odds. Then it occurred to me I could be a gambling man too just by betting against his bet. Some days he wins and I lose; other days I’m the winner. The amounts are never large. I think I’m ahead. I suppose the bookie usually is.
Today I came back from the TAB via the school. I stood outside the gates and looked into the yard. There’s an open area with a broad, sloping roof over it and benches underneath. There’s one little girl who seems always to wear big baggy shorts and to have her hair held back from her face with a clip. She reminds me so much of my Emma at that age I suppose I always stare. Today I stood at the gate looking in. I ought to have known it would cause alarm. A woman came out and asked me what I wanted. I told her I was lost in thought. She didn’t look reassured.
I came back here feeling as if I’d been beaten all over with sticks. But then straight away I sat down at the typewriter and I must have run through three pages with hardly a pause. It was the afternoon, when I don’t usually write, and I finished those pages feeling I know exactly where I will take the story tomorrow.
So I cooked myself a meal, opened a bottle of wine and felt it hadn’t been a bad day. Now I’m sitting out on the balcony looking at the harbour by night. To say it’s a beautiful sight is a ridiculous understatement. If it’s true, as Zoe Shrimpton says, that there’s to be a fireworks display on the harbour, this will be the place to be. But could Clarry be brought here? I don’t see how.
I think again about his advice to me. Did he really say all that about ‘rooting’? Or did I dream it in that dozy moment by his bed? I know it’s normal enough to feel slightly deranged when you find yourself suddenly living alone after years of family life. The thought might bother me more if it weren’t for the fact of those three pages written this afternoon.
Down on the water a paddle steamer is going past Pyrmont towards the Bridge. I take the binoculars from the living room and pick out the illuminated sign on its side: SYDNEY RIVERBOAT. Then I range over the city picking out the signs in lights—QANTAS, ESSO, ROYAL INSURANCE, HILTON, MARTINS, all in red; IBM, ARTHUR YOUNG, GOLD FIELD in white; CITIBANK in blue. On the North Shore ZURICH, MN and AGL are in blue; PHILIPS is blue-green; SHARP and CIC are red; FP is white in a circle, and NCR white on red. LEGAL & GENERAL has a red-and-green umbrella over it. One of the tallest buildings overlooking the Quay has a sign of 1788–1988. Electric stars and spangles shower from it down the face of the building.
The phone rings. It’s Caroline, calling from Auckland. It’s late there—past midnight—and her speech is slurred. ‘Have you been drinking?’ I ask.
She wants to know what business that is of mine.
‘You’re in charge of my kids,’ I remind her.
‘Too right I am. And it’s going to stay that way.’
‘Is that what you rang to tell me?’
‘Jesus, Simon, why are you such a bastard?’
‘Why are you such a bitch?’
She hangs up on me. I phone her, but she doesn’t answer.
IT HAS RAINE
D FOR three days. The lorikeets come in the morning but after they’ve been fed they don’t leave. They huddle, quarrelling, bedraggled, on the balcony rail. They move to the balcony below, or to the building next door, but for most of the morning they stay close. They’re a distraction. I find myself getting up to give them more brown sugar or bread and honey. Then I recognise that I got up because I was stuck for a word or a phrase. It’s only another version of straightening the pictures or making yourself a cup of coffee.
But the lorikeets don’t stay all day. Late in the morning they begin to disappear. It’s hard to imagine what mental processes prompt them into action. I watched one that had spent most of the morning on the rail. Suddenly it was in flight, out over Simmons Point towards Goat Island. It reached the island in just a few seconds but it didn’t stop there. It flew straight on over and I lost sight of it, heading like a little green-and-gold rocket towards Waverton or Wollstonecraft.
As the rain clouds go over, bits of the city disappear. The Australia Tower and the tallest buildings come and go. Occasionally the bridge, straight in front of me there down the harbour, vanishes in cloud. But even when everything is clear and sharp, the rain goes on falling. It varies between heavy and very heavy. It never stops. Today I went to a play at the Belvoir Street Theatre. I don’t have a raincoat here, but I found a blue-and-white golf umbrella big enough to camp under. I took the bus into the Town Hall and set off on foot. I should have known that rain, like everything else in Australia, has to be on a grand scale. It poured through the shop verandas wherever there was a weak point or a hole. It thundered on the umbrella, seeped through, and ran down the handle and into my sleeve. It turned the side streets into rivers. I kept looking out for a taxi but the few I saw had the engaged sign up. Going up Elizabeth Street, sheltering as far as possible under verandas, I was soaked by a car steered by its happy-faced driver through the metre-wide flow of gutter water so everyone on the pavement was caught in the jet from its wheels.
The play was Capricornia from the novel by Xavier Herbert. The young hero grows up in Melbourne believing he’s descended from a Japanese princess. When he returns, against advice, to Port Zodiac, he discovers he’s what’s known there as a ‘yeller-feller’—half Aboriginal—and despised for it. That’s the part of himself he has to learn to accept, and to make others accept. In the end he has to make a journey into the Outback to be reconnected with his tribe. He talks to an old Aboriginal woman. He tells her he hasn’t any knowledge of the bush and how to survive there. She tells him not to worry. She gets lost in the bush too. ‘Buy yourself a compass,’ she says.
This morning when I went to my typewriter I was invaded by a terrible panic. I was sitting there thinking about those two cities-of-the-mind—the Auckland and Los Angeles of my novel—and I thought, ‘Supposing no one believes in them.’ It was like the brown sugar I put out on the balcony rail in the rain. My two cities lost their shape, sagged, sank down, spread out and were slowly washed away. In the end there was nothing but the wet black hard surface of the rail. I couldn’t write a word. I didn’t believe in them myself.
But I had nothing else to turn to. There were thirteen hundred miles of ocean between me and the wife who used to be ‘my’ wife, and the children who used to be ‘my’ children, and the house that used to be mine. This was not my apartment, my city, my country. I was here on the eighth floor of nowhere, and feeling so dislocated, so edgy, so precarious, it frightened me.
I couldn’t write so I must walk. I trust in the action of walking, believe in its efficacy. It’s something I can do, and here in Balmain all the water’s edges, all the points and coves and bays which were once messy and jammed with nautical debris, are gradually being turned into parks and walkways. I walked around a big circuit of foreshore and finished back at Darling Street Wharf. It didn’t seem enough and there was a ferry coming in so I took it and got off at Long Nose Point. I walked back along Louisa Street and through Balmain shops where I stopped for a flat white. It was there I remembered Clarry. I’d been neglecting him. I hadn’t visited him since the rain began.
I found him much worse. You think a person like that can’t lose any more weight—that there’s no more to lose—but it isn’t so. Today Clarry looked like a skeleton with skin. His head was a death’s head. The dark pigmentation seemed to be spreading, as if he’d been baked over a fire. The wrinkles and folds were huge and dark. But the eyes weren’t lifeless. The life still burned in them.
He couldn’t reach down for his tin. I had to get it for him. The radio murmured from his bedside table while he fumbled and counted. Then he told me: there’s a horse called Clanridden. He wanted me to put a hundred on its nose.
I hesitated. What would Zoe think? Wasn’t a hundred a bit steep? I also thought about my own role as secret bookie. Did I want to bet whatever the odds were against his bet? I asked him was it an outsider. He told me not to worry my head about that. When I pressed him for an answer he said Clanridden wouldn’t be a favourite but it ought to be. It was a dead cert.
I didn’t know what to make of that, but I took his money.
He asked me about the fireworks. He said he’d been pretty crook since the rain started. Then he dropped off to sleep, his mouth open, a thin trickle of saliva running out at the corner. He snored faintly. He smelled bad.
I went out to the kitchen where Zoe was making tea. I asked her when the fireworks were happening. She didn’t say anything, just kept her back to me, clattering the tea caddy. It came to me that there were no fireworks. They might have been something she’d invented for Clarry to look forward to.
When I stuck my head around the door again he was awake. ‘Clanridden,’ he said. ‘A hundred.’
‘Clanridden,’ I repeated. And I gave him the thumbs-up.
When I got back here to the apartment I went straight to the typewriter. Auckland and Los Angeles swept back into my mind, dream-cities, fresh and clear and shining. I felt confident; and I felt I could see exactly how the novel is going to end.
I got up and stretched and walked out on to the balcony. The weather seemed to be clearing. Everything was clean except the harbour, which had turned brown with the floodwaters that had sluiced down into it.
Then I remembered the race. I’d meant to go up to the TAB and put Clarry’s bet on for him. I didn’t want to play bookie if he was going to bet in hundreds, but it was too late now. There was only time to turn on the commentary. Clanridden won by a nose.
I owe Clarry four hundred and fifty dollars. I think, ‘I can’t afford it.’ Then I think, ‘Of course you can.’ Then I reflect on the ‘I’ and the ‘you’ in that exchange. And then I think, ‘Four hundred and fifty bucks—it’s a small price for the last life of Clarry.’
This morning the weather is clear, the sky blue, and there’s a long brilliant track of glittering light stretching away down the harbour to the bridge. The white faces of the terrace houses directly below look washed, and it’s as if there are more trees among them; there seems (though it’s an illusion) so much more green than when I last looked. The lorikeets bring their blue heads and gold-flecked breasts and green wings to the bedroom balcony but they don’t stay longer than it takes to eat what I put out for them. On the front balcony the black of the magpies is blacker, the white whiter. And down on the water three magpie tugboats are dragging that tanker away from Gore Cove and out towards the open sea. As it goes under the bridge its highest point seems only a few feet below the centre span.
In the mail comes another card from my friends, owners of this apartment. They talk of returning. On the other hand, spring has arrived in London parks and gardens, so they’re not sure.
From home comes a copy of the Listener’s issue for the Bicentennial. It says New Zealand soldiers envied the vigour and style of their Australian cousins. Just a few days ago, on Anzac Saturday, the Sydney Morning Herald said the New Zealanders were the elite on Gallipoli because they combined the discipline of the British with the dash of the Aussies.
How is it that we can be so civil to one another? It’s so unusual it makes me uneasy.
Yesterday I met Clarry’s daughter, Alice. She’s very brisk and contralto, stylish, with faintly blue-tinted spectacles and a young businesswoman’s no-nonsense approach to traditional male pieties. She told me I wasn’t to take any more bets for Clarry. That put me straight into my aggression mode. I told her I would do Clarry any favour he asked that it was in my power to do. She smiled as if to signal that her bullshit detector was in good working order and turned away. I had my instructions.
But Clarry didn’t want to talk about racing. He held my hand and from time to time slipped into sleep, and maybe it was a coma. But in between there was something he wanted to say.
‘I know where I’m going,’ he said. ‘No worries, boy.’
‘Good on you, mate,’ I said.
‘Yeah, but …’ He licked his lips. ‘What about getting there?’
‘What about it, Clarry?’
He frowned and screwed up his eyes. ‘I might get lost.’
I wasn’t sure how to respond to that. I just said the first thing that came into my head. ‘Don’t worry about it. Buy yourself a compass.’
His face was blank for a moment. Then the creases and wrinkles arranged themselves into something that could only be a grin. A kind of cackle ground its way out of his throat. Next moment he was unconscious again.
I put a roll of notes—four hundred and fifty dollars—into the tin under his bed.
THE DAY CLARRY DIED the lorikeets didn’t come to the rail. Nature thought them too garish and warned them off. Or was it just that I slept late? The magpies came as usual, in their best black and white.
