Even the drunks, who hated everyone equally, found a special place in their hates for the sodomites then.
My mother grew to like the Vietnamese smells after a while. It got to where she spent most of her time in a high, nail-gnawing wonder at how these subsistence farmers raised kids in the tightness of flats two hundred feet in the air. Where were the full-lunged sounds of families cracking into selves she knew from out there in the wheat? Because if they were cracking they were cracking inaudible to her. She lay at night amazed at the silence.
And she came to admire and befriend them by day, and felt herself some sort of Bourke or Wills for entering their kitchens and learning their cooking and inhaling their incense and giggling a few of their words of greeting and farewell. She saw me as a Philistine jigsaw of my father’s genes because I wouldn’t follow. I consoled myself by telling her when she got to know their language she’d hear the same sounds she’d heard in the wheat.
‘Pete,’ she said, ‘you’ve got to try and rise above whatever you naturally are and what you’ve been taught. Any happiness you get in your life will have to be stolen from the vault of goodness that is deep inside you. And the theft will have to be planned — like a bank robbery. I can help you plan it. You’re a little prick full of hate, but we can steal some love out of you.’
I left her there high on her explorations into the Vietnamese and came down out of those flats for good. But I came down with the heavy curse of knowledge on me that my mother was always right.
I got a job as a barman in the Provincial, thinking it was going to be life’s great lesson. But it was a lesson only in that the same class turned up each day and sat on the same seats. In here was a vacuum of homosexuals and Vietnamese filled by old men covered in age spots who told me the same lies day after day. Some of them remembered and told high scenes from gone years when the Roy Boys won premierships and their daughters were beautiful and needed them. Some of them saw members of the Imperial Japanese Forces in flames behind the bar and told of them.
Their lives used to come in waves. Great crashing events and their undertow of consequences. Now their lives came in particles. Identical days.
While I was in the front bar listening to their stories a change came over Fitzroy The homosexuals turned up in numbers that equalled a culture. Something a step beyond just freedom. And the gays and the people who liked the fact of their stepping beyond just freedom were drawn from all Australia to the name Fitzroy. The stampede to get in grew bigger than the stampede to get out.
The R.E.I.V estimated the suburb’s mean property value at $163 000. Tolerance broke out. By the time they estimated Fitzroy property rising faster than anywhere else in the state we had it driven at us in every model. Fitzroy’s greatest asset at this time was its gays. A truth generally known and slowly nodded over.
Rino Bosconi was up and down the cafes of Brunswick Street courting twin-incomed mid-life queen couples. When the cappuccinos were drunk he’d have the table cleared and unroll his sketch plans and with a proud sweep of hand he’d reveal what his architect-cousin had come up with. He’d mention how the Italians and the Gays always put style above all things. Had an innate sense of it. Both cultures. And look, he’d wink, finger-tapping an octagon coloured blue on his plans … a communal spa. And he’d lean forward with his breath across them and sotto voce tell them to keep this quiet, because we don’t want the Equal Opportunities people crawling all over us, but I’m not taking any offers from straights on this site. Exclusivity. He’d tell them he was gay himself once and remembered that period of his life fondly. Then he’d put flutes of Parfait Amour in their hands and ride them around in his Daimler on a tour of gutted boot factories.
They started a festival to celebrate the lifestyle. All the potential ex-biggots bid on the catering and truck hire for the grand parade. The tolerance was breathtaking. Market driven. Market fragile. Beautiful in a way you didn’t want to notice in case it crashed. A baby walk.
Marky came back into this one day while I was listening to my third year of lies from the old men in the front bar at the Provincial. He’d been evicted from the Wimmera by a twenty-two per cent unemployment level. The country was still his god, but his family’s piece of it was too small and too deep in the bank to fetch a living. He had endured years of dole with a social worker chorus.
He sat up at the bar between red old men, giving them cigarettes before they even asked. He offered money for his beers, but I didn’t take it. He’d grown a habit of shaking his head. Disbelieving life. He was permanently angered. Badly tormented by the people who handed over his fortnightly cheque.
What they want, he said, is me saying ‘How high?’ when they say ‘Jump’. Do a course, they say. Specialise. Get an area of expertise. Forget the wheat. Make yourself wise at something or we’ll stop your dole, they threaten.
So he botched a run of apprenticeships, traineeships and correspondence courses. Until he realised, he said, life had already offered him up an area of special knowledge. You and me both, he told me. Experts in one narrow field. He held up an index finger. A field of knowledge that could yield big time. Could pay off enough to let us both get back out there with enough hectares of our own wheat to be immune to United Fucking States farm subsidies.
He had drunk a lot of free beer by now and had reached the subject that dominated him. Our field of knowledge. His talk was spit-moist but his head was still at last. Looking straight at me. I didn’t say anything. I just said, ‘Digger, you fucking idiot.’
‘Good,’ he said. ‘Good.’ He nodded and leaned over the bar and patted me on the shoulder. ‘Then I’ve specialised to a point where I’m the only worker in my whole chosen industry. Perfect.’ He laughed. ‘I’ll count you out then.’
‘You got a monopoly,’ I said. Thinking to myself that all along Marky had the kind of intelligence that should be tractor-sat for days on end circling a crop to a point. And knowing what he’d get a monopoly on was Bosconi damage control.
He was found under a seagull cloud by a bulldozer operator at the Williamstown tip. Ridden there in the back of a garbage truck from Fitzroy. Compacted. Seagulls perched across his back. His seventeen working muscles not even leaving him scarecrow strong. Him not even the hand-flap the blond teenager in the concrete creek had been.
He had the stub of a light bulb pressed through one cheek grinding up against his molars. An unbroken olive oil bottle embedded in a lung. His spine had torn as his body was folded refuse-mean by the hydraulic ram that dissolved space out of the truck. Only a dim watt or so of nervous electricity getting through the tear. Enough to power seventeen facial muscles.
His life is boiled down to a point now where he only has those seventeen muscles to tell his whole story. Four in his jaw. Six in his eyes. Two in his upper lip. Five too deep in his face to move skin.
All he has for language is eye-flash and face-strain. Shades of red. And at moments of maximum passion he can shake. Get the loose rivets in his wheelchair humming. That, I think, is his scream.
His quadriplegia has him held this tight. Tight enough for Rino Bosconi to let his heart beat on, pumping blood to those seventeen muscles, knowing they aren’t enough to tell of the two blond teenagers.
Marky won’t get back out to the wheat. Those towns will never afford the necessary medical equipment. Dimboola and Nhill would need such unlikely electoral event as consecutive National Party victories before they could furnish the Massachusetts-built machines Marky’s hooked up to.
Every fortnight his mother makes the train trip to town. She brings bouquets of crop. Canola. Triticale. Barley. Wheat. Depending on what’s planted along the road she walks to the station. She tries for wheat.
She fans it out of a cut glass vase on his bedside table. A new bouquet every second week. Me telling her one time that perfectly good wheat was found in Tutankhamen’s tomb. Her moving around behind his wheelchair where he couldn’t see and handkerchief-dabbing at her eyes and nose and fighting for face cont
rol. And the new bouquets keeping on coming each fortnight despite her now knowing their millennial shelf-life.
She brushes his hair and we take him out of the hospital for a walk around the streets. We wheel past the collective and talk old times, her accusing and me agreeing what little arseholes we were to women in crises back then. She feeds him wheat-belt snippets. Simply, slowly, and loud. Like he is a boy again, but deaf and a dunce this time. Marky’s body is becoming a sac and when we wheel him over a bump a wave passes through him that makes us silent.
It’s usually the day after these walks I take a walk of my own down Young Street to the police station. Sometimes climbing the front step and looking in to the laminex counter surrounded by posters of the road-dead and the fatally-injected and the domestically-violated and the balaclava-clad sneaking along unknowingly neighbourhood-watched.
Thinking of the other two mothers involved and wondering where they live and what memory of boy they visit. Wishing the cops walking in and out would stop and ask could they help me. Waiting for the day I can finish my walk in there at that counter. Not knowing why I even have the urge. But pleased I do.
NEST-EGG
IN A fairer country than this you could sue the Coburg council for most of what happened. I have to say, you’d do ’em for a poultice if there was justice in here. Because any fool could see that if you build a block of high-rise flats opposite a prison, you can expect strife with the neighbours. You’ve built a line of sight that’s a natural route for trouble.
I wasn’t here when it started. I got nailed holding the tax man’s bucks after it had been going for about a year. Not an offence I’d send a bloke to jail for, but the magistrate works for the same boss as the tax man, so he takes it personal. And when he finally pierces the armour of my figures to the rotten flesh of my ledger he slots me inside.
So when I get to Pentridge, and they put me in C Block with all sorts of hard, bent boys covered with drunken tattoos, it’s practically a ritual. Every third Monday, and you can almost hear the breathing get heavier between these Mondays, the hard, bent boys in C Block take up a collection. We all have to give if we want to watch. It’s strictly user pays.
Every time the collection plate comes around Bernie tries to get out of paying. An accountant, skinny beyond famine physically, and skinny beyond fraud morally, he nervously sweeps ginger temple-fluff across his bald scalp as he pleads.
‘Come on, boys. Let me watch free this once. You know I’m trying to build a nest-egg for when I get out. I need a nest-egg. I’m ruined in my line of work. It’s all right for you blokes, you can go back to yours.’
Furnace Dwyer throws a totem-pole of arm round him and hugs a threat through his bird-boned shoulders and reminds him that quadriplegics don’t need nest-eggs because the public health system looks after them. Bernie’s shit-scared of Furnace Dwyer and public health so he pays up.
We all pay up. Because the bitch won’t come out unless we shoot her a good, solid wad of the folding. And in winter it’s got to be even solider, because as the weather falls her rates rise. But we don’t begrudge her that. The Antarctic wind shunting off the bay has a way of moulding mammary tissue that we appreciate, and it’s worth paying more for.
So we assemble in exercise yard C. It’s the one place in the prison you can see her balcony from. The hard, bent boys roll the collected notes into a wad and jam them into a condom and tie a knot in the end. Then Gary the Alias gets out his shanghai — a coathanger bent Y framed with condoms tied end on end for propulsion — and he fires the wad of money over the wall, across the road, up onto her balcony. He never misses. It hits the glass of her door and shivers it, as the roar, made up of wishes and would-bes from us about how, if circumstances were looser, we’d deliver that wad of notes by hand, dies down.
She’s like a spider sensing a vibration from the outer reaches of its web. She’s out on the balcony before the last quiver has oozed out of the glass. Every time she has new gear to unwrap her stunning body out of. That’s a compliment to us. And she takes it off to a bump and to a grind she’s seen in a black and white movie. It’s weird at first because you can’t hear any music, but you get to imagining it. She’s far from being a natural at this, but we don’t care. In fact her clumsiness seems to make it better … a bit of amateur purity. Half the men in here are in here for being excited by and acting against innocence.
In exercise yard C it used to be that we mouthed filthy boasts and promises while the show was going on. Not any more. We came to hear ourselves high as lap-dogs yapping on leashes, knowing if we were let off we’d get quiet fast. These days we’re a silent herd of flaring nostrils. A still copse of stiff dick. At most all you hear now when the strip show is on are a few half-starved groans and a lot of breathing shallow and asthmatic with sex. All, that is, except for Furnace Dwyer, who is a badly affected man.
As soon as the woman on the balcony begins to peel the clobber he starts to go cold-turkey. His facial scars start to pulse. And his suffering is so mind-over-body acute that it is a source of sorrow to us all.
‘Bitch dies screaming,’ he whispers as she unhooks her bra. And as she progresses to the climax of her act he has to space his threats and curses through chopped-up breaths that never reach enough lung to feed his brain properly.
‘Bloody exploitation … this is. Cuts me up. But my turn’ll … turn’ll come. Cut for cut. I’ll hang her … hang her scalp from that … that balcony.’
No one ever replies to any of this. Because, firstly, no one wants a honed-down serving spoon punched between their eighth and ninth vertebrae, and secondly, we know he’s never getting out of here, and thirdly, on occasion we can see his point of view. Yes, sometimes we think she deserves Furnace. It is, after all, dog-dirty work pushing this stuff at caged addicts. Because when she’s finished, it’s there, it’s in the air, and it has to be got rid of. And it’s got rid of in many sad, tissue-ripping ways that make this joint a much harder place to be than it would be without the sight of her.
Despite this, I’m unhappy when I hear the unbelievable news. I’ve spent so many nights with her in my cell — my version of her anyway — that I was starting to believe she was mine. I’ve been to Europe with her, checked in to some of the grand hotels, winked at the porter as he ogled her arse and struggled across the lobby with our luggage … kilos and kilos of transparent underwear. I’ve watched her undress to soundless music in the Presidential suite. I’ve spent a lot of exotic, aristocratic time with her after lock-up and lights-out. Not just the obvious things, but deep, soulful eyeball to eyeball time. My imagination has become a thing of great power since I was locked up. So I certainly feel a pang of loss when I hear the unbelievable news that some moron who has made a career and a fiasco of studying the mind of man has decided to give Furnace parole. I might even love the poor, doomed bitch, because I feel like crying.
Furnace comes limp-skipping down the corridor from Admin, twisting ears, slapping backs and kicking arses and singing that old Lynard Skynyrd song … ‘Cause I’m as freehee as a birr … hirrd now.’
And we know if a man ever had the energy and the evil to live up to all his promises this one has. The council flats are to become a flawless wall of drawn blinds once again. We’ve seen our last strip show. For the first time I wonder what sort of life she has behind that glass door that opens onto the balcony. What sort of pressures force her out that door to us?
Furnace goes over to Bernie to mess up his cranial thatching one last time. He gets him in a bear-hug and shakes him until his hair flops down off his scalp onto his collar. And he tells him it’s a full-on, brain-popping shame that fraudsters are locked up solid while murderers are free to walk the streets and guzzle slabs of VB of a night. And anyway, where does Bernie’s family live? He’s not above social calls. And he laughs a C-Block-wide reverberation of laugh.
As Furnace lets Bernie go he leans back and takes a deep breath to replace all the air he’s laughed out at him and Bernie pops hi
m in the chest with an ice-pick. It sounds like a fish landing on a pier of my youth. My guess is it goes straight through Furnace’s favourite tattoo, the smiling, smudged blue face of Eva Braun, between his ribs, deep into his heart. Bernie tries to yank it out for another go, fights it and pulls at it from different angles with his face set in kamikaze grimace. But the serration is bitten in between those ribs and he’s dragged down hanging on to the dead Furnace by this slippery handle.
No one moves for longer than normal after a killing. No one can believe how this gentle man got locked to the dead standover ace on the floor. He’s still holding tight to the ice-pick in the twitching Furnace when the warders, with their stop-and-smell-the-roses-stroll, reach him. They’re smiling. One of them says something about Goliath and they’re laughing. And though it is, of course, a good thing when such a man dies premature, none of us are laughing, on account of poor Bernie. Lying there mumbling, with his hands frozen to an ice-pick. Scale-grey. Mumbling about how his life is forever more devoid of any emotion that isn’t fear. Mumbling about how his vision is forevermore blind, he calls it, to anything that isn’t horror undiluted. His mumbles are full of sense. He now has a lot of hard time before him and a lot of hard men after him. We start to sidle for our cells while the warders stand around to dangle their toes in the spreading pool of Furnace’s blood. It’s a refreshment they’ve looked forward to for a long time and they can’t deny themselves now.
The boys in here who are made of the bad things in life, made of slugs and snails and puppy-dog’s tails — and incest and bones broken step-paternally and rides taken in tumble dryers and chainings to fridges and cigarette burnings and untold orphanage barbarity; these hard, bent boys who run the prison have taught me never to speak truth to authority. So when I get in front of the panel inquiring into Furnace Dwyer’s death I lie. I tell them I think Furnace must have been into Bernie for a lot of smokes, and Bernie wasn’t going to let him walk out without collecting. They don’t chide me, the authorities. They don’t even laugh. They just look at me blank. And I can see it registering with them that, uh oh, we’ve lost one tax cheat to the puppy-dog’s tails, to the bones broken step-paternally, to the hard, bent boys who run the joint. And I see my parole step back into the shadows alongside other mythical dates like Armaggedon and judgment day. Choosing sides has its price.
Nice Shootin' Cowboy Page 3
