This Is the Grass

by Alan Marshall

  He put his hand to the side of his mouth: ‘ ’Ot pie or a frankfurt!’ then turned to me again: ‘You know they burnt the pub down, don’t you?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I never heard that.’

  ‘Yes, she went up. They tell me there was sheilas jumping out windows and blokes pulling on their trousers and old Tiny chuckin’ water round. I never found out who old Flo Bronson got to put a match to it. It was well insured. I’d have done it for a spin, then got another hundred out of her to keep quiet, but she was awake-up to that, the old bitch.’

  ‘What happened to Arthur?’

  ‘Arthur was down here last Friday night looking for you.’ His voice revealed his pleasure at being able to tell me this. ‘He got a boat and went crayfishing round Tasmania. I hadn’t seen him for nearly three years. He reckons he lived on an island or something, for six months. On his own, too. He’s a funny bloke. He told me to tell you if I saw you that he’ll be down here next Friday.’

  It pleased me that I would be seeing Arthur again. With the thought that I would soon be able to unload my problems upon him came a feeling they were resolved. I felt a lift of spirits.

  ‘How does he look?’ I asked Gunner.

  ‘Aw, just the same! I wanted him to come home and break a bottle with me before the old woman finished the lot but he wouldn’t be in it. He’s off the grog, he reckons. Ar, they go that way, some blokes, get ideas like, chuck the good times. . . .’ Gunner had no time for men who didn’t drink.

  ‘I never trust a bloke who knocks back a beer,’ he told me once. ‘You can’t be friends with them.’

  It didn’t surprise me that Arthur was not drinking. In the past his drinking-bouts had always been deliberate and controlled. There was no compulsion about them. I wanted to hear more about him, but most of all I wanted to feel he needed me too. He was the only man I had met who showed a preference for my company and I wanted some evidence that his friendship was still as strong.

  To have directly questioned Gunner on this point would have revealed a childishness in me, so I approached it obliquely.

  ‘I don’t suppose he mentioned me much?’

  ‘Well, he wanted to know how you were going. I told him Flogger’d tell him that.’

  He stopped and looked at me, and though he was smiling his eyes were sharp and suspicious.

  ‘What is Flogger gettin’ out of you? You’re pretty thick, ain’t ya. What’s his lurk?’

  ‘He’s getting nothing out of me,’ I said angrily, glaring at him.

  ‘Righto! Righto!’ he exclaimed with a wave of his hand. ‘He talks about you and I just wanted to know.’

  He cried an appeal to the people passing, then continued: ‘Arthur had a yarn with Flogger about you on Saturday. He wanted to know if you’d started tracking with sheilas.’ He lowered his voice and became confidential: ‘Are you going with any sheilas?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  He drew himself up. ‘What’s wrong with you!’ he exclaimed contemptuously. ‘Where’s your bloody big talk—writing books an’ that—and you can’t get a sheila!’

  5

  During the next week I visited the pie-cart each night hoping that Arthur would turn up before the Friday. On one of these nights I left about eleven o’clock and had set off walking along Elizabeth Street on my way home when a big man stopped me. He had been standing in a shop doorway with another man and as he stepped purposely across the pavement he reached out a hand towards me and said: ‘Hey!’

  I stopped and looked up at his unsmiling face. I recognised him as a plain-clothes man and I waited tensely for what he had to say.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asked.

  I told him.

  My attitude must have suggested I was under strain. He dropped his grim manner and said: ‘It’s all right; we’re not after you. I just want to give you a word of advice, that’s all. You’ve been down at the pie-cart since eight o’clock, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What have you been doing down there?’

  ‘Talking.’

  ‘Who to?’

  ‘Flogger.’

  ‘What were you talking about?’

  ‘He was telling me about his fights at the Stadium.’

  ‘That’s all right, but you’re making a welter of it. Now, take my advice. Stop away from there. Make yourself scarce. Knock round other parts of the city if you want to, but dodge that corner. We’re cleaning it up. Whether you know it or not, I don’t know, but you’ve been mixing with some of the worst crooks in Melbourne. If you’re down there when we’re picking them up you’ll be charged too. Now, you understand what I’m talking about, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘We know you’re all right but we’re after one or two you’ve been seen talking to.’ He changed his tone and spoke sharply: ‘How many are working in with the S.P. down there?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t bet.’

  ‘You mean, you won’t talk,’ he said, then added, with friendliness in his voice: ‘Righto! Hop off and keep away from the pie-cart.’ He patted my shoulder. ‘Off you go.’

  I walked down Elizabeth Street until I came to the Collins Street corner. I stood there and later I saw the two men walking up Collins Street on their way towards the Russell Street headquarters. I hurried back to Flogger and told him what had happened. When I finished he looked around him, noting which men were standing in the vicinity of the pie-cart.

  ‘They passed here a while ago,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Staggers over there,’ he jerked his head towards a man leaning against the hotel wall, ‘is the only one they could have seen tonight.’

  He threw a log of wood on to the pie-cart fire then put his hand on my arm. ‘Don’t worry over me. They’ve got nothing on me. It’s the S.P.s and urgers they’re after. Somebody the boys have touched has gone and squealed. They’re not picking their right marks. Anyway, you keep out of it. I’ll bump into you one of these days.’

  ‘Look, Flogger,’ I said. ‘Arthur was going to meet me here Friday night. When he turns up tell him I’ll be waiting for him in front of the Melba, will you?’

  ‘Righto! I’ll tell him.’

  He held out his hand: ‘Hurroo.’

  I shook it. ‘You’ve been good to me,’ I said. ‘Thanks, anyway.’

  ‘Aw—get out!’ he said, giving me a playful punch in the ribs. ‘You’re all right.’

  I went away but when I was some distance up the street I turned to look back at him. He was still watching me. He waved and I waved back.

  As I walked home I experienced a great loneliness. The detective’s advice was an order. In obeying it, and I had no alternative, I would not only be cutting myself off from people with whom I had become friendly and with whom I could talk, but from the life of the city itself. Standing in front of the pie-cart I had a sense of belonging. It was a point of contribution to a more embracing and greater life than I could fashion from my own experience—greater, since this life emerged from the experiences of all men.

  I could never hope to become more than part of this larger life I saw as an abstract concept of reality, but beside the pie-cart I was standing at the portal. Fulfilment lay through this entrance.

  But there must be thousands of other entrances, I thought. The difficulty was to find them, to recognise them. It seemed I must start all over again and the thought made me quail.

  I knew that association with people was necessary for the full development of man’s powers. Father had once told me that the clampers, those horses in the body of a team, were just as important as the leaders and the shafters in the pulling of the load and that most people were clampers.

  But to be selected for the team: that was the point. In my limited experience of the society in which I lived the values brought to bear upon the selection of a horse were the values used in selecting a man. Under such appraisal I was useless.

  It suddenly came to me that my life had hitherto been spent
as an observer, never as a participant, and the fault was mine. One doesn’t wait to be selected: one steps into the gap.

  I was looking on at the struggle as I did at the physical struggles I witnessed during the police strike when a whirlpool of fighting men had moved up Swanston Street. Now, as I thought of it, I knew that at that time, out in the darkness above them beyond my reach and comprehension, were words that, if used at the right moment, with the right force and conviction, would have stopped them. I was certain of it.

  People become animals because of the silence of men who know the words but are afraid or too selfish to use them, of men who want to say the words but whose ignorance withholds a knowledge of them. I was one of the ignorant ones.

  On Friday night, while I was waiting in front of the Melba Theatre, Arthur came walking up the street towards me. He was just as erect, walked just as lightly. He smiled as he approached, but behind the smile was that searching, concerned gaze which, when withdrawn, would know what I had become.

  ‘How are you, Arthur?’ I said.

  He didn’t return my greeting. He never wasted time on such meaningless exchanges between friends.

  ‘I know a café up here where we can get strong tea,’ he said. ‘Come on.’

  He continued walking and I swung along beside him.

  ‘You’ve filled out,’ he continued. ‘How’s your father?’

  ‘He’s all right,’ I said. ‘Hey, listen . . . Tell me . . . You’ve been crayfishing, haven’t you? I want to know all you’ve been doing. What made you leave the pub? There’s a hell of a lot I want to talk to you about. A detective came up to me the other night and warned me away from the pie-cart.’

  ‘Yes, Flogger told me,’ he said. ‘He told me all about you. That copper did a good job. What’ve you been hanging round with that mob for? You’ll learn nothing from them. You’re still going to write a book, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, then added: ‘They’re all right.’

  ‘They might be all right for a while but they become a sort of habit and then you can never pull out. If you’d ’ve kept going down there you’d ’ve been dragged into something and before you’d ’ve known where you were you’d ’ve copped the lot.’

  He led the way into a café and pulled two chairs back from a corner table. ‘Here, sit down there.’ He ordered tea and sandwiches from the waitress, then continued: ‘Flogger told me something about a woman’s paying you half rates. What was the strength of that?’

  I told him. ‘But that’s finished now,’ I said.

  ‘But what made you take it?’ he exclaimed, exasperated. ‘By God! If I’d been here you wouldn’t have taken it. There’s a few things I’d like to tell that woman. Never let anyone else put one over you like that.’

  I turned him off my affairs and questioned him about his experiences since we had last met, and he told me that he got out of the coach run at Wallaby Creek as soon as he saw horses were finished. He went to Tasmania and teamed up with a fisherman there. They bought a ketch and went crayfishing round the islands of Bass Strait. They had a tough time for the first few months until they began poaching and got some big hauls.

  ‘We got tangled with the police once or twice and lost a lot of our pots,’ Arthur explained. ‘We had to make a run for it in the dark one night and I nearly put her on the rocks. It was pitch-black. You couldn’t see your hand in front of you. I saw the breakers when we were almost on them. I came hard down and we shot through a channel no wider than this room. Hell, it was close! We had a look at it next day and you wouldn’t believe it possible. After that the coppers got us in the gun so I pulled out.’

  He rented an island in the strait on which the remnants of a herd of cattle still wandered in the ti-tree scrub. He lived there alone for a year, built a stockyard and rounded up the cattle which he shipped to Tasmania.

  One lot, ‘wild as March hares’, burst through the enclosure in which he had yarded them in Launceston and went galloping through the town in terror.

  ‘You’d never think heifers could do so much damage,’ he said. ‘There was a hell of a blue over it. I chucked it after that and came back here.’

  ‘What are you doing now?’ I asked.

  ‘Punting.’

  ‘Hell!’ I exclaimed.

  ‘There’s a living in it if you don’t plunge,’ he said.

  ‘What do you go on—tips?’

  ‘No—form. I’m out to make about eight quid a week. I’ll do it all right.’

  He was living in a rented room in King Street and had his meals at cafés.

  ‘A bloke should be married,’ he said, his enthusiastic manner suddenly gone.

  He was a lonely man. He was almost forty and had never met a woman he could love. At Wallaby Creek he had told me quite a lot about the women with whom he had had affairs. They were always transitory relationships: his deeper emotions were never involved.

  The women he met were shallow and predacious, and though they met his physical need they did not stir his imagination. His relationships with women were dictated by circumstances and would have degraded some men, but they left him untouched. He had a clean mind and always gained the respect of the women with whom he associated.

  Maybe it was because he respected them, respected all women even when he criticised them. Maybe it was because he believed implicitly in the moral code he had created from his contemptuous reaction to the hypocrisy of men proclaiming their allegiance to a conventional morality they had no intention of observing.

  ‘Drop words and face facts,’ he told me once. ‘You are the only judge of what is right or wrong for you.’

  I began to tell him about a longing to go out with girls that was gradually coming upon me. It was not only a physical hunger but a spiritual one. The two desires warred within me, one demanding a physical satisfaction, the other a devotion that would remove my loneliness, and my sense of inferiority.

  But in my thinking they gradually became dependent one upon the other. There was no solution to my sexual desires without a basis of love, however transitory, through which to release them.

  ‘The trouble is no girl could love me,’ I ended my confession.

  ‘Course they could.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Hell!’ he exclaimed. ‘I just know. I’ve been out with women. I know them.’

  ‘But you’ve told me you’ve never loved any of them.’

  ‘No, because I go out with the wrong women. I was a sailor. I’ve gone six months without seeing a woman. I met a girl in Buenos Aires once and I could have loved her. But I didn’t have time.

  ‘I’ll stand by what I’ve done to women, but I tell you this—every time I met them after, I could look them in the eyes and smile. If I couldn’t do that I’d ’ve gone wrong somewhere along the line.’

  ‘But they’d be molls, wouldn’t they?’ I asked.

  ‘Molls! No, no! I never paid money for my fun. That makes men like animals and besides women should never have to sell their bodies. Any woman I went with wanted me as much as I wanted her. I laughed and danced with them, slept with them and went on. And I left them happy.

  ‘But you couldn’t do that; you’re different. You’ve got to work out what’s right for you. But whatever you do it’s got to leave you feeling good. It’s got to be right to you and right to the girls.’

  ‘I don’t know what’s right for me,’ I said gloomily.

  ‘No, because you’re all mixed up. I’ll straighten you out, by hell I will! You take what you said just now—a girl can’t love you or something. Hell’s delight! Anybody who talks like that must think women only fall for wrestlers like that bloke—I forget his name—who powders his face and waves his hair before he enters the ring.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said feeling depressed. I’ll have to find some way out of it. I’ll have to throw myself into writing.’

  ‘What the hell are you going to write about?’ demanded Arthur. ‘How can you write without having l
oved? Writing’s love and hate and the kisses of girls and a lot of other bloody things besides. When I read a book I like to be able to say: “Hell, that’s me! That’s me in there!” Not that I read much. I’ve been too busy scratching for a crust. Your dad’s got the right idea. . . . I’ve talked to him . . . lots of times. He told me he doesn’t like reading books that make you feel as if you should be reading them in your Sunday suit. By God, that’s true!

  ‘Listen—you’ve got to go out with girls but you’ll never get them to go out with you if you face them with a hang-dog look. You know how a savage dog always goes for a bloke who’s frightened of it. It feels he’s frightened somehow and it tears right into him. When a bloke’s not scared it’ll let him pat it.

  ‘Girls are like that. If you’re frightened and think you’re not fit to touch their hand they won’t have a bar of you. If you barge in feeling as good as they are they’ll fall for you. You’ve always got to be in love. You’ve got to burn like a flame. Then you’ll see them smile and come to you. Then you’ll know how wonderful it is to live free of the dirty shirt most people use to cover sex. You’ll feel you’ve had a bath. You’ve got to be clean to live with yourself. I suppose, to write too—I don’t know. But you’ll never feel clean till you’ve lain in the arms of a woman and looked into her eyes, smiling. They’ll love you if you’re worth it, don’t worry.’

  6

  Arthur’s talk didn’t convince me that I should follow his advice, though I thought of it a lot over the next few weeks. I was becoming resigned to the negative life I was leading and shrank from pushing myself forward into any conflict, any readjustment. By being obscure and hidden I avoided antagonism, opposition; I avoided getting hurt. It might be better to accept conditions as they were.

  Then occurred an incident that made so deep an impression on me my life was changed in consequence. My fumbling and vague seeking for direction crystallised into conviction and there was revealed to me a road my reason told me I should follow.

  I sometimes visited a second-hand bookshop in Fitzroy to buy cheap books or just to read. I now earned enough money to buy a book each week and its selection was always difficult when I was confronted with the works of so many great writers.