by David Malouf
“The trouble with you, Dante,” Johnno told me severely, “is you’re a romantic! All you see is what you feel. Before you know what’s happened you’ll be married and have a job in the Public Library and an ugly squalling dimply called Wayne. You’ll end up with a paragraph in The Courier-Mail: distinguished local man dies of heart-attack at One Tree Hill.”
But the trouble with me on other occasions was that I wasn’t romantic enough. I stood off and refused to get involved. I had too much irony, too much common sense. I was cut off from what Johnno called “life” — though what Johnno called life bore an uncanny resemblance, it seemed to me, to what the rest of us called “literature”. He had recently been burying himself in the Russia of Dostoevski, and had come more and more, with his shaggy head and big-boned, ungainly gestures, to resemble Rogozin of The Idiot, giving way when he was drunk (after two beers, that is) to savage rages.
I would watch him working himself up to it, a bout of his “Nordic madness”. He would sit looking gloomy and enormous, calling up stormclouds as he sucked on what might have been a raging tooth, an iceberg the size of a cathedral. His northern blood boiled at this temperature, at this time of the year, ten thousand miles and as many centuries south of its starting point; his blue eyes smoked. The Long Bar at the Criterion at four-thirty on a summer afternoon was the scene of terrible carnage, the dead lay strewn across traffic intersections and metal trams were charred and buckled, pouring out sparks. Then utter calm. His eyes would be clearest icy-blue, dazzling without depth, and he would be pure again, cleaned out and calm. On such occasions, I came to realise, he was in pursuit of his “soul”, which he would suddenly have lost contact with. It was inclined to wander. Locating itself, it seemed, in his funny-bone, or the hollows of a molar, or in an appendix that flared and puffed up like a dragon on its island, then slept again for another seven years. There were days when he lost track of it altogether. He would barge about a room as if some invisible air current were tossing him at will. The soul would have broken out of his body altogether and set up residence in a one-bar radiator where it glowed with menace, or gone buzzing about over the treetops in a model aeroplane that some schoolkid was playing out on a string. He would rage, glare murderously, and for all my scepticism, I was terrified. He seemed quite capable one day of running amok like the Jugoslav and killing half a dozen strangers with a tomahawk, just to prove to himself (or to me) that his anguish was real. People began to warn me against him. “One day that Johnno will go berserk. If you happen to be around he’ll put an axe through your head,” they’d tell me, “or slip a breadknife into you.” It seemed entirely possible. But I believed somehow in my own immunity. Johnno’s rages always broke beyond me. It was as if, in his cities of the plain, I was always to be the one just man for whom all the rest are saved.
He had one other close friend at this period, who was always being held up to me as the opposite of everything I stood for (I had never seen him in fact, Johnno took great pains to keep us apart), the real soul-mate of his rages and aspirations — a medical student called Bill Mahoney. Bill was a real terror, a dionysian whirlwind, a stick of dynamite, a Nachaev. There was nothing Bill wouldn’t do. He was a killer, an assassin, who had conscientiously rid himself of every bourgeois squeamishness, every bookish sentimentality. Bill was an exterminating angel. And to look at him you’d think butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. That was the whole point of course. A real spy had to be unrecognisable. An exterminating angel must look and act like a bank clerk. Bill’s plan was to work himself towards the centre of society, conforming with it, cooperating with it at every point, in order to bring it down. In the meantime he and Johnno were putting themselves through a crash course in the disintegration of consciousness. It was a systematic programme. You began with something simple, like an act of theft, then went on step by step to the end. Destroying the myth was a process like any other.
And the end?
That, of course, was just the sort of question I would ask. Who could know what the end would be, when all the myths had dissolved like so many ghostly chains and we were free to be ourselves?
Johnno had embarked in the meantime on a quite prodigious programme of shoplifting.
With a daring so outrageous that he was never even questioned, let alone caught, he would sweep through Barker’s Bookstore picking up books from left and right till the pile was so high under his chin that he could barely see. On past the cash desk, staggering slightly. Out into Edward Street. Where he would tumble the whole pile into a swing-top litter bin.
“Jesus!” he would whisper, with the sweat pouring off him and his legs weak with excitement. And the pure exhilaration of it would last all the way up Queen Street.
“There are too many books anyway” he would tell me fiercely. “And cars!” (glaring at the traffic as we pushed across against the lights). “And toasters, Mixmasters, washing machines!” He would have walked off with a washing machine if he’d been able to manage it; staggered up Queen Street and toppled it over Victoria Bridge into the river. “The trouble with you, Dante, is you’re intimidated by objects, you know that? I bet you wince every time the spine cracks on a book. You’re a complete product of the consumer society. A credit to the power of advertising!”
But worse even than my respect for property, or my rationalism, was my contemptible sense of humour.
Wandering idly around Barker’s, flicking through art books or the new poetry, I would suddenly come upon Johnno in the mystical act of making his first theft, his face trancelike and distant as his right hand hovered over one of the tables, hesitating fastidiously between Somerset Maugham, for whom he had a particular loathing, and Daphne du Maurier. Entirely solemn and engaged. And as our eyes met, briefly, what he recognised in mine would drive him to raving distraction. A sense of humour of my sort, he told me, was disgusting, mere bourgeois self-protectiveness, and a sure sign of bad faith!
His own commitments were never anything but wholeheartedly complete.
Under the influence of his Russian reading he had discovered a sudden need to abase himself, like Dmitri Karamazov, before a holy man, and had made tentative moves toward the Russian Orthodox Church. He consulted the phone book, made one or two anonymous calls, even sent them a breathless and ecstatically confessional letter. But the local Russians, mostly White, who had found their way to Australia via Shanghai and were terrified of being followed, took fright at Johnno’s approach, suspected he was some sort of agent or a local crackpot and threatened him with the police. He took savagely against them and turned to the Greeks. After all, as everyone knew, the Greek Orthodox Church was older, purer than the Russian, holier even if the truth was known. From Stavros the barman at the Club he got the address of an Orthodox priest, and set out early one morning, after an all-night preparation, for the house in the West End, to abase himself and be purified.
He used to tell the story of what happened then with great booming guffaws; but at the time, I’m sure, he was deadly serious. His appearance in the little front garden off the tramline, wild-eyed, shaggy, must have terrified the priest’s wife, who opened the door in her apron and with a squalling half-naked child on her hip. She spoke no English, and could make nothing of Johnno’s extravagant gesturing. When the priest came out in his shirt-sleeves (he was in the middle of breakfast), Johnno knelt, kissed the cuffs of his trousers and then (to the priest’s considerable consternation) lay full-length on the path between the cannas and beat his brow upon the stone.
“What do you do here?” the priest shouted, flinging his hands about and making apologetic and helpless gestures towards the passers-by, who had come from the tramstop and were peering in over the picket fence. The baby squalled, the wife had hysterics, Johnno moaned and beat his brow. “This is a madman,” the priest explained in panic. “He is unknown to me. Quite definitely unknown.”
“Forgiveness,” Johnno wailed, beginning, now that the whole thing had turned into a farce, to enjoy himself, and determined to make trouble f
or that “shit of a priest”.
In the end there was a brawl. The priest began kicking and demanding that he get up, and Johnno bit his leg. Someone scrambled over the fence to part them and Johnno was at last driven off, but came back to shout obscenities and throw clods of dirt at the priest’s windows till he came out and threatened him with the police. Johnno was incensed. All the priest had cared about was what the neighbours thought. He had offered to abase himself and they had turned the whole thing into a public scandal. Anyway (he would be shaken by an outburst of giggles) what was the use of abasing yourself on the earth when the earth itself, at this particular point, was so utterly un-holy? There had been ants on that path. They’d swarmed all over him. Who ever heard of Holy West End? As he’d always insisted, it was a place where real anguish was the subject for nothing but the most disgusting comedy.
Even, as it turned out, the anguish of the heart.
VIII
✧✧✧
Johnno’s being in love, desperately, hopelessly, towards the end of his final year, came as a complete surprise to me. For a long time I didn’t even suspect. He seemed quieter, that’s all. Then one night he opened up and raged. He had been caught while his resistance was low by the most insidious bloody madness of them all, the subtlest and most self-destructive invention of the whole rag-bag of bourgeois delusions, romantic fucking love! What’s more the girl was an idiot. A silly bitch of a librarian who read comics off-duty because she “worked all day with books”, and had nothing to talk about but horses, weekends at the Coast, and how many of the sons of big station-owners up north she had been “practically engaged to”.
Her name was Binkie. For nearly a year, perhaps more, she must have been to Johnno what she was to me, one of the liveliest girls at the parties we went to, the dark, tomboyish daughter of a Mackay cane miller, who drank rum and coke and had a deep, thick voice the colour, I always thought, of molasses. When she was very drunk she’d get one of us to ring long-distance to check on some boy back home who was her current fiance, and often enough the only person who would do it was me.
“He’s two-timing me, the bastard!” she’d whisper over my shoulder as I waited for the number to answer.
Then when there was a voice at last: “That’s his mother. Tell her you’re one of his old school mates from Churchie.” Then darkly, as the voice at the other end explained that Ross or Brian or Murray was out for the evening: “I wonder what he’s up to, the two-timing bastard. Out with the boys my foot!”
She was the girl who introduced us to “Bottles”, a deadly game that we played late on in the evening, when people had mostly gone off home or drifted into empty bedrooms. We would stand in a circle round the table with full glasses before us of whatever we were drinking — beer, sherry, rum and coke — and number off: one two three etc., fast around the circle. Only for every number containing a four or a seven or any multiple of either you substituted the word “Bottles”. And if you hesitated, or missed, you drank off the entire contents of your glass.
Binkie played the game with a mad intensity.
“Faster,” she’d yell, “you’re giving yourself time to think, it’s not fair.”
“Forty-six.”
“Bottles.”
“Bottles.”
“Bottles.”
“Fifty.”
“Fifty-one.”
“Fif …”
“No no, you missed,” she’d cry triumphantly, “fifty-two is four times thirteen. Down the hatch! Now come on. Faster!”
“Fifty-three.”
“Bottles.”
“Fifty-five.”
“Fift …”
“No no, bottles! Fifty-six is bottles. What’s the matter with everyone? I’m going to win again.”
I don’t know when Binkie stopped being the “Bottles girl” for Johnno and became something more. I don’t even know when they saw one another, or how long it lasted, or if there was anything to it even, except in Johnno’s overwrought imagination. I was having my own problems, in the form of a plump, good-natured girl called Rhoda. Her father owned a chain of second-hand car yards and her house, a big two-storeyed mansion overlooking the river, was just a stone’s throw from ours on Kingsford Smith Drive. For two or three months I used to meet her when she was off-duty from nursing school, and at the weekend, when her parents were away, we would sit in a swing on her front verandah watching the spidery lights on the river and listening, in the dark, to the put-put of fishing boats going out to the Bay. Then suddenly, without warning, it was over. Rhoda’s father disapproved of me, I was a Catholic. I prepared to argue: I wasn’t a Catholic at all, I didn’t believe, I hadn’t been to church since I was fifteen, what did her father mean? But the state of my beliefs wasn’t really the question. Rhoda’s father had promised her a Californian hardtop for her twenty-first. And, well —. She looked dewy-eyed and regretful, but I saw immediately that I couldn’t compete. I spent several evenings moping about town and examining my rival in display windows. It was beautiful, I had to agree. It cost just over a thousand pounds, though her father, I realised, would get discount for being in the trade. A thousand pounds, minus twenty-five per cent. Say seven hundred and fifty. I nursed my wounds and told myself, stoically, that it wasn’t every young man of just twenty who knew his price on the open market. We remained friends for a while and continued to turn up at the same weekend parties, but it never really worked and she was tactful enough to drop me, firmly, before the hardtop actually materialised as more than a shadow between us. I never saw her again.
Binkie had been good to me through all this. She knew what was going on and she encouraged me to talk about it. Having just broken it off with Stuart, or Douglas, or whatever the boy in the north was called, she was inclined to be bitterly humorous.
“Men are such shits,” she would say, leaning on one elbow and shaking her head. “Do you know he got some girl pregnant on a football trip and actually married her?” She drained off the last of her rum and coke. Then seeing my hangdog look, leaned across and put her hand on mine. “Oh poor Dante! I’d forgotten. Well, I suppose some women are too!”
One morning early, after a party, I was walking her to the first tram. It was nearly dawn. We had stopped halfway across Grey Street Bridge to peer over the concrete balustrade to where tramps slept on the tufty piece of waste-ground under the approach.
“I trailed one of those old fellows from the library once,” Binkie told me dreamily. “There was a whole colony of them — they had a fire in a kerosene tin and one of them was playing an accordion.”
I had become aware, while she was talking, that someone was following us. He had stopped just out of sight, at the springing of the arch, and was eavesdropping on us. I saw his shadow briefly in the glow of the lamps. I said nothing to Binkie, not wanting to alarm her, and we walked on. When we stopped again to listen to the starlings that had suddenly begun to twitter, thousands and thousands of them it seemed, invisible in the milky, lamplit air, the figure moved again and stood right in our path, so that Binkie saw him too. The sun came up, and with it a fog that suddenly thickened and rose off the river in a dense white cloud. We were all shrouded in it. The starlings twittered. Binkie caught my arm briefly, then relaxed.
She took a step forward and called angrily through the fog. “I might have known it was you. What do you want now?”
Johnno looked big and foolish in the half-light. His shirt half out of his trousers, his hair ruffled, he was pretending, not very successfully, to be drunk. Binkie made a little gesture of desperation and went past him. I hesitated for a moment, and Johnno, seeing the difficulty I was in, shrugged his shoulders and turned slightly to let me pass. As I did so he laid his hand briefly on my shoulder, as if to absolve me of any complicity in the affair. It was strictly between Binkie and himself.
When I caught up with her she was shaking, though with the first touch of sunlight the day’s warmth had come. We walked on and I could hear him a dozen or so paces beh
ind, whistling tunelessly in the fog.
Suddenly Binkie turned on her heel: “Go to hell,” she shouted. “Why can’t you behave like other people? You know I don’t want you. Just piss off!”
He had stopped, and gradually I could make out his bulk. The sun was lighting the edge of a great curve of stone beyond him and the milky fog was beginning to drift and go thin. In a moment it would lift altogether and we would be face to face in the early morning sunlight.
“Oh, come on,” Binkie said miserably, hauling at my elbow “Ignore him.” And she began to walk off.
“Are you OK?” I asked, uneasily aware that it would be simpler, later, if nothing had passed between us, but feeling that I couldn’t go without speaking to him.
“I’m OK,” he said.
He turned back, and I walked with Binkie into the wide crossroads in front of the bridge and silently under the fig trees along Petrie Terrace, beside the railway yards, where the first trucks were beginning to shunt and the cattle could be heard stirring, bellowing in their yards.
“Damn him!” Binkie said fiercely. “Damn him, damn him! He’s driving me up the wall.”
Johnno never mentioned this incident and never referred in the following weeks to the fact that Binkie and I were friends, or lovers perhaps, for all he knew He was away for most of that summer, mapping Lake Manchester for his geology thesis, and when we saw one another briefly he was no different. Gentler if anything. It was Binkie who talked now and kept me, somehow, involved. She had a flat along the river at New Farm and I went there after work to play knockabout games of tennis on the tumbledown court or to swim in the tepid swimming-pool.
“For God’s sake,” Binkie would say, half-laughing at it all, “he’s trying to educate me! Look at this.”
It was Lermontov’s A Hero of our Time. He had also sent her on other occasions Tolstoi’s Resurrection, Goethe’s Elective Affinities and a glossy presentation recording of Mozart’s Requiem.
