Spinner

by Ron Elliott

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The Rocks, I reckon,’ said his uncle with a pretty clear voice, even though he remained laying on his back with his eyes closed. ‘Hear those horns?’

  David realised he did. Had.

  ‘The ferries.’

  ‘Fairies?’

  ‘Ferry boats in Sydney harbour. They’ve taken up the houses down in The Rocks so they can build a bridge across the water. We’re in one of those houses. Might be Katie, the Queen of the Underworld, is my guess. Don’t think Blackie works for himself.’

  ‘That was the man at the racetrack. The one who was going to cut off my finger.’

  Michael pushed himself up, his back resting on the shattered plaster. He pulled a cork out of the full bottle of brandy with his teeth, but winced then felt with his tongue to where one was missing.

  David went to try to drink more water. The stink from urine, their sweat and David’s vomit made him gag again. There were big cockroaches moving about on the wall, like leaves drifting on water.

  Michael took a big gulp of brandy. ‘They don’t want you playing the Test.’

  ‘I heard it. On a radio.’

  ‘Not doing bad without you. Least to start with. Even Johnson made thirty.’

  ‘What day is it?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘We have to get out of here, Uncle Mike.’

  ‘Can’t be done. They drug you, and ... me too.’ He indicated the empty bottles on the floor. Then he smiled. ‘Will you throw this Test if they let you out?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good for you. Their original plan was for me to persuade you to throw it. They mistakenly believed O’Toole’s little Fagan articles about me leading you astray. I disagreed. I never thought they’d kidnap you.’

  Michael closed his eyes again, clearly ready to return to the kind of long, half-drunk half-sleep he had on the train.

  David put on his brightest voice. ‘Then we should play a great trick on them and get out of here and get back to the team and win the game and cost them a packet. What a lark.’

  Michael opened his eyes and smiled brightly at him, pointing a finger and nodding. ‘Spoken like a master, David. You have learned well, my son.’

  David suddenly recalled his grandfather lying just so, waiting to die. He felt weak and had to sit, his back against the wall under the window. His head hurt, but he was trying to think past that, to form a plan. He looked to the door.

  ‘Hey,’ said his uncle, ‘I haven’t seen you since Melbourne. That Test was magnificent. It was like time stood still. Like something that seemed only theoretical—discovered and made real and concrete and clear. It defies description.’ He gulped his brandy.

  ‘We have to go, Uncle Mike.’

  ‘Made a lot of people angry with me down in Melbourne, Davey. When I promised no wickets and you did what you did. So bad, then so wonderful all in an instant. Like a big bomb.’

  ‘They’ll kill me, Uncle Mike.’

  ‘No, I’ll talk to them. We’ll be right. Little chat.’

  ‘They’ll kill me because I won’t do what they say and it’ll be no good for them ever, if it’s no good now.’

  ‘We’ll sort something out.’

  David tried to get up. His legs were too wobbly and he couldn’t. He crawled through the broken bricks and plaster to the door. It was locked. One of its wooden boards was missing and David tried to see through, but there was just a landing and some stairs.

  Michael drank deeply from his bottle.

  David knew that he would soon be dozing, happily useless in his brandy-drink half-sleep.

  ‘Grandad died.’

  ‘I heard. I’m sorry.’

  ‘You didn’t like him.’

  ‘True, but not. I didn’t like that he didn’t like me, but he didn’t like me for very good reason. And our present circumstances rather bear out his low opinion of my character.’

  ‘Why don’t you shut up. You’re not being clever. You just say things cos you like the sound of them, but they don’t mean anything.’

  Michael finally blinked. Maybe he was listening.

  ‘He knew he was sick. That’s why he let you take me.’

  ‘Ah. Yes. I didn’t think he cared about my broken promise to Ernie.’ Michael grinned, but sadly.

  David sensed there was more on offer. He wasn’t so fearful of the knowledge now. ‘What promise?’

  ‘No. Not a patch on Earnest James. Better man all round. Believer. Got the girl. Kept whispering in my ear you see. ‘Promise to do this and promise to do that ... I couldn’t even run ... kept slipping in the mud and my blood and his blood. Blood everywhere. Open front of my boot kept catching on things. He’s on my back and in my ear, whispering. “Love you. Love them.” Love. Promise. A bloody dance on a broken bridge. I don’t even know when he stopped whispering.’

  Michael gulped at his drink.

  David thought about what Mrs O’Locklan had said. Was that it? His uncle’s wound. David got himself up onto all fours ready to crawl back to Michael.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault, Uncle Mike.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It wasn’t your fault he died.’

  ‘I know that. You think it’s that? That simple?’ His uncle had his nasty edge, the nasty edge of his drunk self. ‘Even though I met her first, she fell in love with him and made the better bargain. No hard feelings. Cross my heart.’

  David waited on hands and knees still near the window.

  Michael kept on, quiet and bitter as though talking to himself. ‘What happened is he got blown up, but that’s not what happened. What happened was I promised, you see. What happened was I was supposed to come back ... to you and her—the big piggyback promise—and I was supposed to look after her. But I didn’t. I didn’t answer the call and she killed herself. That’s what happened.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘True. You know it.’

  ‘No, don’t say.’ It was David’s voice that David heard, little and frightened. Her. It was about her. David hadn’t been ready for this.

  ‘And if you don’t know it, you’ll read it if you ever get out of here, because O’Toole has it plastered all over the newspaper. Blackie showed me.’

  David vomited again, on the floor where he was, then tried to crawl from it. His ears buzzed. It was true. He did know it. The whole town knew it. His mother. The nice Mrs Pringle nearly saying. David realised that he had known for some time and had somehow kept the secret from himself.

  ‘In the dam,’ said David, his head now against the wall.

  ‘I didn’t know where until you told me at the farm.’

  ‘She must have been so sad.’ David saw a beautiful young woman standing by the dam. He felt how she felt. A hopelessness. It was a sadness that was as cold and deep and black as the water in front of her.

  ‘That’s what I did. That’s the thing.’ Michael was talking to himself, not David. ‘O’Toole finally told a truth. Not all of it, of course. There are layers in your brain, says Freud, and the layers can lie to each other to protect other layers ... you can go a little bit mad so you don’t go really mad. That’s the theory. And that is also what I did wrong. I went a little bit mad.’

  David was back against the chipped wall watching his uncle smile. He was like an actor on the movie screen, changing his voice to become a teacher, then a storyteller and then a sad old drunk, all by turns and sometimes within a sentence. It was like his uncle wasn’t even out there, but inside David’s head, imagined. Like the lady David also watched as she started walking into the water of the dam, her loose white dress spreading out on the surface of the water.

  ‘I promised your father I’d look after you and your mother ... only my foot developed an infection. Big flap of skin full of mud and bits of other men. Helen was looking after me. Her husband had just died. Solace. Soul-less? That’s the thing I did wrong. That’s the broken thing, there. I bludged. I stayed in hospital for longer than I needed to. As long as I could. I
stayed back from the front and in a warm place where I slept and slept on dry sheets under warm blankets. I fed. Caressed. Slept.’

  Michael looked at David, suddenly real again and open and raw. ‘She killed herself. I had time to get back to help her and I didn’t and she killed herself.’ He closed again, and with a lazy smile went back to making a story of it. ‘She couldn’t take the loss of him. She died of a broken heart. I had promised him I would ... and I didn’t. The news of her death came by cable. That is the moment. Then, not before. I did go mad.

  ‘Insanity. It is enticing. Like drink. You can give yourself to it. It’s like sleep. No pains. No chores. It’s like falling, falling up. Hellie joined me, and we went mad together and shut everything out except what we felt with our skin and tongues. Wine and cheese and skin. They found us of course, not at Stonehenge, but in a cellar. I was discharged. Not honourably, but my missing toe misled folk. I was and am a coward but not in the way they all think. I stand falsely accused of a couple of crimes and guilty of the ones left uncharged. It’s all fake. All chaos and random and meaningless. There, my whole confession.’ Michael drank more brandy.

  David said, ‘I don’t believe you.’ He leaned his shoulder into the wall and tried to push himself up.

  ‘Don’t believe?’

  ‘I don’t believe it’s meaningless.’

  ‘It’ll be true whether you believe it or not. Wake up.’

  David stood, leaning against the wall to stay up. ‘I don’t believe you. I won’t believe you or any of your story.’ David took some steps towards his uncle. ‘You. You’re the stupid cow just waiting to die. We’re going to get out of here and we’re going to help Australia win. And we’re going to be all right.’

  David was shouting. The shouting brought the men.

  Blackie and the other man crunched into the room with their bottle of sleeping stuff.

  David ignored them. He shouted again at his ugly, drunken uncle. ‘I don’t want to die. I want to live.’

  His uncle said nothing and did nothing except look emptily at David as the men grabbed him and held him down while they pushed the rag of horrid smelling stuff into David’s face.

  Black.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I didn’t drink much that day and not much during the night either. I pretended to drink. I’m good at that, both drinking and pretending. I pretended to drink but would tip most of it out, so they’d think I was as drugged in my own way as David was with the chloroform. I had to hope they didn’t overdo the chloroform, while I dried out enough to be able to manage some glorious, doomed, limping attempt at rescue. Perhaps I’d have more success than the last time I tried such a thing.

  Me. Had you guessed? Yes, it’s me doing the telling. Michael. And not as you’d imagine, not sitting in the front bar getting free drinks while I spin a tale, and maybe auction a few old cricket balls with dubious D.D. signatures, which I confess, I have done. Not then, but later, the survivor yet again who is fated/feted to look back and set out the exploits of his betters. I’m telling David’s story for him, trying to get it in his words, from his point of view. You must admit, I was uniquely placed.

  By the way, and for this record, I was not magically changed in the wee hours of the morning by my confessions to David about the various ways I had let down every person who mattered to me. I wasn’t cured, after lying on that straw-filled couch in the abandoned house in The Rocks, pouring out my brain pus to my twelve year old analyst. No.

  But even I, the ugly, drunken uncle, saw they would kill the kid. As I’m sure you will have noted, repeatedly perhaps, I do not believe the world is just or fair. It is a Dickensian melodrama with a fair measure of Thomas Hardy thrown in. It is, of course, much worse than that, if we take out the irony. Even so, I felt David deserved the chance to live. Maybe it was the crack about me being the stupid cow, thrown back in my face. You gotta admit The Kid had pluck. So, fuck Blackie and fuck them all. It was worth a crack.

  I tried to wake him in the last moments of night. This appeared to be when the anaesthetic was closest to wearing off, and also when Blackie and his offsider, Wally Timlinson, were at their least vigilant. I couldn’t rouse him.

  As David has observed, or at least me through him, the door had been locked, but increasingly less so as the Test match progressed and we behaved more like sleepers than escapees. I grabbed him under the arms and draped him over my shoulder, holding his arms with my left hand to keep him secure, but leaving my right arm free, in what was to become known as the fireman’s lift.

  The bedroom door was not locked. It was merely latched, and only took a perfunctory bump of my shoulder to click and swing inwards. I moved carefully onto the landing. There was a window there, unbarred, and mostly unglassed. I got over the ledge and found a small portico-like roof of corrugated iron. It bent and groaned under our weight, and I had to lean into the post of the next building’s upstairs veranda in order to lessen our downward pressure. While I leaned there, with David on my back, I had time to look at the new day sky. Dark clouds were gathering off towards dawn, like an army pregnant with intent.

  The Rocks had had a long and inglorious harbour history, even back then, and had developed into a pretty ramshackle and condensed inner city suburb of long ill-repute. However, the old was making way for the new as they had started to build an impossibly long bridge across the whole of Sydney Harbour. They had torn down houses and moved on the poor, to make way for the big towers that would hold their bridge. The Rocks, that I looked down on, holding the post grimly, had all the look of a mildly bombed village in France.

  I managed to keep hold of the post and inch us to the rotted wood of the next veranda. By leaning my left shoulder into that post to prop us both there, I was able to pull away the rotted rail enough to allow me to step across. Even so, it was a little dicey swinging us around the post, hoping it would hold, and hoping I wouldn’t drop the dead weight of David. He was still breathing. And easier to hold than Earnest had been.

  Ernie never had any arms to hold him on by. Both of them had been blown off at the elbow, when for once in his life his timing was off and he misjudged that grenade. Even though I got the tourniquets on, to stop the great gush of his blood, it still ran out all over my chest in a constant drizzle of his life. I’d tried to push his shoulders down onto mine and I’d tried to bend enough to carry him, but my foot kept catching and slipping on the duck-walk boards. Half my boot hung down like a the mouth of a dopey dog. For a long while he whispered demands for promises and declarations of love. I should have told him that I loved him back and I never did. Not a thing to occur to a lesser man. The whispering stopped before I made it to the field hospital, but I’m not sure when. Or if it ever has.

  I put David down when I reached the veranda. He had long skinny arms that kept on going to these fingers that kept on going too. If he hadn’t had such long skinny legs, then his fingers would have dragged on the ground behind like some primate. I touched his cheek, finding it warm. He was alive. I thought of some mild endearments, but couldn’t make them come aloud. Funny the few things that I can’t say.

  I took his arms and swung him up onto my back again, then kicked in the piece of corrugated iron that was nailed into the doorway of this veranda. It made an awful din, but gave easily. I ran with him down the stairs and out the back.

  I headed uphill, away from the giant pillar that was part of the new bridge. It looked like a huge cenotaph that morning and I was looking for some living part of the city. I must have made more racket than I thought, because as I neared the end of the lane I heard Blackie shout and turned to see him coming out from where we’d been imprisoned.

  I reached the corner, but there was Wally tracking us along another road, so I turned up the nearest gap between houses away from both of them. Blackie Cutmore, of the self-fulfilling surname, was later to shoot Squinty down in Melbourne. No honour amongst thieves either, it seems. Wally Timlinson was to later become Katie’s lover. Katie was one of
the two Queens of the Underworld of Sydney. Then Wally got shot in some other altercation over some other patch. But those pieces of colourful historic trivia had not yet come to pass. This day they were two fit young thugs steadily gaining on David and me.

  There was a vacant block with neatly piled old bricks and a parked lorry. I went the other side of the lorry and stepped magically into a normal street. Cars were parked on the road and milk bottles parked on front verandas. Smoke climbed from cooking breakfasts. It was as though we had spun from one time into another out of an H.G. Wells’ time machine.

  Across the way at the next corner was the Hero of Waterloo, a pub, illegally open at five or six in the morning. I kept running, trying to sense whether there was a heartbeat in the lad I was carrying on my shoulders.

  There are small mercies in the world if you can just time your run to come upon them as they pass. For instance, although they hadn’t yet brought in the concealed weapons laws that drove some of the more avid crims of Sydney to start carrying razors instead of pistols, neither Blackie nor Wally seemed to be ‘packing,’ as the Americans say.

  The second dubious mercy was the open pub. In an era when early closing was a major issue, and sly grog the beginning of many a dynasty including Katie’s and Tilly’s, it seemed that The Rocks continued to follow its own legal system, an independent principality in Campbell’s Cove.

  I ran into the bar where the men reacted instantly. A navy type pulled out a knife. A man near the back jumped up, knocking four beers from the table, his mates yelling their anger at him and me. The barman pulled out a big piece of well-worn wood, suitable for splitting a skull or two.

  ‘I gotta get this kid to hospital,’ I yelled, still moving towards the back, looking for other doors that might lead out and not into the dead end of a dunny.

  ‘What’s wrong with ’im?’ someone eventually asked.

  Before I could answer, Blackie and Wally came through the door. They looked straight at me, but then nodded around the room, smiling. They knew a lot more men in here than I.