by Pip Smith
They didn’t cry or beg their only son and child to stay. We weren’t that sort of family I suppose. My father was a trader who always dressed the best he could manage, even in the hardest times, and my mother was a stiff upper lip sort of woman. Even so, the morning after I told them I was leaving she made haggis and blood sausage especially for me, and my father sipped his tea quietly until he could find it in himself to wish me luck. I could tell by the unusual hardness in his voice that he was trying not to show how much he needed me around, in case it caused too much of a fuss.
I was too young to realise I’d never see them again. Excited and nervous as I was, I don’t really remember my passage over here. I barely remember the name of the ship. Maybe it was the SS Australia, maybe it wasn’t.
I know I came direct to Sydney, and because I didn’t have two pennies to rub together I had to work my passage. I spent most of my time in the boiler room working the pump. It was hot down there and time burned up like a fever. When you spend your days only sweating, never pissing, the booze hits you harder and comes back up more easily. It was always a mad fight for the dunny after a night on the piss. And it was a good idea to keep a crowbar under your pillow. Down in the pump room we were so far under the surface of the sea that we’d hear loud thuds against the hull and wonder about the sharks and giant squid with teeth trying to break in and go for us. But sometimes the thuds came from the inside. You didn’t ask too many questions about that.
I remember spots slowly appearing on the faces of the men I worked with. By the time we saw the high yellow cliffs of Sydney some of the crew had let those spots take them over. And I remember thinking that the good thing about being a nobody is you’re not important enough to sneeze on.
Anchored in the middle of the harbour, we were quarantined for two weeks, watching boats with yellow and white flags come from North Head for the bodies. Sydney sprawled all around us like a tart with her legs spread. Come and get me boys, she said, but we couldn’t and the bitch knew it.
Once, a stiff dead sheep washed up against the hull, and sometimes the water frothed red, sometimes a brownish yellow, the colour of beer. And I thought: Well then, Sydney’s also a city of restless men throwing their carcasses into the drink.
But no, of course I won’t say it like that.
Where’d you work when you first got here? they’ll ask. Temora, I’ll say. Why’d you only last two weeks? And I’ll say, Now you know as well as I do that men have the pub they go to and like dogs they like to know the smell of all the other men at that pub. They say Temora is Australia’s friendliest country town, but there’s friendly, and then there’s climb-inside-your-head friendly. I had grand notions of going to the outback to become a drover, or better yet a jackaroo, but of course I wound up cleaning glasses in the Temora pub.
I like to keep myself to myself, but in Temora there were blokes who were all: Where you from? and Crawford? I know a bloke by the name of Crawford from Edinburgh, wonder if you know him, and Wellington? My cousin grew up in Wellington, as if there were only two people living in these places: you, and the bloke they’re related to. Their questions crept in from all sides and then there you were, stuck in the middle with no way of getting out short of throwing a beer in their faces and running away.
In Temora, bugs crawled over the tiles in the loo. Flies and other flying things flung themselves at the gas lanterns. And outside there were flecks of dried grass blowing against the fence. They reminded me of something. A body being thrown against a toilet door. The queasiness of endless blue above and all around and no way out.
I preferred working in the city. The King’s Head was the sort of place where suits and bar flies and working girls felt comfy sniffing each other up—the pub being on Park and Elizabeth streets, right in the middle of town.
When you’re the new useful some men let their eyes follow you across the room, slow as the eyes of lizards. They watch you until they’ve grown accustomed to your smell and your ways. Some bar fly will lift their sorry head and say, Tell us about this new one doing the glasses, and the barmaid will say, Don’t know a thing about him, loud enough for you to hear. That’s when you carry on picking up glasses as if you’re deaf.
Doing the tasks of your job is about a quarter of what your job actually is. All the rest of it is making everyone believe they couldn’t live without you, and if I’ve learned anything in my life it’s that everyone would be fine living without me, so I have to put on quite a show of polishing glasses with an extra twist of the wrist, and grunting when I change the heavy kegs.
In the city people cark it all the time and no one bats an eye. When I was working at the King’s Head a bookmaker called George who lived upstairs shot himself in the head. No one knew why. Do you have to have a reason? Sometimes you’re just full and it’s time for lights out. Then a woman burned alive there in her bed. The only things that burned were the woman and the bed, and the version of the story that stuck was that she was reading a book called The Resurrection and fell asleep, then the bedclothes caught alight when the candle fell over and whoosh, up she went in flames. The licensee was shitty because now he was down one bed and one set of bedclothes and had nothing but a black bedframe and a pile of ash in exchange. He got her week’s rent out of the room before the cops combed through her things, though, and he was proud he’d had the presence of mind to think of that.
You see, the great thing about cities is, the more people they have in them, the more you’re left alone. Or the more you find yourself alone in them at least.
With all the ghosts lurking about the place I tried to get another job but it was tough, considering I can’t read that well.
I listen, though. I listened to the snatches of things people thought were worth talking about, which was usually about how some woman burned alive and some bloke shot himself with a revolver and how the new useful swings his arms kind of funny don’t you think, like he’s trying too hard to look tough.
I did get another job where, thankfully, I didn’t have to talk to as many people, but there were downsides, too, that almost put me off my food.
Back then Sydney’s meat was killed on Glebe Island, connected to land by a bridge. There was something about the slaughterhouse being surrounded by water that helped the ladies of Sydney forget that their good fresh sausages came about thanks to some faceless men killing on their behalf.
The sheep, bullocks, pigs and cows were all killed differently and in different sheds leased by different butchers. I worked for most of them over the three years I was there, but never doing the actual killing. You had to be built like a bull yourself and be highly trained for that. My job was to hose down the floors or take the offal to the punt, but I watched enough times to know how to kill in fourteen minutes flat.
The bit I liked best was watching the men cut around the legs and tail and strip off the skin in one piece. The worst was watching the pigs get killed. When they got frightened, they got frightened in a real human way. They looked at you and screamed like they knew what was coming. Sometimes the butchers had to chase them round the room wielding the hammer over their heads for maximum force when they finally brought it down between the eyes. But this was bad news, because the more the pigs run around the more excited they get and you don’t want your pig to get too excited because fear makes for bad meat.
When the pigs were cornered they leaned back on their hind haunches with their front trotters out in front of them, like an Arab praying or like a dog about to get whacked. Then the butchers hit them on the head with the hammer. Even though most of the men had been killing for ages it was hard not to let the pig’s fear catch on, so they hit too hard sometimes, and sometimes more than once, and smashed their skulls in.
Now there are new tastes for American-style slaughtering, which is where you’re meant to stun the pigs without smashing in their skulls, but God only knows how you’re supposed to do that with nothing but a hammer. They’d never let you waste bullets on a pig.
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sp; They used to dump the innards and diseased livestock into the harbour right next to the abattoir, but women got hysterical if they saw their children bathing next to a sheep’s lung, or when the beaches of their harbourside properties began to froth with red foam. Then there was the smell of fat that came out the chimney of the boiling-down room and mingled with the smoke from the ferries to make meat clouds that mustered over the harbour. But if Sydney wanted their meat killed the same day they ate it, and if they didn’t want to pay extra for it to get frozen in the new expensive refrigeration rooms, this was the price they had to pay.
It was alright once you got over the shock of how human the pigs looked, hanging upside down in a row like women hanging from trapezes at the Tivoli. I tried to get over it by remembering I probably step on hundreds or thousands of ants every day and don’t think twice about it. Still, it seems unfair to only get shocked when you’re killing something that could, in a certain light, be mistaken for yourself.
Why’d you leave the meatworks? they’ll ask, and I’ll say: Look, after three years of blood and guts a man can either grow a thick skin or start turning off his meat, and I’m not one to be fussy about my food so it was time to work somewhere else.
At Perdriau’s in Drummoyne the congealed blood of a tree goes in one end of the factory and comes out as so many bits and pieces of civilised life that I reckon if you took away everything in the world except for the things made of rubber you’d still have a pretty good shadow of what the world used to be like.
Inside the factory there were rows of men working machines and even girls working alongside men, but in different jobs. They would’ve taken on more girls if they could’ve, because they got paid half of what the men did, but they weren’t up to the same kind of manual labour as the men, and quite frankly the quality of the products would have suffered.
There was one department where the men and the girls got to work together, and that was where they worked on inner tubes. A girl roughened the end of her tube. The man then took it from the girl, uncovered a bottle of mixture, brushed over the ends, closed her end tightly over his, and pressed them hard together under a hand roller.
Repeating the same task every day made it easy for your mind to wander. Watching the girls and the men work together, I was reminded of all the things that aren’t made of rubber but could be: nipples when they’re cold, a man’s member when he’s excited. Going from meat to rubber as quickly as I did, you realise how similar the two are.
I would’ve liked to work on the inner tubes, but I was too shy to ask, and then it was too late. No matter how useful rubber is, if there’s a strike in five other industries, it becomes much harder to get buckets of resin from the Amazon to Drummoyne, and then you’re laid off without a second thought.
Losing my job was a shock, and I was feeling mighty sorry for myself. There were a few bad weeks on the piss which I’d rather not go into, and then I had no choice but to go back to work, any work, and of course I wound up right where I started: at a pub. But by then I’d accumulated a few more knocks, and to tell you the truth I was grateful for the company of the women working there.
To be single all your life, all the way up to the age of forty-four, is no easy feat, especially as a man in this town. The war must’ve killed off half the men, or they’re too busy playing with each other in the Hyde Park dunnies, or just playing with themselves in their own rooms, because there are lots more single women in Sydney than men.
Up until recently I didn’t have time for a woman. I always thought they picked at your quiet moments, as if you were a dead sheep in a paddock. Even when they keep their mouths shut you can see them planning to bring the brilliance out in you, or add brilliance, by imagining you in a blue shirt that might bring out the blue in your eyes. And then as soon as they turn thirty they cut to the chase and throw themselves at any pair of balls. Their once-high standards are now sagging down around their ankles. If they used to want their future spouse to have an office job, now all they want is for him to be able to write his own name.
Not being able to write my name, I thought I was off the hook. But at that time my nights were long and sleepless. Dark minutes dragged and became gaping hours. I’d keep busy during the day in the hope that I’d fall fast asleep as soon as I was horizontal, but instead I’d lie with my eyes wide open, dog tired, bones aching, feet hot and swollen with blood, wondering if the touch of a woman’s breasts against my back would make the endless night a warm pleasure instead of a terror. On my days off, I’d catch myself sitting in the park, watching young lovers giggle uncontrollably, and tried to remember the last time I made a woman laugh like that.
So I suppose I turned myself in—to the women, that is. If you let her, there’s always one woman who’ll do so many nice things for you, really go out of her way to ask you how you are or bring you a homemade lunch or mend a hole in your jacket, that you start getting trained to expect these kindnesses, like how wolves get turned into dogs.
I met my Lizzie when I was working at the Coogee Bay Hotel by the sea. There were worse places to work. During the dizzy summer months people played dress-ups out on the beach every night of the week and the St John’s Ambulance men made a fake gold rush, burying gold nuggets in the sand and watching people go crazy digging up the beach trying to get them out again. Even from the beer garden I could watch the ocean’s strange effect on women. They laughed at the waves as if they were cheeky fingers tickling them in their most sensitive areas. They let their hair out and leaned back into their deckchairs with their eyes shut, giving in to the sun’s long slow full-body kiss. It made you want a woman, so you could kiss her like that.
After an early shift in summer it was a tradition for the other boys who worked at the Coogee Bay to take a running leap into the ocean.
Are ya coming, Crawford? they’d ask.
No. Don’t swim, I’d say.
Don’t swim or can’t swim?
What’s the difference to you?
Fair enough.
The conversation would go the same way every time, as if having a repeated routine with someone was halfway to knowing them.
That’s Crawford, they said to the new Scottish office lady, he don’t swim. They were confident they knew that about me, at least.
I was wiping down the bar, and she’d come out of the office to ask the barmaid whose timesheet had a tangled scrawl instead of a name at the bottom.
As the other men bolted out the door for the sea the barmaid whispered to her, That’d be Harry Crawford. Can’t read or write, the poor bastard.
You could see the heart of that Scotswoman glow like a lamp. To her, I was a stray dog covered in blood and grass and shit, and she was going to clean me up and teach me how to read and write and maybe how to love her back. You could see her coming up with the whole plan in the second it took me to put the rag down on the bar and look up.
She was wearing a plain dress in a fresh yellow. Her hair was the colour of wood ash, and broken capillaries dusted her cheeks. She was forty-nine then, and thick around the middle; she didn’t look like she was going to crimp and pinch me into shape. I stayed behind to give the tables another polish, and another, and another, hoping that when she was done for the day the two of us could take a stroll down the pier perhaps, until her tram was due to leave. She was a hard worker, because I polished every table in the front bar seven times before she locked up the office and stepped out in her summer hat.
It was January then, and even though it was evening it was bright on the concourse. Mermaids and pirates sat on the low walls and ate fish and chips, as if that’s what mermaids and pirates did every day. Women slipped in and out of the water in less than they’d wear to bed. Kids who’re usually seen and not heard shrieked across the beach wielding kewpie dolls over their heads as if they were about to kill a pig with them. Lizzie looked like a young girl, her eyes full of wonder and free of worry. The on-shore breeze whipped her hair about her face, giving me an excuse to touch it. We
stopped under a pine tree and she startled when I tucked the hair back behind her ear, as if no one had ever touched her before. Then she smiled, showing her terrible teeth, and I smiled too.
When she stepped onto her tram, I caught a glimpse of how others saw her. No girls eyed her jealously. No blokes helped her step on board. She was politely stepped around, never to be thought of again, and I was glad for it because it meant I could have her all to myself.
We were married at the Canterbury Registry Office in September last year, and almost a year later we’re still going strong. Being the twitchy sort, if someone asked me what I’ve done with my life I wouldn’t know how to answer them. But there’s a stillness in my wife that’s as large as a cathedral. My twitchiness calms right down when I think of it.
Lizzie and I can spend hours sitting next to each other, not saying anything. Sometimes I wish I could sit next to her and do nothing but sneak looks at her calm face. Sometimes I wish I never had to go to work, but then I’m glad to go to work, so I can have coming home to look forward to.
And the best part is, this woman loves me back. I can’t believe it. She loves me so much she’s convinced she’s up the duff. I reckon she’s going through her change of life, but when she gave me a kiss before I left for work this morning and said, We’re going to have a baby, I wanted it to be true so much I almost believed it myself.
Now the cops have brought me to their dungeon office and it’s time to talk. The interview room is small and the typist is not making eye contact with me. My palms are sweating and I can’t breathe right. I should’ve seen this coming. Men in dark coats and hats pulled down to cover the face have been sitting in the corners of most places I’ve been drinking or working in this past week. I heard these men ask, Have you seen a person goes by the name of Harry Crawford? and what could I do but hide? I know as well as the next bloke how the cops work these days—they ask questions until a man doesn’t know what he’s answering, and next thing he knows they’ve put an entirely false story into his perfectly innocent mouth. Just like how it was during the great strike of 1917, when the police went into the homes of union leaders and picked up bags which were suddenly full of knives and guns that the union men had never seen before. Oops, what’s this then? the cops said. Oh ho ho, this will be going straight to the magistrate—what do you think, boys? and all the rest of it. They should be magicians, not police officers, the way they pluck things out of the air is all I’m saying—
