by Peter Kocan
As the youth turned to go the other man spoke.
“Ask him what he reckons. Go on. He plays footy.”
“Alright,” said the man at the counter. “Listen. He reckons Ronnie Robson’s overrated, whereas I reckon that, on his day and pound for pound, Ronnie’s still the best there is. What’s your angle on it?”
The youth was starting to feel a bit more at ease, because of the bike thing having gone so well. He tried to look like someone who ponders long and deeply on football matters.
“Well,” he said, “the thing about Ronnie Robson is that he’ll give you a hundred and ten per cent and then some.”
“Yeah, that’s right,” said the man at the counter, pleased.
“And he’s tuned like a Swiss watch,” the youth added.
As he turned and went out he heard the two men starting to discuss what he’d said, as though it was quite profound.
He only began to shake when he’d got well away. Then he felt pleased at how well he’d done. Forcing himself to stop shilly-shallying and just barge in and do it had been the key. It had been a lesson. Fortune favours the bold, he reflected.
The youth went back to Telford Square. As he passed the newsstand he noticed a photo of Ronnie Robson on the front of the paper. He bought a copy and went to Don Di’s coffee shop and ordered a hamburger with all the trimmings, and a milkshake, and read the item about Ronnie having signed a new contract for his football club for a record amount. That must have been why the two men at the pawnshop were discussing whether Ronnie was still as great as ever. “It isn’t about money,” a club spokesman was quoted as saying. “It’s about letting Ronnie know he’s appreciated.” How wise a thing to say, the youth thought. He reflected again that there was much wisdom in football. It was about “finding your values.” That was a phrase of Ronnie’s. The youth had read it in one of his magazines, in an article about sports heroes who do good work for charities. There’d been a photo of Ronnie visiting an institution for boys who’d got in trouble with the law. The picture showed a crowd of them gathered round Ronnie and him holding up a football, and underneath was a caption: “Finding your values is the key,” footy star tells delinquents. The article said that Ronnie had been in trouble himself when he was fifteen. He’d come from a broken home in a little coalmining town and had stolen a car for a joy-ride and been put on a good-behaviour bond. “I found my values in football,” he told the boys, “and I know each of you young blokes can find your values in some field of endeavour.”
The youth felt the tears welling. He wanted to find his values, he really did. He gazed at the photo of Ronnie and Ronnie seemed to return his gaze and to understand what he was feeling.
Di brought the hamburger with all the trimmings. The youth wiped his eyes and took up the knife and fork and found he could not work his hurt arm well enough. So he picked the hamburger up with his good hand and tried to eat it that way. But it was so stuffed with trimmings that bits of meat and onion and tomato and blobs of sauce fell onto the plate and onto the table and into his lap. He felt embarrassed and left the hamburger and sipped the milkshake instead. He had started to think he’d go back to the Astro and pay a week’s rent. But the pawnshop money had only just been enough for that. Now, because of the hamburger and the milkshake, he’d left himself short. Why didn’t he stop to think before lashing out like this? It had been the sheer relief of it going so easily at the pawnshop. That was it. He’d been too relieved to think straight, but now he realised how little he’d really got for the bike. It hardly met his needs. He would be homeless anyway, for all his trouble.
Two policemen came in and stood at the counter talking to Don. One of them turned his head towards the youth and gave him a long look. Then they went out. The youth sat for a long time trying to get calm. Di came over and asked him if he wanted anything else and saw the mess he’d made with his hamburger. The youth glanced again at the front of the paper and there was a sneer in Ronnie’s expression that he hadn’t noticed before.
It was late afternoon and he wanted to lie down someplace quiet and doze and forget himself for a while. He went along the street towards the Astro and approached the doorway cautiously. An angry voice came from inside. It was the Owner’s and he was arguing with a tenant in the hallway, the same tenant who’d been there that morning, the one with the smoker’s cough. The Owner kept shoving his face aggressively at the tenant’s face, then backing away when the tenant hacked out a cough. That’s how it looked, anyway. The youth only got a brief sight of them in the hallway before the Owner noticed him outside and started shouting, “Hey! Hey!” and waving him in. The youth stayed where he was. The Owner started to push his way past the tenant towards the youth, but the tenant wasn’t finished arguing and wouldn’t let him by. They began to scuffle, the Owner barking out words in his foreign language and the tenant hacking and coughing as they grappled.
The youth walked on quickly, his heart banging. He kept looking behind him. He saw the Owner emerge into the street and he started to run. When he looked back again the Owner and the tenant were grappling on the footpath and the Pale Watcher was there too, making gestures of distress with his hands but keeping well out of the fight.
When he’d got several blocks away the youth stopped to catch his breath and let the throb in his arm and shoulder subside. He saw a park and went to a seat and sat down. He stayed there until night came on. He had no thought of where to go or what to do. He was thinking of those few things back in the room at the Astro: his woolly jumper and some magazines in the wardrobe, and most of all his bedside lamp. He thought of the times, back in the room, when he’d leant a picture of Sweetheart against the base of the lamp, and alongside it his copy of Year of Decision, and so had made a little shrine in the circle of light, a shrine to Beauty and Love and Bravery and Death.
7. URBAN FOLLIES
The youth was in the empty business district. He had got into Diestl’s limping stride and went round and round the same few blocks for a couple of hours as the wind made desolate noises in the canyons of the streets.
At one point he saw a van stopped ahead of him under a streetlight. Its doors were open and three people were on the footpath, leaning over, talking to somebody hunched in a doorway. The van had ALISON STREET MISSION painted on its side, and an image of Jesus holding his hand out in succour. The youth had seen that van around the city a couple of times before, and had remembered the piece of paper Pastor Eccles had handed him. One day he would make contact, like he’d promised, but it would have to wait till he felt more resilient. You needed resilience to go and present yourself to a bunch of people. You had to be in a cheerful frame of mind. But if you were feeling cheerful and resilient you wouldn’t bother, for you’d be content with your own company, your own thoughts. There was a contradiction. He found this idea of inherent contradiction interesting and walked for another hour on the strength of it. But then he was chilled, and his teeth were chattering, so he left the business district and wandered to the seedy end of town, thinking to get a cup of tea.
He took a short-cut down a lane. Halfway along he found an old sofa that someone had put out as rubbish. It was in a corner that was out of the wind and quite dark. When the youth’s eyes had adjusted to the dimness he examined the sofa carefully. The arm at one end was ripped almost completely off and the stuffing was spilling out, but the rest of it looked fine. He knelt down and smelt it and noticed a scent of perfume. He thumped it a couple of times and watched and listened for movement. He was worried about cockroaches, or even rats. There was nothing. He was pretty sure the sofa hadn’t been there long enough to be infested. He sat down on it and leant back and looked at the sky, which was clear and starry, despite the wind. He stretched lengthwise, his head resting on the sofa’s good arm and his feet at the broken end. He felt cold, even out of the wind, but the softness of the sofa made up for it. It was easy on his sore shoulder and he was able to turn a little when h
e needed to vary his position. After a while he got his towel from his bag and spread it over himself like a blanket.
He woke in panic at some stage, feeling something touch him. He was afraid it was a rat and gave a cry of fear and disgust. It was a big ginger cat. The cat did not run away but stayed and stared at him, then leapt onto the sofa and snuggled against his legs. The youth was glad. He and the cat slept. When he woke again the cat was gone and first light was over the city.
He left the lane and went to the railway terminal and splashed water on his face at a basin in the toilet. He had a vague sort of chilled feeling. He also felt tired and had a headache, but he felt that way most times so it wasn’t anything special. He wanted something hot to eat, and a big cup of tea. He remembered that he had the bike money in his pocket and for the time being needn’t go hungry. He was still in one piece, and as soon as he found a cheap cafe he’d be having hot food and drink. He was managing fine. Diestl would be proud of him!
The youth slept on the sofa in the lane for three nights. The ginger cat kept him company for part of the time. There was no rain and he had no trouble.
Once a couple came along after midnight, arguing and swearing at each other. They stopped and kissed and fondled for a couple of minutes. Then they resumed their argument and walked on. The youth felt he was learning about life. He hadn’t known that people could argue and have the hots for each other at the same time. Another night a derelict meandered by, muttering to himself. And a police paddy-wagon nosed along the lane and past him. He was frightened for the moment, but after the coppers had gone he felt reassured that he must be hard to see in the dark corner, shielded by the sofa’s high back.
During the day he went to the State Library. He was there when the doors opened and he stayed till closing time. He took breaks to go and buy himself a bread roll or to stretch his legs in the adjacent park, near the statue of Henry Lawson. He was not bored. He did begin to wonder about the way he smelt, though. A couple of times people sat near him, then seemed to find reasons to move further away. He didn’t care all that much because a lot of the time he was feeling quite out of himself, as though he didn’t have a body anymore but was only a mind floating in a peculiar dimension.
The thought that he smelt bad only really bothered him one time. A beautiful girl with long blonde hair sat near him. He figured she was a uni student. She put a pile of weighty-looking books on the table in front of her, as though she was settling in for a long study session, but then she gathered the whole pile up and moved to the other side of the reading room.
Everyone in the place knew what had happened. They were whispering to each other about it. It filled him with cold rage. He kept his head very still and pretended to be reading his book but moved his eyes cautiously around. He caught sight of people making little signals to one another with their hands, or by moving their heads or mouths or elbows in particular ways. He felt anguish at the injustice of what they were thinking. He hadn’t been fantasising about that girl. He didn’t need to. He had Grace Kelly in his life. He wanted to get the White Book out of his bag and show them just how many pictures of Sweetheart he had. That’d wipe the smirks off their faces!
He wondered whether he was imagining some of this. Were they really signalling to each other? But he knew there were some things he had not imagined. There really had been a girl and she really had got up and moved away from him. Then the out-of-body feeling came back strongly and he wasn’t totally certain about the girl anymore.
He stood up and left the reading room, putting on the Diestl mood to help him cope with the feeling that all eyes were on him. He went into the park and walked about. He thought about Diestl. There was a side to Diestl he had not paid enough attention to. He mostly thought of Diestl as the great symbol of detachment, of solitary survival, of being impervious to everything in the world. That was all true, but there was a whole other thing too. Diestl did not wander the earth randomly. He had a destination and a purpose: to get to the spot where he would make his stand, strike his blow, make the enemy pay. Diestl was like a walking time bomb. He kept himself apart and safe, not because his well-being mattered in itself but because he needed to get that bomb to where it would do most damage.
The youth stopped walking about and stood staring at the city skyline. He was picturing that skyline crashing down in flame and smoke. Diestl was beside him and spoke in an ice-cold voice: “That’s it. You’ve seen the point at last.”
THE APOLLO Cafe was down a side street near the railway terminal. It was dank and poky and every surface had a sticky unclean feel. But the youth liked it because the food was very cheap, and because there were piles of old magazines to look at. He had come there the previous three evenings to have baked beans on toast and a pot of tea and leaf through copies of Equestrian World. For some reason there were lots of copies of that magazine and the youth enjoyed searching for photos of young blonde women in boots and jodhpurs and riding coats. They reminded him of Sweetheart, and the thought of her in jodhpurs was very exciting.
He had ordered a pot of tea with the last of his money and wanted to linger over it as long as possible. The old sofa had been cleared from the lane and he had to find another place to spend the night. But he felt very headachy and had hot-and-cold sensations. The longer he could delay going into the streets the better. That was another good thing about the Apollo: you could hang about for a long time on one pot of tea without anyone minding. The regulars hung about a lot. They were mostly old blokes with grubby clothes and stubbly faces who had a smell of stale grog round them. They tended to eat their food carefully, as though their teeth were bad, and as though they knew they had to get a certain amount eaten for their own good, even if they didn’t really fancy it. Some were quiet and kept to themselves, others talked a lot and joked with each other and with Mike behind the counter. Mike was a very large man with a hulking way of hunching his shoulders up, as if he were a wrestler preparing to grab you in a headlock, but he spoke politely and you felt safe in his cafe. Mike called the regulars by their names and some of them called him Mikey. There was one old chap called Deak who always referred to Mike as “Mine Host.” Deak was gaunt, with white hair, and a bit shaky on his feet, but he had a grand manner and spoke like an actor reciting Shakespeare, using his hands to make elaborate gestures.
“Tell me, Mine Host,” he would say, “how is the rat-meat this evening? Is it up to this establishment’s celebrated standards of succulence?”
“You tell us, Deak,” Mike would reply. “You’re the one who just had the stew.”
Then someone might chip in with a comment about peculiar eating habits, and that might remind someone else of a yarn about tough times in the outback or whatever.
The youth listened to all the talk, but seldom looked up from the magazine in front of him. He could relax to some extent because he had developed a way of thinking himself into a kind of invisibility, the way an animal does when it stays very still and quiet and relies on that to keep from being noticed, even though it is in plain sight.
Now someone mentioned the bush, and Deak said: “I surmise that our young friend here might be a traveller from the hinterland. Am I right?”
The youth raised his eyes and found Deak and Mike and another two blokes looking at him steadily. It was a shock to find himself suddenly the focus of attention.
“Down from the country for a while, are you?” Mike asked.
“Um, yeah,” the youth replied, looking back down at the magazine.
They didn’t press him any further, though they must have been wondering about him since that first night he’d come in. It wasn’t a place you saw a kid very often. He also realised how down-and-out he must look.
After a pause the conversation went on to other matters and the youth started getting ready to go. One of the old blokes was saying that Pastor Pete had given him a new jacket and that he felt like a new man in it. He had the jacket
on and was running the zip up and down to show how good it was. It was brand new, he kept saying, not second-hand, and Pastor Pete had saved it especially for him.
Deak remarked that Pastor Pete was a scholar and a gentleman, and that the jacket suited the new owner’s colouring: it was a sickly colour. The man replied that Deak should kindly pull his head in. Mike remarked that that was the best idea they’d heard all night. Deak made a sort of bow, like an actor acknowledging his audience. Then the talk went on to other things and the youth got up and laid his last few coins on the counter and left.
He stood outside for a minute. He’d hurt his sore shoulder when he’d picked his bag up too quickly. The pain was enough to make him wince. He walked to the next corner, and glanced up at the clock-tower of the railway terminus. It was only nine. The thought of the night ahead was too much to bear. He cursed himself for not having made better use of the past few days. He should’ve pinched another bike and pawned it. Except that he couldn’t have gone to the same pawnshop as before. It would have to be a different pawnshop, and each time after that a different one again. He wondered how many pawnshops there were, and whether it was always as easy as he’d found it. Probably not. Most pawnbrokers were probably more suspicious, and would argue, and demand more identification. That man had been so taken up with Ronnie Robson’s merits that he hadn’t had his mind on the job. It being so easy that time had been a fluke, and pinching bikes wasn’t a real means of surviving. The youth’s last bit of hope fled.
A police paddy-wagon was approaching, so the youth began to walk briskly. He knew he should appear to be going somewhere, that it was loiterers the cops were scanning for. He came to a broad lane with a sign that said Alison Street. He turned down the lane and went along it till he saw that it came to a dead end. Just before the end, on the right, was an old warehouse. It had upper storey doors at the front and above the doors the sturdy beam that the ropes used to work from. ALISON STREET MISSION was painted in white letters and there was an image of Jesus holding out his hand, the same image the youth had seen on the side of the van those couple of times. A light was on above the old timber entrance door, but it was firmly closed and there didn’t seem to be any sign of life inside. The youth sat on the opposite kerb, vaguely trying to think where to go and what to do.
