Hester wanted to laugh but knew it was dangerous. She went to pour him a shot of whatever, even though she knew he’d run out of money. But Benny clearly didn’t take to the intrusion. He did a strange right-angle turn to look down at Josh, tilted an imaginary hat, and said, What’s the problem, fella? Something got you by the short and curlies?
What the fuck?
The old-timers rose and retreated into the saloon bar. Hester thought of calling the boss from the other bar – the boss barely tolerated Josh at the best of times and they had actually come to blows in the past. Yet they went way back in ways Hester had never been able to unravel, let alone understand.
I mean, what’s your issue, matey?
Benny wasn’t flustered. Hester imagined he had too many acres and too much machinery to be flustered by a loser like Josh. But she put her money on Josh, and clenched up, and thought, This is why I hate and love this job. This is what I am. I hate and love myself. She thought all that and remembered the first time she’d slept with Josh in one of the rooms upstairs – aggressive and soft and jubilant and just plain sad. That was it. He’d made her feel unique and worn-out and that was at only nineteen – he was maybe two years older. They’d taken acid and he’d told her about a book called The Little Prince, which she went out and bought. She still kept a copy in her handbag, a dog-eared copy with underlined passages, especially about the rose under a dome.
I don’t have an issue, matey! said Josh, spitting and dribbling.
Then Benny took Josh by surprise. Wanna arm wrestle, matey?
Josh kicked the bar, shook his head like he had a mane, though he’d hacked off his own hair recently and it stuck out in tufts at angles, and said too loudly, Well, why the fuck not!
And then they were at a table near the jukebox, with the grey light swamping in through the window, and suddenly a crowd around them – old-timers, who were coming in to the sports bar and dining bar for an early liquid or counter lunch, even the boss, though Hester stayed behind the bar, watching on tippy-toes, struggling with desire and allegiance.
On the face of it, they were poorly matched. Josh was ill-looking and wiry, and Benny burly – if not in his prime then just past it, and healthy-looking. But both parties knew they were about even, and that it would be a tussle. Hatred boiled in both men, just showing itself in different ways.
They eased on and then braced and held each other, swollen-faced, eyes popping for an age. People goaded them at first, then went silent, feeling something was at stake, something disturbed and dangerous. People broke away and left them to it. It was like possession, and the harder the two pushed against each other, the more expressionless their faces became. Hester feared Josh’s skinny arm would snap.
Benny spoke first, grimacing. You’ve got issues, matey.
So have you, arsehole, spat Josh.
You could be right there, matey.
The struggle continued, then both men, as one, eased off the pressure but held their wrists in place, vertical, with just enough tension on their arms to keep it all in place. Josh spoke first, and in a spiel …
I hit my missus sometimes, but never my kid. She gets on my nerves trying to keep me out of the pub, away from drugs. It shits me that she’s right. I kinda love her but I hate her. I didn’t mean to clock her so hard – gave her a black eye. I wasn’t even angry with her, just hanging, and didn’t know what had happened. She went off to one of those fuckin’ refuges full of lezzo man-hating bitches. Now she’s back again gettin’ her mind poisoned and hating me more. Fucking can’t stand it. And I might not even see my daughter again.
Benny, studying their gripped hands, said, I know where you’re comin’ from. But you’re wrong about those refuges … sometimes they’re the only places women connected with men like … us … have to go to.
Josh put more pressure back on and Benny responded.
Fuck that, mate, what would you know!
Benny said, I’ve been where you’re at now. You mightn’t think it lookin’ at me, he added with a kind of strained trumped-up pride.
Josh grimace-laughed. Look like? You just look like a dickhead to me.
Benny eased a bit and said, Natural reaction under the circumstances.
Josh said, You trying to be all enigmatic or something?
Benny, who didn’t know what he meant, launched into a speech. I’m on my third marriage and this one is a good one, a stayer. She tolerates my occasional binges because I keep it out of the house. We’re well-off. But before I inherited the farm I was bitter and angry and I pushed my first two wives around.
What, at the same time? Are you Brethren or something?
What?
You know, polygamy.
Nah, was married to one then the other. Gave ’em both a hard time. I used to have the knack of luring the fillies in. Still have it.
Jesus, and I thought I had problems.
At least you’re admitting you’ve got problems.
Outside, the world flowed by and both men looked at it, only half concentrating on the wrestle. Josh imagined he saw his girlfriend Beth sail past without a care, sail past in the passenger seat of a car – no doubt driven by one of those bitches trying to separate the family, bust them all up. He put more pressure on the hand he was holding and it responded the same. But it wasn’t her, and he knew it. Who was this cunt? Why were they holding hands? Josh made a few short sharp jabs of intense pressure, thinking to finish it, but the other hand answered – they moved in a thirty-degree arc, but not much more. Josh’s arm was aching bad.
Hey, boys, how’s it progressing? asked Hester from over the bar. I reckon it’s a draw – you’ve been going for ages.
Stay out of it! both men said as one.
Then they laughed. And cracked up laughing till they cried. People started filtering back to watch and laugh, and then the boss called out in the loud, annoying, booming, self-possessed voice that had so riled Josh since he was a kid, Drinks on the house for the combatants.
Then the pressure was gone and both hands floated apart, as if they’d been strained against a doorframe and were defying gravity. They went to the bar and swigged their gifted beers. Neither man said a thing. Both left shortly after via the door through which they’d entered, with maybe a gap of ten seconds between them. Josh first, then Benny. They walked off in opposite directions, their lives altered in unpredictable ways.
THE LAST DAYS OF THE RAILWAY HOTEL
I’d been living there for ten years, watching the days and my disability pension disappear through the old building’s plumbing. But why not? I had no partner, and no one was likely to pick me up or respond to my overtures even if I was spruced up and sober. Seriously, why bother?
I moved in at the invitation of a cheaper-than-normal cheap room. I knew the owner. He and I had been old foes. Thirty years earlier we’d campaigned against each other for the seat of F, south of the city. He’d been the Liberal Party candidate, and I the Labor. He was a particularly virulent form of his strain – smash the unions, especially the waterside workers, which is what I came out of.
Not that I want to revisit those times, or even my days on the wharves. Other than a few old mates who journey up from their Port retirements to drink with me down in the front bar, I have cut all contact with that life. I am just a drunk now – I watch footy on the big screen and read cheap novels from the book exchange. Westerns, even a bit of science fiction, occasionally what my old schoolteacher friend would call literature. I read and drink and am sometimes led back to my room with pissed pants. The Railway is a hotel that handles, even expects, that kind of situation. It’s what some call a rough pub.
Someone once called me and Bill – the owner, licensee of this establishment – queer bedfellows, and Bill popped them in the snout. He was a good thirty years older than the bloke, but there was nothing the loudmouth could do to defend himself. A rough pub, full of street alcoholics, the odd drug addict, and ex-footballers. The police came in to sort things out on occasion,
but they had an understanding with the Boss, as he liked to be called. He was always friends with their boss, even when their boss was sacked. I guess he knew things.
But Bill would always provide the police with a sacrificial lamb – especially a young addict. Bill was an alcoholic and tolerated a bit of smoke, but didn’t have much time for speed freaks and junkies. In fact, he’d be more than happy to see them hanged. In the meantime, he was never averse to his head barman topping the old alky regular’s drinks up with a dash of meths ‘on the house’.
His head barman was Steve the Greek, who wasn’t even Greek, as far as we were ever able to tell. But he knew a couple of powerful Greek families who had sway in the way he respected. Anyway, Steve the Greek. I had more contact with Steve than any other of the pub regulars over the ten years. But I also knew all the barmaids and in some ways I was like gentry.
The best way to get to know someone is through slow, mind-numbing overfamiliarity. Drinking with them day in, day out. But that’s not going to tell you anything quickly, so I’ll resort to a few incidents to show the natures of the players. I’ll start with the barmaid, the senior barmaid if you like, who stretches back to Bill’s younger days, and was likely the notorious lover who brought him down while he was serving as (believe it or not as he hates trees) Minister for the Environment. Beth. Beth Penny. A tough redhead (dyed) who looked ten years older than she was with clothes on, and ten years younger with them off. I know, because every Boxing Day for the last ten years she’s given me a mercy fuck.
The incident, out of many, that sticks in my mind with Beth relates to her being held up at knife-point towards closing one weeknight a few years ago. It was an addict, as they usually are. Hanging out and willing to rob even people who could identify him. Maybe he thought he could fix it up a few days later and it’d all blow over, but I saw his shakes and angry eyes and total loss of control and his edging towards using that knife before even an affirmation or refusal could be made. He’d charged in off the street, straight to the bar, which he leapt onto, crouching with the knife drawn at Beth’s throat, yelling, Give me the takings! The whole fucking lot! Now. Don’t make me repeat myself!
Okay, darl, says Beth, her huge balcony pushed against the junkie’s knee, the knife almost cutting her throat. Not a problem. I’ll have to lean across and open the till, darl. Okay, he says, shaking and angry. Beth opens the till with one hand, and starts bunching the notes together. He can’t wait, of course, and leans into the till to grab the notes himself – Beth slams the till drawer shut on his hand and falls back away from the knife, and quicker than any natural phenomenon, Steve appears and pulls the guy to the floor behind the bar and kicks the shit out of him. Beth steps over the barely living body, pulls a beer, and says, cool as you want, If it’s okay with you, Steve, it’s drinks on the house. Given there were only three of us plus Steve and Beth left, it didn’t cost the house too much.
There are four younger barmaids rostered across the week, and they work in shifts. Occasionally a fifth covers for holidays or sickness or self-inflicted malady. I’ll mention two who stand out in all sorts of ways. Belinda is twenty-five and a gambler. She has the horses running in the background, and she and Bill keep an illegal tab going behind the bar. She’s not interested in anything but the horses. She says she’s going to have a share in a winner one day. She’s a tallish if compact woman whose father was a jockey and mother was a local (six-foot) model. She has a narrow range of conversation.
Then there’s Alice, my personal favourite. She’s twenty-two and would never sleep with anyone connected to the hotel. I like this about her. In fact, none of us knows anything about her private life. But she’s bookish, as they say, and is always reading when there’s nothing happening, though it shits Steve, who tells her to polish glasses instead. She reads Penguin classics, and has read Pride and Prejudice six times. Sometimes, if she’s had a couple of drinks, she acts out the characters behind the bar. She’s a hoot. I am not a violent man, not really, but when one fella started groping her as she was collecting glasses from a table, I hit him so hard it broke two ribs. Charges were laid but dropped – I reckon Bill sorted that one. Bill loved all his barmaids. Though the pub was a hellhole, the barmaids liked Bill.
I had an argument with Bill once about the hours schoolteachers work. They get paid for doing nothing, said Bill, and tossed back a sherry. I quoted Ivan Illich to him and he told me to get fucked with my mumbo jumbo and Beth said, Steady, Bill, your blood pressure, which is what she said to all old drinkers, boss or hobo, when they got a little heated.
Anyway, this argument started when Steve the Greek leant on the beer towelling, flattened it out with wing-like outstretched palms, and said, Some people say I have an easy job – telling the barmaids what to do, telling new delivery blokes where to roll the barrels, but what they don’t realise is all the after-hours worry I have. Bullshit, one old codger cackled, and we all laughed. But Steve had that look on his face, and when Alice squeezed past and said, Whoops, boss, he didn’t even flinch. We all knew he’d never scored with Alice and lived in permanent hope, though Steve wouldn’t grope her or blackmail her or trade favours. He was a proud fella who wanted his late-forties self to seem appealing, for her to value him as a catch. He could show her the ropes of life and wanted her to appreciate this – and him.
The argument went on and on till Bill said, You’re all a bunch of fucking no-hopers, I wipe my hands of the lot of ya. He then fell off his barstool, and Beth helped him out back somewhere.
Steve watched them go and stared at the doorframe longer than you’d expect, then looked down at the beer emblem pattern, the black swans a-sail on rivers of lager, then out past our bowed, beer-glass-focused heads, and said, just out of the blue, Pub’s closing down, boys. Bill’s gone bust. He looked at me, shook his head, opened the bench and crossed into the bar, wiped a table with his bare fist, then vanished under the exit sign. No one said a thing. That urine smell of stale beer came into nasal focus for me for the first time in a decade. I would be homeless.
Belinda was crying, but she was crying for Bill, not me or the rest of us.
What will you do, Steve? I asked during a quiet moment a few days later. Pubs are always looking for an experienced hand, he said. Then again, I might open my own place – just a bar down in Freo. Where will you go?
Me? Fuck knows. A dorm somewhere, maybe. Bill might be broke but I’ve seen the retirement village brochure he’s been flashing around and I think he’ll be right. Why don’t you move in with him? said Steve. In with Bill? You’re joking, mate!
During the last days of the Railway Hotel Steve the Greek, my sometime mate, came into his own. He seemed to think it his job to keep everyone drinking and happy. He even laughed when I spewed over one of the tables. Don’t worry, mate, Alice will mop it up with her tits. Even Alice kind of laughed, but I was so out of it I can’t really be sure.
But this is not just a bit of shared autobiography. There was an incident on the last day that makes this a story worth telling. In fact, what I’ve just told you would have been repeated wholesale in the many newspapers that covered the incident at the time. But none of us said a word. Doesn’t matter now. Steve and Bill are dead and there’s no bringing ’em back.
One of the junkies Bill had, shall we say, mistreated, stuck his head in during the last session and said, Serves all ya fuckers right. Good riddance to bad rubbish, you bunch of old pisstanks. Now Steve took it in good humour – good spirits even! – and went up to the scraggy shit, put him in a headlock, and affectionately drove his knuckle into the bloke’s dreadlocked mess of a skull. There, ya junkie bastard, a goodbye present. We all laughed, even Bill. But the junkie didn’t find it funny and, wait for it, pulls his dick out and pisses right there on the floor. Steve backs off, saying, You dirty little bastard, but Bill staggers across the room, right into the stream of orange piss which never seems to stop, and kicks the guy in the pisser. The guy staggers off, a mess, and we laugh and keep
on drinking.
When the bastard comes back with some bikie mates, Steve vanishes while Bill and the girls berate them. They rearrange the place, which is silly because it’s going to be bulldozed anyway. Then one of the big bastards grabs Alice and clearly means to fuck her there and then. Steve appears with a rifle, shoots the bloke, shoots the junkie, and goes to shoot another bloke, who rushes out of the room.
And that’s what happened. Nothing more, nothing less. With blokes dying on the floor, everyone returned to their drinks as if nothing had happened. It was, after all, the last days of the Railway Hotel, a rough pub. Funny how you guys try to find a political angle in all this. What with me and Bill being enemy-mates. But it was Steve who was the real politician.
SISTERS
One crawled through the window, and another left by taxi. Not immediately, but within half an hour. It took twenty-five minutes for the cab to arrive, and the older sister, Jessy, stood out in the street waiting, swigging from a bottle of vodka. It was morning. Maybe 9 am. The younger sister, Monica, had called the cab for her. It was the least she could do.
He wasn’t real, and yet all too real in this. A thorn. An aberration. Something of a freak. Looking back, looking back over the years, the decades, the sisters could catch up, with a little tension, and agree he was bad, a freak. He wrecked our lives, they affirmed. Wrecked them before they’d really had a chance to get started.
It was a freaky situation, a freaky demographic. The port city ran on shabby gentility, working-class anger, and out-ofit-ness. The sisters were two years apart in age, and gravitated towards each other because of a shared interest in the blues. There were some great blues bars in town. Both generally hung round with older men, but ‘the freak’ was roughly their own age. He was a junkie. That’s all you need to say, they agreed.
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