This Is the Grass

by Alan Marshall

  “We were standing at the open door of the lounge and the people inside could see us. A man and a woman were sitting at a table near the door. The man was drunk—happy drunk.

  ‘Hey there, you!’ he called to me. ‘Come and have a drink. . . . You’ll do me . . . Come on. . . . Have a drink and to hell with it. Bring him in, Missus.’

  Mrs Bronson bent down and whispered quickly in my ear: ‘Always take a shout. Order whisky. I’ll always serve you ginger ale. Swallow it down as soon as you get it. It’ll help make up your board.’

  She straightened up and laughter was back into her voice again. ‘He’s all yours, Alec’ She placed her hand upon my shoulder and pushed me into the room.

  ‘Good on ya, sport!’ said the man. ‘That’s the stuff. . . Sit down and enjoy yourself. Where’s a chair? Here! Push that one over. Sit down. What’ll you have? What are you walking on those sticks for? Here. Give ’em to me. Put ’em under the bloody table. That’ll do. Hey, Missus, fill these glasses. Come on, Rube, empty that glass. What’s wrong with you?—you’re two behind me.’

  The woman across the table lifted the half-empty glass to her mouth and poured the beer down her throat without swallowing. She must have been plump once, but now she was thin and her skin was loose upon her. Her tired face was set like a mask. Her head nodded and she swayed a little on her chair. I thought she looked ill.

  She returned the empty glass with great deliberation to the table and slid it across the wet surface towards the man. As she did so she gazed fixedly at some spot on the table as if stability were there.

  ‘Whisky for you, Alan?’ asked Mrs Bronson, gathering the glasses.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘That’s the stuff to give ’em!’ exclaimed the man, putting his hand on my shoulder. ‘This is the life, boy! You only live once, you know. Have a good time while the going’s good, that’s what I say. What’s your name?’

  ‘Alan,’ I said.

  ‘Good on ya, Alan. You’ll do me!’

  I was troubled. I remembered my father saying once that no man should take a shout from another unless he was prepared to shout back.

  ‘I don’t like taking this drink from you,’ I said to the man. ‘I can’t shout back.’

  ‘What the hell does that matter?’ he exclaimed, dismissing my doubts with a scornful wave of his hand. ‘I wanta buy you a drink, that’s what I wanta do.’ He leaned towards me and asked in a tone that invited confidences: ‘Ain’t ya holdin’ too good?’ He put his hand on my shoulder again. ‘Don’t you worry, boy! Don’t you worry! I’ve got money to burn. I backed Sunrest at twenty to one at Moonee Valley, Saturday. Take a look at this.’ He took a wad of notes from his pocket and tossed it on to the table. ‘There’s dough for ya!’

  The woman stared at the money with blank eyes. She hiccuped.

  Mrs Bronson returned carrying a tray on which three full glasses were resting. She handed me the whisky glass half full of brownish liquid and pushed the beer towards my companions.

  The man threw some coins on to the tray. ‘Don’t worry over the change, Missus.’

  ‘Thanks, Alec.’

  ‘Here’s luck,’ said the man, raising his glass to me.

  ‘Here’s luck,’ I repeated.

  I drained my glass in one gulp and returned it to the table.

  ‘Hell!’ exclaimed the man who had only drunk part of his beer, ‘you must have cut your teeth on barbed wire.’

  I took my crutches from beneath the table and stood up.

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’ve got to have my tea. The bell went half an hour ago.’

  ‘Let it go,’ he said, waving his arm in a gesture of rejection while he strove to hold his head steady. ‘Let the bloody thing ring its head off. Who wants to eat! I don’t. Do you, Rube? Do you want to eat?’ He became depressed. ‘Ar, I dunno! Rube’s full as a boot and I’m as . . . full . . . as . . . Rube.’ His voice trailed off.

  ‘I’ll go now,’ I said.

  ‘Righto, sport.’ His head was too heavy to hold erect. It leaned over and faced the table as if the table exerted some spell upon it and sought to drag it down. ‘I’ll be seein’ ya.’

  Rube’s mouth began a good-bye smile, but her mind suddenly grabbed it, clamped it shut against the swinging world and some internal heaving. She closed her eyes and I walked away.

  The dining-room was alive with voices. Women laughed, glasses of beer were raised and lowered, men turned in their chairs and spoke to those they knew at other tables. . . . They were mostly racing people. Their conversation dealt with racehorses or money.

  ‘I’ve got a few quid to spare if you let me put my boy up on him.’

  ‘He was just kicking him along.’

  ‘He threw everything but himself and the sulky at the mare.’

  I sat at the end of a table in a place that had not yet been occupied. The table-cloth was white and clean here. There were no beer stains upon it, no smears of food. In a few moments a girl appeared beside my chair.

  ‘Roast beef, roast mutton, roast lamb, corned silverside, steak and kidney pie,’ she intoned while looking at a man across the room.

  She was a thinner and younger copy of her sister, Mrs Bronson. Her name was Violet Abbey and she was in love with a jockey. She never laughed or smiled, only looked. But now she was just a waitress to me and I wondered why they didn’t employ a girl who would smile when she asked what you wanted.

  ‘Steak and kidney pie,’ I said.

  There were two men sitting at the other end of the table. They looked like local workmen, council employees, maybe, who worked on road repairs. One of them was a giant of a man, well over six feet high, with huge hands that completely encircled the cup of tea around which they were clasped as he sat with his elbows on the table. I imagined him as the creation of a sculptor who had hewn his face from a red-gum block with emphasis on massive forms rather than on detail. It was a rugged, weather-beaten face like the figurehead of a brave ship. His companion addressed him as ‘Tiny’.

  Before I finished my meal they were joined by the coachman who walked in with his quick, stockman’s step and sat beside Tiny. He had had a bath and changed his clothes but he still wore his elastic-sided boots with their high heels. He said hullo to me and I experienced the direct honesty of a glance completely unshielded by pretence. He seemed to know me well, as if I had once been an object of study for him and the knowledge then gained was so complete it did not demand further development.

  I would like to have joined these three men and listened to them talking. I heard Tiny say: ‘His old woman rushed in and kept yelling: “You’ve killed him! You’ve killed him!” “It’s all right, Missus,” I told her. “I know where I hit him.”’

  After a while I left the dining-room and went into the lounge where I sat down in the corner across the room from the shuttered bar counter that opened into the public bar now closed to the roadway. The shutter was up and Mrs Bronson was serving glasses of beer, whisky or gin to men who carried the full glasses to tables where women awaited them.

  The couple with whom I had drunk before tea had gone. The two men who had signed the book were rapidly becoming drunk. The girls with them looked bored and smoked incessantly. The air was thick with cigarette smoke.

  The personalities of the people in the room began to change as the night advanced. The laughter of the women became high and less restrained. Men became moody and sullen or compulsively happy. Some became argumentative. A chair was suddenly thrust back and a man stood up abruptly. He leaned over the table and spoke heatedly to the man opposite him whose face was now near his own. A companion placed his hand on his shoulder and quietly pushed him back into his chair.

  ‘Cut it out!’ he said.

  The men began introducing oaths into their talk. They swore with emphasis, the stimulus they gained from certain swear-words being intensified by forceful delivery.

  They vied with each other in telling dirty yarns in lowered voices. They told them to the w
omen who held their ears near the men’s mouths and nodded as the yarns proceeded. When the yarns were ended they drew back in pretended shock or laughed with lowered heads. Some made ineffectual protests and one woman kept saying: ‘Now cut out the filth. Let’s have another drink.’

  A local man, the one who had sat with Tiny at the dining-table, began to play a concertina. Some couples, clasped tightly together, danced between the tables. One man kept trying to kiss the girl with whom he was dancing, but she kept laughing and drawing her head back. He suddenly pulled her to him savagely and kissed her on the mouth.

  I became afraid and went to my room. I lit the kerosene lamp and sat on the edge of my bed. I was confused and would have liked a friend to talk to. I wanted to tell someone all about it. My father wouldn’t do. I was certain he did not know that life like this existed.

  I had always associated kissing with love. When a man kissed a woman he loved her and love was a gentle emotion. It was protected and guarded. It contained reverence, I thought.

  The violent kiss of that man! That couldn’t be love. Yet why would he kiss her if he didn’t love her? They must be engaged, surely. Was it usual for people to show their love for each other by kissing in public? Had I been living in darkness up to now and only by chance been meeting people who did not act in this way?

  I had had dreams of loving and being loved. The girl I had created to share my world had come dancing forth from the bush to comfort me in my loneliness. I never quite knew who her parents were, where she lived. She just existed like a bird.

  I got into bed thinking of her. She had been real until tonight. Now I knew she was only a dream. The real world did not produce such girls; the real world was out there in the lounge.

  And I felt sick and tired with trouble. And I would never write books full of the music only children hear. Everything was tumbling and only trees were straight and clean.

  But dogs loved you and were good. And horses. . . .

  I lay for a long while looking at the ceiling. I had decided to blow out the lamp and go to sleep when the door opened and two girls entered, the ones I had watched sign the book. Their appearance was so unexpected, the occurrence itself so beyond belief that I looked at them in astonishment that must have stamped itself in lines of fear upon my face.

  One of them laughed as she looked at me. ‘Take a look at that, will you!’ she said to her companion, referring to my expression. ‘You’ve scared hell out of him.’ She clutched the end of the bed to steady herself. ‘Shut the door before they find us.’

  The other girl closed the door and came over to the side of the bed.

  ‘I haven’t scared you, have I?’ she said, speaking with pouting lips and in the placating tones of a woman addressing a baby. ‘He’s not frightened, is he?’

  She sat on the edge of the bed, pushing me with her hand to make room. My arms were beneath the blankets which were pulled up to my chin. She placed a hand each side of my head on the pillow and bent over me. Her face was just above mine. I could smell the beer in her breath, see the smeared lipstick on her lips, the thick layer of powder on her cheeks. Her lids were heavy and drooped half over her eyes. She changed her expression. Her cheeks grew taut, her lips parted and she spoke softly through her teeth.

  ‘You’d love me to sleep with you, wouldn’t you?’

  She waited for me to answer, but I couldn’t speak.

  She slowly lowered her head, watching my eyes till she was too close to keep them in view, then she pressed her lips against mine.

  I tried to withdraw my head by pushing it backwards deep into the pillow but she followed it. I felt I was suffocating. I was nauseated by the warm smell of stale beer, by her predacious mouth, by what I had seen in her eyes.

  She raised her head and I could breathe again.

  ‘There’s someone coming!’ exclaimed the girl at the end of the bed, looking at the door.

  The girl sitting beside me looked back over her shoulder. The door opened and the coachman stepped in. He looked at me first and I again experienced the feeling he knew everything about me. It was a look that shouldered burdens.

  He turned to the girl on the bed: ‘What are you doing here?’ His voice was hard and his eyes were still.

  ‘Mind your own bloody business,’ she snapped at him.

  ‘Get out!’ he ordered her, pointing to the door. ‘Get out and leave him alone.’

  ‘What . . .!’ she began.

  ‘Get out, I say!’ He took a step towards her.

  She rose hurriedly. ‘You put your hand on me and I’ll have you run in.’

  ‘Out!’ he repeated.

  He followed them into the passage then came back.

  ‘You can go to sleep now,’ he said. ‘They won’t come back. I’ll put out the light.’

  He blew out the lamp then spoke from the darkness. ‘Tomorrow I’ll shift you over to my room.’ He went out and closed the door behind him.

  I felt like an old man. The weight of all that I now knew had aged me and I could never return to my carefree days again. I know everything now, I thought. There is nothing more to be learnt about men and women. I know things I’ll never be able to repeat. I’ll have to spend the rest of my life putting my knowledge into books, exposing these evils that most people do not know exist.

  I’ll denounce every bastard in this pub, I thought, the violent language of the place already affecting me.

  But underneath I was desperately worried. The kiss the girl had given me left me with a conviction I was committed to her. She had branded me as Father branded a horse and now I belonged to her.

  I was certain that, in the morning, she would come up to me to discuss our relationship, and that she would probably demand I marry her.

  The thought of marriage with her appalled me. I could see her sitting drinking beer while I did the cooking and the washing up. I would never be able to write.

  I decided to fight strongly against any demand that I marry her. Probably some compromise would be possible. But if she insisted, what could I do? I was almost as good as married to her now.

  I fell asleep holding the blankets tightly around me.

  4

  When I rose in the morning the girls had gone. I was surprised. I had emerged from my room keyed up to defend myself against charges of co-operation. I was going to deny that I had kissed her; she had kissed me.

  The knowledge that all this was now unnecessary left me deflated and tired. I felt sure I was a weak character and I entered the kitchen in low spirits.

  Gunner Harris and another man were sitting at the table having their breakfast. Rose Buckman was standing over the stove.

  ‘And how is the Shire Secretary feeling this morning?’ She was smiling as her gaze went over me.

  ‘Good,’ I said.

  I greeted Gunner and said ‘Hullo’ to the other man. He was a small, pink and flabby man with an obsequious, servile manner. His cheeks hung loosely on each side of his face, their weight crumpling the flesh beneath his chin and on his throat. His lower lids drooped away from his eyes, revealing their pink linings like the eyes of a spaniel. He had a soft, ingratiating voice.

  ‘Good morning, sir,’ he said.

  Gunner addressed him as ‘Shep’. I learnt later he was the yardman, the man-of-all-work at the pub.

  But his main job was to act as a bell-wether for Mrs Bronson. When some teamster or timber worker on his way to the city came into the bar for a drink, Mrs Bronson, anticipating the moment when he was about to drain his final glass, would hurry down to the kitchen and slip Shep a two-shilling piece. He would pocket it and go padding up the passage to the bar where he would intercept the man.

  ‘Have one with me before you go,’ he would say ceremoniously, his soft hand on the man’s arm. The man rarely refused but it meant another shout from him, then one on the house from Mrs Bronson.

  In the meantime they encouraged the man to tell lengthy stories of his work. They questioned him, flattering him with their
interest and attention. He usually stayed till his money was gone, then staggered out to his gig or wagon, the trip to the city now abandoned.

  ‘Are you going to have your breakfast here or go into the dining-room?’ Rose asked me.

  ‘Here,’ I said.

  She placed a plate of bacon and eggs on the table and I sat down.

  ‘Where’s Arthur this morning?’ I asked Gunner.

  ‘Gone long ago,’ he said. ‘The coach leaves at seven. He was full last night,’ he added. ‘You always know when he’s been giving it a bash; he gets up singin’ and whistlin’. Now he won’t touch it for six months.’

  ‘You can always judge a man by what he sings,’ observed Rose, gazing thoughtfully at a frying chop.

  ‘You were telling me about that bloke,’ Shep said to Gunner. I had interrupted their conversation and Shep was anxious to renew it.

  ‘Well, I got him to come home with me all right,’ Gunner continued his tale. ‘I told him we’d crack a bottle. He comes in and I have a screw at his wallet. I’ve got no conscience so don’t worry about that. Birds eat and are free. They don’t work, so why should we? How it happened was like this: I had to get dough and get it fast. My wife and I had a bad bust up on the Thursday and I looked like losing her for keeps. I put it on him for a tenner but he sort of jacked up and didn’t want to come in on it. Then he made a go to get out. I got stuck into him proper and finished up with fifteen quid.’

  I could see Shep liked this story. He was the type of man who dreams of ways to get money without working. He’d short-change a man, ingratiate himself with bookmakers to get tips for the races, scuttle out of his stable den to lift and carry, to harness horses, to promise menial service—all for the coins he was tossed, money he carried in his pocket and counted furtively in secluded corners.

  He drank it all, swallowing beer with shaking urgency and wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. I was to have scores of breakfasts with him. He was a book I was to read in instalments. The last chapter would, I knew, end in final and utter defeat in the gutter.