Johnno

by David Malouf

  Johnno looked put out, as if I had discovered him in a deception. Yes, yes, he had been in Australia for three months. Didn’t I know? — there was a mineral boom. He was working on an oil survey, out on the Condamine, making over a hundred pounds a week. It was crazy. He couldn’t stop now because he and the Mango (yes, of course, I remembered the Mango) were on their way back after a weekend break. He’d drop me a line and maybe next time he was down we could have a drink together.

  He was enormous. Larger than life. Perhaps three stone heavier than he had been in Greece. And bore an uncanny resemblance, I thought, to one of his old heroes, Ubu Roi. Gross, dishevelied, his flesh flabby and yellow behind the miner’s beard. Coarsened but untanned by the sun.

  I walked them to the station. We stopped twice, once at the British Empire, once at the Windsor, while Johnno swallowed a slug of gin, pouring it straight down his throat; and by the time the train left he was relaxed again and seemed pleased to see me. We really would meet. Maybe even next weekend. We’d go to some of the old places or to Stradbroke Island. I’d hear from him on Thursday.

  I didn’t hear from him for over a month. Then one Friday night, as in the old days, there was a phone call. He was at the Royal George in the Valley. Why didn’t I come in and meet him?

  I arrived late and found him drinking with two fellow-workers from the survey, a Swede whose name I didn’t catch and a pale, freckled man in khaki shorts and singlet who was called “Blue”. They were driving back next day in the Swede’s car, and there was a good deal of discussion about when they would set out. Finally it was settled, we shook hands all round and Johnno and I left. Johnno was in one of his moods. His hand was bandaged, an accident he told me with a primus stove. He seemed preoccupied. A couple of drinks more made him maudlin, then abusive, then simply weary, and though we tried hard enough, the evening failed to catch fire.

  If Johnno had intended us somehow to revive the exploits of our youth, Brisbane itself had taken measures to prevent us. The Greek Club had been moved back a street towards the Gardens, and we took a good twenty minutes to convince ourselves that we weren’t dreaming when it refused to reveal itself in the old place. The new club had an open courtyard and a regular restaurant and looked eminently respectable. The brothels too were gone — closed by the new government as part of a campaign to destroy the city’s reputation as a tropical backwater, sluggish, colonial, degenerate, and force it into the present. The menagerie in the Gardens had been removed at the same time, and the unfortunate animals, a few scrawny monkeys, a demented ape, some moth-eaten wallabies, and several cages of parakeets and lovebirds, had been carted off and exterminated. Their cages were burned and the gardens reorganised to make pretty walks, with lily ponds and a cascade. There was no report on the inmates of the two houses. But the houses themselves were still there behind their corrugated-iron walls. Nobody had bothered to burn them.

  It was the same all over. The sprawling weatherboard city we had grown up in was being torn down at last to make way for something grander and more solid. Old pubs like the Treasury, with their wooden verandahs hung with ferns, were unrecognisable now behind glazed brick facades. Whole blocks in the inner city had been excavated to make carparks, and there would eventually be open concrete squares filled with potted palms, where people could sit about in Brisbane’s blazing sun. Even Victoria Bridge was doomed. There were plans for a new bridge fifty yards upstream, and the old blue-grey metal structure was closed to heavy traffic, publicly unsafe. There would eventually be freeways along both banks of the river that would remove forever the sweetish stench of the mangroves that festered here, putting their roots down in the mud; the old boathouse where we had gone to dances was burnt-out and the pontoon where Johnno had swum that night during the flood had been dismantled and taken for scrap. Huge pieces of earth-moving equipment and cranes with iron-jawed buckets and hooks presided in the moonlight over dirt piles that seemed more extensive in some parts of the town than what was still standing.

  It is a sobering thing, at just thirty, to have outlived the landmarks of your youth. And to have them go, not in some violent cataclysm, an act of God, or under the fury of bombardment, but in the quiet way of our generation: by council ordinance and by-law; through shady land deals; in the name of order, and progress, and in contempt (or is it small-town embarrassment?) of all that is untidy and shabbily individual. Brisbane was on the way to becoming a minor metropolis. In ten years it would look impressively like everywhere else. The thought must have depressed Johnno even more than it did me. There wasn’t enough of the old Brisbane for him to hate even, let alone destroy. The others had got in before him.

  I never did discover why he had come back.

  What had happened to Nepal? Was it really Miles he had been heading for all these years? What sort of defeat of his expectations, what moment of panic, had brought him back full-circle, the long way round from Brisbane to the Condamine, via the Congo, Paris, London, Hamburg, Athens? He was too drunk to give me any coherent answer — or pretended to be — and all I could make out of his mutterings was our need to “destroy the myth”. He had destroyed the myth two nights ago. With Bill Mahoney. Bill knew what it was all about. He kept repeating this, with great loose guffaws, and moments between of looking baffled and stricken. Then submerged into silence, sodden and morose. I found no way of reaching him. At last when he dozed off, I went out, called a taxi, and sent him home.

  Somewhere during all this he had invited me up to the camp for the weekend. But I didn’t dare leave the Grafton business for that long and put him off. Sometime later, I told him, when it was cooler. He shrugged his shoulders. It was up to me.

  About eleven next morning he called. He sounded clear-headed, almost his old self— somehow I found it easier to accommodate myself to Johnno’s voice, which had changed so little over all these years, than to the lumbering presence I had wrestled with last night. He was ringing to tell me that he hadn’t gone with the Swede after all. He was going back later by plane. He told me this three or four times, without explanation. Then hung up. The message seemed to me to have no particular importance, and I didn’t think of it again till over a week later. Then circumstances made me go back to Monday’s paper and look carefully at an item I had barely noticed when it first appeared — one of the weekend’s many road accidents. A Holden with two men in it had plunged over the Range below Toowoomba late on Sunday morning, and the occupants had been killed outright. One, the owner of the car, was a Swedish migrant aged thirty-three, from Taroom; the other was a labourer of no fixed address. They had been working at an oil-drilling site in the South West.

  There was no doubt in my mind that they were the two men I had met at the Royal George, and I thought also of something Johnno had said to me more than once over the years: that half the road accidents that were reported in the papers weren’t accidents at all, but carefully managed suicides.

  Is that what he had intended? Is that what he and the Swede and the man called Blue had been planning at the Royal George before I arrived? I couldn’t believe it. Yet what else would explain Johnno’s phone call and his insistence that he hadn’t gone?

  For by then Johnno’s own death had been reported, in a five-line paragraph in The Courier-Mail (which had got him after all): Accidental drowning near Miles. It had happened on Saturday, less than a week after the car crash. He had been pulled out of the water by a fellow worker, Doug Wilson (the Mango), who had tried without success to resuscitate him. There would be an inquest.

  The Mango!

  One of those shadows Johnno had tried so hard to lose all those years back, he had reappeared just two months ago to be in at the end, someone who just happened to be there, sleeping off a drinking bout at the edge of the weir, when Johnno dived in and failed to come out again. It was the Mango, a skinny nine-stoner, who had dragged his huge water-logged body up out of the weeds and pumped away, as we were taught to do in the Junior Lifesaving Team at school, till he himself collapse
d with exhaustion.

  And of all the rivers in the world that might have risen up to take him, it was the Condamine, whose course we had drawn in so often on our homework maps of Queensland and its river systems — the Condamine that we had represented, like all our rivers, with a blue line of solid ink, but which was, we knew, only the ghost of a river for two seasons of the year, a few glittering waterholes in a channel of ridged white sand, flowing furtively underground. In one of its more abundant moments it had reappeared to swallow him.

  The Mango and the Condamine! Who could have foretold it on any one of those afternoons, years back, when all three of them might already have been in some sort of conjunction? The Mango leaning over Johnno’s shoulder during Mr. Campbell’s geography lesson to “copy”, while Johnno traced in the fictitious course of the stream, from its rise in the MacPherson Ranges, about a hundred miles southwest of where we were sitting, to where, far away in the inland, it crossed the border, joined the Murray-Darling system, and made its slow way, by other names, to the Bight. The pattern might have been there already if we had had eyes to see it. Now at last it was clear. Or was it? The pattern had been achieved.

  I thought of Johnno’s promise, that in seven years every last particle of Australia would be squeezed out of him, he would have freed himself of the whole monstrous continent.

  Well, the seven years were up. Like a bad charm. And it was Johnno who was gone. Australia was still there, more loud-mouthed, prosperous, intractable than ever. Far from being destroyed, the Myth was booming. There were suggestions that it would soon be supporting thirty million souls. Australia was the biggest success-story of them all. Real estate was pushing deeper into the gullies, higher towards the crest of every visible hill. New fast highways ribboned across country, with service stations all steel-and-glass, motels all glass-and-polished-wood, identical from Cairns to Albany. At the city’s edge, the dumpyards were now receiving not only the cars we had learned to recognise and covet on our way home from school, the Vanguards and Austin Atlantics of 1948, but the newer streamlined jobs on whose back seats we had fumbled and flared: the Ford Customlines and Minis of the late fifties — all indistinguishable scrap. In the old city centres slim tower-blocks were staggering towards the moon like grounded rockets aimed at nowhere, vying perhaps with the figures, forever climbing, of the Stock Exchange, where oil and mineral stocks were reaching astronomical heights, an index of Australia’s extraordinary confidence in its own future — in the black sea of oil sleeping untapped under impossible deserts, that inland sea, invisible to the eye, that the last century had dreamed of and never discovered. It was there at last. Even Johnno had come to believe in it.

  I turned again and again to that paragraph in the paper.

  “So — you don’t believe me. The Courier-Mail now, I suppose you’d believe that!”

  He too had submitted himself at last to the world of incontrovertible event. Johnno was dead. The Courier said so. It must be so.

  I was still reading and re-reading that brief paragraph when the postman arrived.

  There, on the top of the pile, was a letter in Johnno’s big scrawling hand. I read it quickly, then screwed it up, tossed it across the room, redeemed it, read it slowly again. Its tone was that of every letter or postcard I had ever received from him. His cards from Rosebery and Mount Isa. From the Congo. From Paris. “One of my native boys will walk all night to deliver this,” he had once written me from his camp on the borders of Rhodesia. “And you won’t even bother to reply. He’s worth a dozen of you.” It was true. I always owed him an answer. There was always someone else I cared for more.

  I thought disquietingly of moments when the whole course of events as they stood between us quivered expectantly, and might have gone another way: an afternoon whose heat now returned so powerfully to my imagination that sweat started out all over my skin — when I had gone to Johnno’s place with my first stolen goods, two screwdrivers and a Matchbox jeep that I had meant to present to him as some sort of offering. Remembering how all afternoon the occasion had refused to declare itself. Something the overwarm day had been expected to produce failed to eventuate, since I had located its excitement in my secret, in my three foolish prizes; and when I brought them out the occasion was defused, Johnno had been cheated of some revelation of his own. I thought now, painfully, of his tolerant amusement and my own naivety. And years later, in Athens, when I was struggling to get him home one night and we had come to rest for a moment in a dirty shopfront, his whole drunken weight against me, he had laughed suddenly, his mouth close to my ear, and said: “You know, Dante, when we were at school, I used to think of you as the most exotic creature — so strange and untouchable. Like a foreign prince.” My mind had whirled, a whole past turning itself upside down, inside out, to reveal possibilities I could never myself have imagined. He gave a harsh laugh. Was the joke on him or on me?

  His last letter had neither address nor date. It was scrawled across a page torn out of a company ledger:

  Dante,

  Please please come. Or we could go to Stradbroke for the weekend. Why don’t you ever listen to what I say to you? I’ve spent years writing letters to you and you never answer, even when you write back. I’ve loved you — and you’ve never given a fuck for me, except as a character in one of your funny stories. Now for Christ sake write to me! Answer me you bastard! And please come.

  love

  Johnno

  XIV

  ✧✧✧

  The service was at ten-thirty on the Wednesday morning. I took a bus marked “Crematorium” from under the fig tree in King George Square, and in the mid-morning dazzle we sped out through the city, past suburban schools where kids were lining up in the playground, or being marched in to a fife band; past sagging verandahs where two symmetrical palms stood on either side of a red-stained path, or allotments where women with huge washing baskets staggered to a clothes hoist standing solitary in a yard; past roadworks where men in shorts and muddy boots were boiling a billy for morning tea. Then off the highway into a dry, treeless gully, till the crematorium appeared high up on a slope: a parapet of variegated stone; dark verticals of pine; then as we swung into the courtyard, a glimpse, beyond classical arcades, of a chimney stack.

  The chapel was unnaturally cool, its white walls pierced by stained-glass gothic lights, where angels of a geometrical variety, vivid, sexless, undenominational, broke the harsh sunbeams into eddies of scarlet and mauve. Music was being piped in. It arrived, like the coolness, through holes in the floor — bubbling up softly between the basalt flags. There were altar rails of superbly polished brass, but no altar. Just a tilt where the coffin rested, end on and slightly elevated towards us. On either side ajar of arum lilies, naked and white.

  The bus had come in early. The chapel, empty at first, except for his mother in the front row, supported by aunts and a large uncomfortable uncle, began to be crowded, as newcomers shuffled into the narrow pews, their feet scraping on the flags, their whispered apologies clearly audible as they jostled down a row. I felt someone slide into the seat behind me.

  “I had no idea you were back even,” she whispered.

  It was Binkie, in a black suit, with a little pillbox hat.

  “Isn’t it awful!” She looked suddenly alarmed at the loudness of her own voice in the quiet. “I only came,” she breathed, “because I saw it in the paper.”

  The eulogy was delivered by a Church of England clergyman who was a friend of the family. He hadn’t had the honour of knowing Johnno himself, but he did know Johnno’s mother, who was a fine woman, and several of his uncles, and felt therefore that he could say something of this young man who had been snatched away — I’m not certain now, but I think he did say “in the flower of his youth”. I thought of all those Anzac services I had attended at school, when the honour-boards were read aloud round the Hall and the names intoned in what seemed then to be an endless litany. The war-dead were only too familiar, the first and second sons of fam
ilies whose names appeared on warehouses and wharves around the city, on timber mills, factories, department stores, and whose big tumbledown houses I had known in my childhood, ramshackle mansions going to ruin in the charge of two old-maid sisters whom we ran messages for, or as they got dottier and dottier, laughed at in their floppy lace hats. The dead had the same names as our neighbours, or boys in the class above us. They were sixth-formers who had never grown old and simple-minded like their sisters. And just reading off the places where they fell, Ypres, Mons, Gallipoli, Pozières, Bullecourt, evoked a peculiar atmosphere of golden splendour and colonial chivalry that we might have longed for like a broken dream. Their deaths were both tragedy and fulfilment. They were noble, dedicated, remote, and too good for the rest of us in our prickly flannels, bored with the rhetoric that made this other, earlier generation sound oddly as if they had never stood where we now stood, had never faked a geometry exercise or cribbed a Latin unseen, scribbled dirty words on lavatory walls, had evil thoughts, existed in the flesh that so palpably contained us. Johnno had been in those days the most irreverent of us all. Making jokes out of the corner of his mouth about some of the names as they were read, finding double-entendres in the speeches of the tedious old heroes who came back from the dead to address us. What the minister was doing now was forcing him into that splendid company Johnno too was to be a golden youth cut off in the fullness of his promise. I realised with a shock, as I considered the faces here, their seriousness, their response to what the minister was creating out of Johnno’s ribald, heavy-in-the-flesh reality, what dying really means. It means no longer to exist in the minds of the living as a real presence, intractably solid and unique, but to suffer metamorphosis into a pale, angelic figure in whose company we would never raise our voice or giggle or take off our clothes; an insubstantial abstract of such empty recommendations as “devoted son”, “loyal friend”, “a splendid example to us all”.