In Mine Own Heart

by Alan Marshall

  There was another side to his character, a compassion for those girls he imagined were ignored by men, that I encouraged and loved in him. He never attended a dance without having at least one dance with a girl who for some reason sat neglected against the wall.

  ‘I’m going to have a dance with that lass over there,’ he would say to me, nodding towards a girl striving to appear unconcerned as men passed her by. ‘It’ll save her thrashing the pillow tonight after she goes home.’

  We always sat at the same table when we first entered the cafe. It was attended by a plain little waitress upon whose face the marks of solitary conflict in a lonely room were sometimes visible.

  As she got to know us her attitude became motherly and once she said to me, ‘You’ll catch your death of cold if you go round like that. You should have a sweater on.’

  She placed special flowers upon our table, gave us extra cups of coffee for which she did not charge, showed interest in our activities and, what was most important of all, gave us the impression we were her favourite customers. We learnt that boys did not take her out and that her parents lived in New Zealand.

  I discussed her with Paul and we decided to take her to the pictures on one of her nights off. It was going to cost us a bit since we intended to book the seats and take her home in a taxi. We were each going to buy her a box of chocolates and these we were going to present to her at interval at the same moment. And one was not to pay more attention to her than the other.

  We economised for a week until we had enough money then entered the cafe confidently, happy in our plan. Paul was to ask her, since he would be able to do so without fumbling for words. We sat at our table and she came up with a vase of flowers better than the one that was already there.

  ‘These are much better,’ she said as she exchanged the vases. ‘I think they’re pretty, don’t you?’

  We admired them and thanked her for keeping them for us then Paul said, ‘Alan and I would like to take you to the pictures one night. Will you come?’

  For a minute she could not reply. There was a chance he might be joking. She had probably never heard of two men taking a girl to the pictures and she must have wondered if she had heard aright.

  ‘What?’ she exclaimed.

  ‘The two of us want to take you to the pictures,’ he repeated.

  She busied herself with the tablecloth while she considered a reply.

  ‘The two of you? Why?’

  ‘Because we like you,’ I put in.

  She coloured a little. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’d like to come.’

  A few nights later she sat between us at a picture theatre. To my surprise I did not feel awkward or shy and was able to talk naturally and happily. When we each placed a box of chocolates upon her knee it was she who was unable to talk.

  Witnessing this emotional moment she was experiencing freed me from feelings of inadequacy and for the first time I was Paul’s equal.

  We took her home in a taxi, walked with her to the gate and I kissed her cheek when we parted.

  ‘I should’ve done that too,’ said Paul on our way back to the city. ‘It was the right thing to do, mind you. But I seemed to get off on the wrong foot or something. I wasn’t quite set for it when you hopped in. If I’d kissed her then, after you, it would’ve looked like I was copying you and have spoilt it for her. So I just let it go. I think I did right, if you work it out. Yours wasn’t just an act; it was square dinkum and she’d know it. Anyway, it was a bloody good night, wasn’t it!’

  They were all ‘good’ nights to him. Now as we travelled into the city sitting on the dummy of a cable tram with wind flowing against us, he was anticipating another one. The parting remark of the man on crutches had set in motion some desire to dance, to leap, to display his high spirits. It was a desire to remove from his mind an uncomfortable feeling of failure to impress, of a suggestion he was a depressing mate.

  ‘I’d like to let myself go tonight,’ he said waving one arm in a rising motion as if it were a wing. ‘We won’t go to the cafe; we’ll go down to the Palais at St Kilda. I feel good. Let’s go dancing.’

  He always included me in any anticipatory evocation of physical activity commonplace to him as if it were the spirit not the body that established my participation.

  The Palais was a large dance hall where young people seeking companionship in dancing gathered each night and where unaccompanied girls could go without loss of prestige. It was a hunting ground for boys seeking girls, for girls who found in dancing the most enjoyable vehicle for romantic fantasies.

  There was a spot against the rails surrounding the big dancing floor where Paul and I always stood. It was at one end of the floor where the dancers in their circling came close to the rail before making another circuit.

  We stood there for a while watching them. I knew many of them by sight. Paul had danced with most of the regulars. It was a sight I enjoyed and the music lifted me. With the aid of the music it was easy to project myself into an imaginary dance with some girl who showed more than ordinary skill or who seemed to possess qualities of character I admired.

  But it was their faces and the information I gleaned from studying them that interested me. I often took notes while standing there, recorded scraps of dialogue which I studied when I returned home. There I savoured again the revelation I often experienced from some chance remark.

  ‘Well, it’s my dance first,’ said Paul. ‘I think I’ll go for that little girl in blue. See her over there? She’s with that girl going across to her now. Over there …’

  I saw the girl.

  ‘Can she dance?’ I asked. ‘I didn’t notice her in the last one.’

  ‘She’s not bad. She enjoys it. She doesn’t keep looking at other chaps while she’s dancing.’

  I watched him stride across the floor, saw her realisation while he was some distance away that he was coming to her, her turning away as if she had not noticed, the look of surprise she assumed when he spoke to her, her acceptance, her studied way of rising that owed its origin, maybe, to some magazine article on How to Become a Film Star.

  All the rules of behaviour they followed for the purpose of concealment … These girls carried behind their smiling faces some troubled, uncertain little girl, a victim of values established by the mass longings of them all, longings that were the product of popular songs, films, romantic novels, magazine articles and poster advertisements for beauty aids.

  When the dance was over and Paul had conducted the girl back to her seat, she watched him walk away from her and I knew she liked him, hoped he would ask her to dance again.

  ‘Well,’ he said when he again stood beside me. ‘How did I go?’

  ‘Good,’ I said.

  ‘Have you picked a girl?’ he asked. ‘Point her out.’

  ‘She’s sitting over there on the left talking to a chap standing in front of her. He’ll move in a minute. There now … She’s got fair hair and looks kindly.’

  ‘Kindly!’ exclaimed Paul. ‘Hell!’

  ‘I think I’d like her.’

  ‘All right. Where is she? Yes, I see her. Why pick her?’ he exclaimed in a change of tone. ‘You dance with girls I wouldn’t look twice at.’

  ‘I like her,’ I repeated. ‘Now talk sense to her. None of this “The orchestra’s fine tonight” business. Find out if she reads. Ask her if she likes going for walks in the bush—that sort of thing.’

  ‘She’ll think I want to take her for walks in the bush,’ complained Paul. ‘You can’t talk like that when you’re dancing.’

  ‘Of course you can. Go on. They’re off again. Grab her before someone else does.’

  ‘There’s no danger of anyone else grabbing her,’ muttered Paul.

  He hurried across the floor and in a minute he was dancing with her, guiding her towards me. He swung her around a few feet away from where I was standing. He looked into my eyes with no sign of recognition but they gave evidence of comprehension when he saw my lips form t
he word ‘Books’.

  ‘You look as if you read a lot,’ I heard him say as he manoeuvred her before me.

  I could not hear her reply.

  In ‘my’ dances Paul never took his partners more than a few yards away from where I stood watching them. This often confused the girls accustomed to partners who ranged the entire floor and they suspected there must be some reason for Paul’s obvious determination to confine them to one small area.

  Sometimes a girl asked him—a little sarcastically perhaps—if he liked dancing in this corner. To this question he always replied, ‘The floor just here is made of special wood for the purposes of demonstrations’, an explanation I had given him for use in such emergencies.

  It seemed to satisfy them. But occasionally he found himself with a girl who gave me an assessing glance after a few minutes concentration on following the improvised steps of Paul’s demonstrative dancing in front of me. He always imbued my dances with some spirit of abandon, some gaiety, an exaggeration of movement that I suspected appealed more to my sense of humour than to any other source of appreciation. He claimed that this was the way I would have danced had I been able. Maybe it was. Applied seriousness always made me want to laugh.

  This was the pattern of our behaviour at all the dances we attended—a dance for him, then a dance for me, a partner for which I selected.

  The time was to come when he would bring my partners up and introduce them to me, but I wasn’t ready for that yet.

  4

  My association with Paul gradually developed some poise and confidence in me. My preoccupation with my own inadequacies gave way to an interest in the girl to whom I was talking, and once having realised that a genuine interest in another had a contagious quality and inspired a similar feeling directed at myself, I lost some of my awkwardness.

  Contrary to Paul’s attitude to conversation I found great pleasure in listening to people talking about themselves. I had read that to understand people one must first of all understand oneself. I did not believe this. I felt that an understanding of people was necessary before one could look into one’s own heart with truth.

  I was often amazed at the insincerity of people I met, their readiness to condemn in scathing terms those weaknesses in others of which they themselves were guilty. They manifested this hyprocritical attitude more emphatically in their remarks on sex than on any other subject. Here their own dark struggles were considered in isolation, cleansed of evil by a distortion of motivation that transformed sinister aims into justifiable and worthy desires.

  And yet I sometimes felt they were not hypocritical in their judgment of others. In some strange way they were sincere in that they believed in their own conventional virtue against the contradiction of their own thoughts. In the interests of self-respect and as a means of protection from truth they had to condemn the normal adventuring in sex revealed to them in others even though it paralleled their own.

  The false values attendant on sex instilled into them from childhood by the combined shouting of magazine, press, pulpit, parents and school demanded they defend the judgments of this conditioning. They sought to reconcile their attitude with society’s rulings so that there would be no conflict within them and they did this by becoming judges of others, seeking to protect false laws they never obeyed themselves.

  They claimed this attitude was the product of decency though in truth it was nurtured by the society in which they lived, a society that found it profitable to cultivate a need for sexual excitation in most mass media of communication.

  In themselves it was begotten by jealousy, envy, and a frustrating fear of deprivation. They did not realise this. They did not understand themselves since they were incapable of understanding others.

  I had been friends for some years with a man named Arthur who in the past had attempted to teach me tolerance. It was he who gave me what understanding I had of sex and who exposed to me society’s false and evil view of it.

  He once told me of a father who, in explanation of the restrictions he had placed on his teenage daughter, said to him, ‘I want to prevent sex from being roused in her.’

  ‘He might as well have tried to stop the sun from rising,’ commented Arthur when telling me the story. He went on to explain in his own words that what should be the most elevating and glorious awakening in such girls was destined to come breaking over them in the midst of sordid struggling and bewilderment.

  It was hard to retain one’s sense of the wonder and beauty of man’s love for woman in this society of false values and hypocritical self-righteousness. Sometimes I felt it would crush me like a worm beneath its boot.

  Those girls with whom I kept company for a while found it difficult to explain why they delayed inviting me to their homes. They feared their parents’ reaction to my crippled body, a reaction which, though they were brought up on the same values, they had discarded under the influence of our relationship.

  When confronted with their mental conflict I spoke for them, treating the problem with a sense of the ridiculous which lightened their burden. But the fear of their parents remained and when I eventually met their mothers, the only parent who mattered, the pressures began.

  The mothers were tactful when discussing the matter with me, a stage they reached with some reluctance. So much so that sometimes I could not help but agree with them, feel a sympathy towards their attitude. But such discussions, however friendly they were, always ended in sad partings and I was left wandering lonely again.

  There was a girl who, preparing me for a meeting with her parents, said in puzzled tones, ‘Mother told me that all cripples are sex maniacs.’

  At her words panic seized me. I was the Jew seeing the swastika painted on the gate of his home, the Negro hurrying across the road from the merciless gaze of a white woman, the child in the path of a bolting horse.

  Paul was oblivious to this background of adjustment and conflict. He would never have been able to understand personal antipathy towards me. In most respects we were independent of each other and fought our own battles while mentioning them in passing.

  With Arthur my relationship was quite different. He was a tall, resilient man with keen eyes and a still, absorbed way of listening to you. He was like my father in appearance and they had many similar qualities of character. Both believed in giving me my head while being ready to grab the reins in times of danger.

  Arthur was a punter, but in the past he had sailed on windjammers, fought as a sniper in the Great War and run a coaching business from an hotel at Wallaby Creek, some twenty-three miles from Melbourne, where I had first met him. I was boarding at the same hotel while working as a clerk in a Shire Office and here he became my self-appointed guardian. He was much older than I and had never married though he was rapidly approaching this state. He rented a city room in King Street and had his meals at cafes. I sometimes accompanied him to these places since we found it pleasant talking together across a table. He became an authority on cafes and was always searching for one where cheapness and good meals went together. He believed that good meals were always served in a new cafe for a fortnight after it opened. After that they began to fall off.

  He often greeted me with news of such an opening: ‘There’s a cafe started up in Elizabeth Street where you can get turkey for one and nine. Let’s go down there.’

  After a few enthusiastic days visiting this cafe he became depressed and told me he couldn’t understand why turkey was regarded as a luxury.

  On the days when there were no races he sat before a table in his room and studied ‘form’. He didn’t believe in ‘systems’, regarding them all as false guides since they never took into account the perfidy of owners and jockeys.

  ‘The first thing you have to know is the character of the men handling the horse. Since they’re all crook that’s not hard. Then you work out when it will be most profitable for them to win.’

  He would follow the career of a horse that, though impressive in action, was consistently
losing races. He sought to anticipate the day on which the owner would let it go. He would then begin backing it. When he won, the price was always good and he managed to live on his winnings.

  Like all gamblers he lived under mental strain made more onerous by lack of purpose. He wanted some woman to love, to hang on to, to work for. He was not a gambler at heart but his war injuries, that had necessitated portion of one of his ribs being grafted across a hole torn by shrapnel in his skull, prevented him working and were even now showing signs of bringing about a permanent paralysis.

  He was always talking about giving up punting. ‘It’s a mug’s game,’ he said once. ‘Never fall for it.’

  Once when he had lost heavily he said, ‘When you have a bad day at the races you can’t stop in your room. You go out on to the street and you don’t know what the hell to do. The only thing that will lift you out of it is for some woman to tell you she loves you. You feel good straight away.’

  So he began keeping company with Florrie Birch who was a waitress in a cafe attached to the railway station where the meals were better than at most other places. Florrie was a plump, brown-haired girl with a ruddy face that suggested she was brought up in the country. She was a farmer’s daughter and could milk cows, churn butter, cook good meals and would, I felt sure, take complete control over the life of any man she married.

  Arthur fell in love with her reluctantly.

  ‘She’s sawing at the limb; I can’t hang on much longer,’ he told me one night after we had left the cafe and he had arranged to meet her later, and then added, ‘That girl is a peasant, Alan. I don’t know … I love her better when I’m away from her.’

  ‘Then don’t marry her,’ I suggested.

  ‘Yes, you can say that again,’ he said. ‘It’s easy to say that. Blokes can shout from the grandstand but toss them the ball and they don’t know how to kick it. Sometimes I walk along the beach at night and I get the smell of the sea in my nostrils and I look away out over the water and I think, “That’s where you belong, you silly bastard, out there on the sea where the waves are slapping hard against the wall of your bunk.” You could shove your finger right through into the sea, you think, and I wonder what the hell I see in her.