My Brother Jack

by Johnston, George

  I felt suddenly sick of the whole business.

  ‘I think we’d better go, Jack,’ I said unhappily. ‘I’ll go back home if you think I should.’

  He obviously hadn’t wanted me to say this, because it made him sit down, and he looked me over very carefully as if he were studying me for visible marks of decadence.

  ‘That’s going to depend on this codger, though, isn’t it?’ He crossed his legs more comfortably and took out his tobacco tin and his Zig-Zag papers and began to roll a cigarette. ‘If he turns out to be another of these poofter friends of yours I wouldn’t let you stay here for all the tea in China.’ He licked the cigarette, twirled it in his fingers, bit off the loose shreds of tobacco, and spat them on the floor. ‘Or you want to go home, is that it?’ he asked casually.

  ‘Well … I don’t know.’ I looked at him uncertainly. ‘I didn’t run away, did I? It was Dad who kicked me out, wasn’t it? How do I know what they’re saying even? I told them I wanted to write things and now they know and —’

  ‘Ah, that flamin’ house is no good for anybody!’ he cut in with sudden startling ferocity. ‘I’ll be getting out of it myself any bloomin’ day from now.’ He struck a match and lit the cigarette. ‘It’s Mum, though, isn’t it?’ he said in a quieter tone.

  I nodded dumbly. He kept slowly turning the lighted match in his fingers, staring at the flame, and the blue tobacco smoke trickled slowly from his nostrils.

  ‘You see, I got the boot to-day,’ he said. ‘I didn’t do anything this time, but Crebbin sold that storeroom place to old Kinross because they’re going to make a garage, and he decided to close down half the workshop and lay eight of us off. We got a week’s screw instead of notice. I was going to try it up the bush for a while, the Wimmera or the Mallee or maybe those fruit places along the Goulburn, but now … well …’

  ‘But now what?’

  ‘Well, it kind of depends on what you’re going to do, don’t it?’ He squinted at me through the scribbles of smoke. ‘That’s the point, isn’t it? We can’t very well just leave Mum there with him, can we?’

  I could feel my tongue drying, but I swallowed a bit and said, ‘Well, I can go home if you want to try the bush.’

  ‘Yes … well, I don’t know, Davy …’ He studied the cigarette carefully, and picked another shred of loose tobacco from the end of it. ‘You know, now that this has happened I been thinkin’ about it, and I reckon it might be the makings of you to have a go at it on your own for a while. I mean, just to get out of that bloody rotten house for a bit … that bloomin’ smell of pisspots and lavender water and old women dying … And all those flaming rows!’

  ‘But if you’ve lost your job …’

  ‘Ah, there’s a ton of yakker about. I can pick up something else. I don’t mind hangin’ around if you want to give it a go. You wouldn’t be giving up your job at Klebendorf’s?’

  ‘No. I couldn’t, anyway. The papers are signed for six years.’

  ‘Yes, well I could meet you somewheres Friday nights and take your pay home to Mum. Or you could buy a postal-note and send it to her.’

  I nodded. ‘I was wondering about that. She’d still need the money, of course.’

  He gave a short mirthless laugh. ‘They’re not John D. Rockefellers, are they? They still got the house to pay off. And the Chev. And that bloomin’ pianola. And God knows what else besides.’

  ‘That’s right.’ I had a sudden feeling of miserable empty worthlessness. There was not one single thing that I had thought about. I had not thought of somebody being with Mother, nor of their needing the pay, nor of Jack’s responsibilities. I didn’t even seem to know any longer how I had got myself into the situation … now it had turned into just another part of the drifting and the dodging, and even the decision as to what I was to do evidently was not mine to make. Jack had come looking for me, and Jack would decide.

  ‘We can talk about that after, though,’ he said, as if he knew exactly what I was thinking. ‘First we got to take a dekko at this poofter mate of yours, don’t we?’

  Just then I heard the click of the key in the door lock, and a good deal of chattering and laughter, and there was a sound of heavy things bumping and a chinking of bottles out on the porch landing, and then over it all floated Sam Burlington’s clear, gay cry:

  ‘Fife and drum, Stunsail! The fun begins!’

  ‘My bloody oath it does!’ Jack muttered to himself with a kind of grim pleasure. He had got up from the chair. He was standing with that slight stoop forward that I knew so well, his shoulders loose, and his feet placed the way he always had them in the boxing ring.

  Even Sam Burlington’s sang-froid and love of the unexpected were not proof against the spectacle of Jack standing there in the studio, and for a long interval he was arrested in the doorway, his mouth open, utterly speechless, with the questioning faces of his friends crowding up behind his own mask of astonishment. I realized with a sudden accumulation of shame that Jack had Saxe-blue godets inserted at the ankles of his pearly-grey Oxford bags!

  Then Sam pulled himself together and came into the studio, wrinkling his nose and sniffing at the air, and said, ‘So we have company, Stunsail,’ and his friends pushed in behind him with crates of drinks and a nine-gallon keg of Victoria Bitter, and among them was the pretty blonde girl who had been with Sam on the night I arrived. She took no notice of me at all, but to my surprise she looked at Jack in a cool, half-mocking sort of way and said, ‘Hallo, so you did find him?’ and Jack nodded, still very watchful and poised on his feet, and Sam swung around and said, ‘Now what the devil is this all about, Jess?’ and she shrugged and turned away and suddenly I knew that ‘Jess’ and the ‘peroxided sheila’ at the Gallery who had told Jack where I was were one and the same person, and I clawed through my humiliation and shame to say, ‘It’s all right … I’m sorry … this is my brother – this is my brother Jack,’ and then everybody was pushing into the room and making a lot of noise as they put down their burdens, and staring with amused curiosity at Jack, and Sam was saying, ‘But my dear Stunsail, I never knew you even had a brother. What did you say his name was? Jibboom? Topgallant? My dear Stunsail’s brother’ – he held out his hand – ‘welcome to the Spring Street Saturnalia. Your name doesn’t matter. Whatever we are now, we shall be under jury-rig before the night is out!’

  Jack was still tensed and watchful, but I could see that he was a little bewildered too. His handshake with Sam was cordial enough. And Sam beamed at him. Sam liked to meet things full on, too. He tossed an instruction over his shoulder – ‘For heaven’s sake, Jess, do open a window or two; the place stinks like a tarts’ shop!’ – and then he clapped Jack on the shoulder in the friendliest possible way and said, ‘You just make yourself absolutely at home, Taffrail old cock, while the rest of us organize the orgy.’

  ‘His name is Jack,’ I said in a thick hoarse voice.

  Sam’s laugh snorted out. ‘Jack, Taffrail, Jibboom, what does it matter?’ he said expansively. ‘Does he know how to broach a niner and get the bung in, that’s the point?’ He waved at the nine-gallon keg of beer, which had been propped up on the sofa.

  ‘My bloody oath he does!’ said Jack enthusiastically.

  Had I been a little older or a little wiser I might have known that Jack and Sam Burlington would have got on famously with each other. They were only total opposites superficially; their impulses were similar and they shared the same extravagances.

  It was not many minutes before Jack, with the nine-gallon keg working efficiently and the pots filling, was making apologies for his intrusion. ‘I was just looking for me young brother, see. That’s all I came up about. I didn’t know you were going to have a bit of a rort here. I mean, I had no intention of pratting in, if you follow what I mean.’

  The extraordinary thing was that the others all seemed to like Jack, too; they were fascinated by his slang, the tricks he had in rolling a cigarette, the superb self-assurance with which he handled the beer kegs
and the pots – he had volunteered himself as ‘barman’ – the stories he told. They seemed not even to notice the smell of his hair nor the absurdity of his clothes. Even so, I was relieved that the girl called Jess was the only one I recognized from the Gallery School. The others – five young men who gave the impression that they lived in good houses in Toorak or South Yarra, and three quite pretty girls – were strangers to me. They remained so. Nobody was ever introduced to anybody else, so I never did learn who they were, and after that night I never saw one of them again. So it didn’t matter, anyway, what they might have thought of Jack, although this is not the sort of thing one thinks of at the time.

  The opening stages of the party itself are a lost thing now, although fragments linger like flecks of old paint caught in crevices of wood. I remember Jack’s puzzled inquiries, and Sam’s gleeful explanations, about the name of ‘Stunsail’; and my own discomfiture at the disclosures, even though only Jack seemed to be at all interested. I remembered my alarmed revulsion at the shameless exposed way the girls sat on cushions on the floor, with their knees carelessly apart in their short skirts and the shadowy disturbing gleam of naked thighs above their rolled stockings. I was shocked by their casual acceptance of drinks and cigarettes, by the candour of their conversation, by their abandoned submission to kissing and petting.

  I cannot be sure now whether my withdrawal from the party was because of all this, and voluntary, or whether Jack had some hand in it. Up to a point he had entered into the spirit of the occasion, but he was still watchful, and I think he remained suspicious for quite some time both of his surroundings and of the company he was keeping; it is possible that these suspicions, imposed upon his voluntary guardianship of me and his earlier opinions of Sam and his studio, set up a curious paradoxical grimness in his own mind, and that it was he who, feeling that I was too young and too inexperienced to be a participant in a festival which even he was not too sure about, tactfully suggested my retirement. I do remember that when one of the girls chided me for not drinking it was Jack who said, quite firmly, ‘He don’t touch the stuff, and he don’t smoke, and he don’t have a thing to do with sheilas.’

  Whatever the reason, I found myself in the little bedroom with the door closed against the gradually mounting hubbub of wild conviviality. It is a troubling and sometimes alarming thing to have to follow the course of a party through a closed door; the perspectives of behaviour get hopelessly out of true; the conclusions drawn tend to be over-dramatic. Wrong inferences are read into overheard fragments of conversation, and even wronger ones into the gaps of silence. There is no validity in trying to follow with cold logic the uninhibited course of other people’s gaiety; a sober person is always hopelessly out of depth at a drunken party, and if he is there behind a closed door, so much the worse for him.

  After a time I stretched out on Sam’s bed and tried to sleep, but a jangling discord kept me tense and vigilant. I was racked by nerves, by panic, by shame, and, it must be admitted, by an overwhelming curiosity. At one moment I would be fiery with shame wondering what errors of taste or manners my brother was committing; the next moment my brain would be reeling with the pictures of the debaucheries my imagination would fashion. There was no harmony nor even continuity in the sounds that drifted through the closed door. They were separate discordances, each with its own implicit and alarming meaning – the sudden slamming of a door, the sharp high-pitched scream of a girl, inexplicable jets of uncontrolled hilarity, the crash and tinkle of breaking glass, the shrill racketing gabble of dispute, thickening voices, grown hoarse and louder, all talking at once, the wailing of the phonograph suddenly cut off with the rasping croak of the needle sliding across the grooved wax, questions uncompleted and answers unheeded, the sound of a girl hysterically sobbing, the rhythmic shaking of the floor to the Charleston beat … ‘Yes, sir, that’s my baby; no, sir, not just maybe; yes, sir, that’s my baby now …’ Jack’s voice singing in vaudeville cockney, ‘They’ve dug up Father’s grave to lay a sewer …’ Claps and thunderclaps of undisciplined laughter, the sound of a bottle rolling, the thud of a piece of furniture overturning or of a body falling …

  It must have been hours later when I realized that the raucous bedlam had changed into something else – a duologue, quite muted, slow-voiced and thick, and as I strained my ears to listen I realized it was Jack and Sam Burlington.

  They were obviously talking about Sam’s painting on the easel, because Jack was saying, slowly and carefully, as if each word had to be chosen with great particularity: ‘That’s her there, though, isn’t it, in that picture of yours?’

  ‘Jess? Yes.’ The words came from Sam’s mouth as ‘Jesh’ and ‘yesh’. There was a long pause before he spoke again, now with a melancholy intonation. ‘Shavagely dishappointed, ol’ cock,’ he said. ‘Shavagely. Shall put a palette knife through damn’ thing firsht thing t’morrow. Will, y’know. Don’t believe in likeneshes, Taffr’l, ol’ cock. No good. Y’knew it was Jesh, eh? No good. Pity.’

  ‘’Course I haven’t seen her in the buff like that,’ Jack said. He spoke thoughtfully and even more slowly than he usually did, but his words came out without much slurring; he seemed to be standing up to it better than Sam. ‘You mean t’tell me,’ he went on, ‘she strips off an’ sits around starko and lets you paint her like that, without a stitch?’

  ‘Nasherally, ol’ cock. Nasherally. Quite ‘nother matter in bed. Quite different. Art is art, o’ cock. Arsh longa vita brevis. Latin tag. ‘Propriate. Art is long, o’ cock, an’ life is short. An’ Jesh is Jesh. Yesh, sir, thash my baby. Jesh. Look at her over there, eh. Jush look at her! Beau’ful girl. Talent too. No morals. Wassit matter? She’d sleep with you. Me. Anybody. Arsh longa vita brevish. Mushn’t deceive ourselves, Jack o’ cockalorum. Mush pull ourselves t’gether. Too friv’lous. Tha’s it. Friv’lous. ’S-where you’n me are wrong, Taffr’l ol’ cock. Too friv’lous. Need purpose. Earnestness … tha’s it. Tha’ brother o’ yours got the right idea, y’know? Not friv’lous, see, not friv’lous …’

  ‘Sonk, though,’ said Jack thickly.

  ‘Dishagree,’ slurred Sam. ‘Dishagree categorically. Categorically,’ he repeated as if surprised that he had been able to pronounce it.

  My face was burning as I tiptoed to the door, and very quietly opened it an inch or two. They were seated side by side, cross-legged on the carpet amid a litter of bottles, glasses, ash-trays, spilt puddles of beer, broken glass, the upended keg, and the unconscious bodies of all the other guests, who had passed out in the chairs, on the sofa, on the floor and even under the table. Jess was sitting bolt upright against the wall, with her head back against a door hinge and her eyes tightly closed. Jack and Sam looked like the two survivors of a massacre. Both had empty beer glasses. They were holding them very stiffly in front of their faces, peering at them with owlish intensity.

  ‘Been a sonk ever since he was a kid,’ Jack said to his glass solemnly.

  Sam in turn addressed his empty, froth-encrusted glass. ‘But not friv’lous anyway,’ he said. ‘Not like ush. Wasser matter with him?’

  ‘Nothin’,’ said Jack. ‘Kid’s all right. Jus’ sonky, that’s all.’

  ‘What d’you care?’

  ‘He’s my brother, isn’t he?’

  ‘What d’you care?’ Sam repeated.

  ‘First sheila he goes out with,’ said Jack, ‘he’ll either pick up a dose, or he’ll get her up the duff, or she’ll march him up the altar quick as a rat up a rope. Either that or he’ll end up a tonk.’

  ‘Arsh longa vita brevish,’ Sam said profoundly.

  Although there were many nights when I slept on the sofa in Sam’s studio, that first party evidently established a tacit precedent, and whenever Sam gave a party, or was more privately entertaining Jess or one of his other girls, it was unmistakably conveyed to me that I should remove myself. On these nights I would sleep on a park bench in the Fitzroy Gardens.

  After the first few days the whole adventure proved dismal
ly unsatisfying. I resented the discomfort and inconvenience, and with every day that passed I grew more homesick. The typewriter remained in Sam’s studio, but I found myself unable to concentrate when I was there and the article on the Hobart Town whalers, which I had begun with such confidence, remained unfinished. I no longer went to the Newspaper Room or the Public Library, and I stopped visiting the wharves. At Klebendorf’s I worked without much spirit but more conscientiously. I regularly attended the Life Class but my work gave no satisfaction either to Barnaby Stanton or myself.

  Jack, who had got a job delivering on a baker’s round, would meet me once a week in Fitzroy Gardens – he never visited Sam’s place again – and I would give him the money to take to Mother, and we would talk for a while or go to a newsreel theatre, and although I always prayed that he would suggest I go back home he never did, and for some reason I never dared suggest it myself. Not to him. After a while I found myself hoping that Mother or somebody in the family would become seriously ill, or have an accident, or that some terrible domestic calamity would happen which would necessitate my returning. But nothing like this occurred and Jack seemed to treat my exile in the most off-hand way.

  I was unable to come to grips with any single aspect of the situation in which I found myself. Sam’s ebullient prophecies had curdled and soured. I did sleep on park benches and occasionally I did eat sausages-and-mashed at his café in Russell Street, but I met no harlots and visited no doss-houses and wrote no epics and was not arrested for vagrancy. After a while I suspected that I had become something of a bore and a nuisance to Sam Burlington, and so I began to visit the studio less and less frequently, but this left me with that much more time in which to savour, bitterly and morosely, my own loneliness and misery.