by Gilling, Tom
PRAISE FOR THE SOOTERKIN
New York Times Book Review, Notable Books, 2000
‘This is thoroughly modern fiction…it’s a rare delight to see such an accomplished, original novelist emerge fully formed from the hydra head of media…The rest of us should have the grace to applaud him.’ Bulletin
‘A novel of Dickensian richness combining the filth and misery of early colonial days with wry touches of black humour.’ Australian
‘The Sooterkin…concerns the birth and circumstances of a seal-child, born to an ex-convict named Sarah Dyer. The controversy and opportunities created by this singular offspring make for fine entertainment, as a freakish, comical story emerges rather unexpectedly from the grim facts of colonial history…In place of a founding myth, The Sooterkin offers something slyly mocking, possibly monstrous: the strange muffled song of a seal-pup.’ Australian Book Review
‘Extraordinary…a compelling read.’ Books on Sunday
‘Tom Gilling is a natural writer of considerable elegance and inventiveness…[The Sooterkin] has a deep enchantment and marvellous narrative compulsion.’ Courier-Mail
‘An extraordinary story told with disarming simplicity in a unique voice…Gilling’s sure-footed storytelling creates a world full of robust and intriguing characters.’ Herald-Sun
‘The Sooterkin…evokes the wild atmosphere of Australia’s convict history… Like the midwife of his story, Gilling is up to his elbows in blood and pig’s grease and every other mucky detail of 1820s Hobart. What a rough and pungent place it is, packed with the authentic detail of historical research… The Sooterkin would be a real eye-opener in schools, a window into the truly uncouth beginnings of this now comfortable country.’ Sydney Morning Herald
‘[A] jubilantly irreverent first novel. Like his countryman Peter Carey, Gilling isn’t shy about applying a fun-house mirror to an old fashioned adventure, playing sly modern games with appearance and reality.’ New York Times Book Review
‘Sure the town reeks, but the novel itself has the intoxicating fragrance of magic—and magical storytelling.’ New York Post
‘The Sooterkin is one of the most original and entertaining novels to come out of Australia in a long time.’ Sunday Telegraph
‘Darkly fantastical.’ Los Angeles Times Book Review
PRAISE FOR MILES MCGINTY
‘Part history and part fairytale, this is a beautiful story.’ Melbourne Weekly
‘The prose is such a delight to read, I was tempted to backtrack, trying to work out how so much could be achieved with so little apparent effort.’ Canberra Times
‘Gilling shares with his central characters the longing to soar, if only off the page, and he rides his galloping prose with an unmitigated sense of confidence and freedom.’ Big Issue
‘This is the work of a disciplined virtuoso writer. It is one of the most memorably entertaining Australian novels in a long span. The pleasure of reading it is all too brief and the book is laden with sheer delights.’ Australian
‘Miles McGinty works not just because of the strength and unpredictability of its two central characters. This may be just a piquant love story. But, as it plays with history and technology, it finds copious other material with which to engage.’ Sydney Morning Herald
‘A narrative that is as seamless and full of puff as a well-made sail in high wind.’ Age
‘Gilling writes with disarming simplicity and humour. Miles McGinty, like The Sooterkin, is a charming book and an enjoyable read.’ Courier-Mail
‘Though the novel revolves around the inevitable meeting and love affair of Miles and Isabel, their picaresque journeys are peopled with quirky characters that lend the story delicious flavor and send it off on entertaining tangents.’ Publishers Weekly
‘A beguiling novel that celebrates a young 19th-century Australian who thinks he can build a flying machine; his opposite number, Isabel, is fairly skeptical about flight but not about love, and both of them are suckers for a good supply of dreams.’ New York Times
‘Miles McGinty is another glowing evocation of vaudeville.’ Sunday Herald (UK)
‘Storytelling is a recurring motif in Miles McGinty, and one that makes the novel strongly reminiscent of Murray Bail’s novel Eucalyptus.’ Guardian (UK)
‘A beguiling lightness and enjoyable, wry humour.’ Daily Telegraph (UK)
‘It’s more than worth reading for Gilling’s use of language, some of it so good you feel like whooping.’ Glasgow Herald
Tom Gilling was born in England in 1961 and emigrated to Australia in 1983. He is the author of the acclaimed Miles McGinty and The Sooterkin. He lives in Sydney.
The paper used in this book is manufactured only from wood grown in sustainable regrowth forests.
The Text Publishing Company
Swann House
22 William Street
Melbourne Victoria 3000
Australia
www.textpublishing.com.au
Copyright © Tom Gilling 2008
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
Published in 2008 by The Text Publishing Company
Printed in Australia by Griffin Press
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Gilling, Tom.
Dreamland / author, Tom Gilling.
Melbourne : The Text Publishing Company, 2008.
9781921145797 (pbk.)
A823.3
This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government, through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
For Ciaran
Contents
I
II
I
The Crypt nightclub on Oxford Street was a crimson cube of blistered concrete and weeping gutters, diagonally across the road from the Supreme Court. Its metal awning hung like a half-closed eyelid above the pavement, where at 10.59 p.m. on New Year’s Eve a queue of emaciated clubbers was already forming in the sheep race between the barriers and the wall.
Nick Carmody joined the end of the queue. He’d spent the last couple of hours perched on a window stool in the Judgment Bar, watching a human statue startle passers-by. Painted gold and standing on a milk crate, the statue would suddenly reach out and prod pedestrians with his trident. You expected a kind of serenity from a human statue but this one was so aggressive that Nick kept waiting for someone to turn around and pull him off his pedestal. The fact that he was still standing as the clock approached midnight owed less to the tolerance of New Year’s revellers, Nick suspected, than to the presence of two paddy wagons on Taylor Square.
The Crypt wasn’t Nick’s sort of place. It never had been his sort of place, though he’d been there on the night it opened, drinking bottles of Steinlager as a personal guest of the proprietor, his old classmate Danny Grogan. Danny had been a resentful boarder at St Dominic’s since the age of seven, although the Grogan family home, with its bluestone turrets and flagpole, was visible from the school playing fields. Nick was a scholarship boy from Maroubra Beach. A wary friendship developed between them: an alliance of outsiders.
Since leaving St Dominic’s he and Danny had made the effort to meet up from time to time, although there was now a sense— at least to Nick—that what lay behind these encounters was something other than friendship, or even the memory of it.
The queue behind him now stretched around the corner. Nick gazed along the line of faces, searching for a girl—any girl—he would not feel absurd trying to chat up.
He was twenty-nine and none of them looked older than—fifteen?
The phone message from Danny had described it as a wake. Of course, this being the Crypt, there was a dress code, which Nick had ignored. The dead boy (even now, Nick found it impossible to think of him as an adult) was their contemporary at St Dominic’s, Julian Glazer. He’d just been found at the bottom of a cliff near Bondi Beach, steeped in Jim Beam, with a head wound that could have been the result of falling but could equally have been made to look that way. Nick hadn’t seen Glazer since the day they left school, but Danny had made it sound as though he ought to be there—as though he had something to gain by coming.
It wasn’t as if he had anywhere else to go. He wondered what Carolyn was doing, then realised he didn’t need to wonder. Carolyn would be at a New Year’s Eve party, probably at the harbourside home of one of her legal colleagues. They—the few who didn’t know—would be asking where Nick was and she’d tell them, as she’d been telling everyone, that she and Nick had called it a day. Called it a day—the sort of phrase her father was always using. Carolyn’s parents fought like cat and dog but it would never have occurred to either of them to call it a day. Whereas their daughter had called it a day after just seven years. Not that they were married or had children, thank God. Nick would have been tempted to give it a bit longer but in the end he’d had to agree that seven years was long enough. He was surprised—horrified, in a way—to find how little he missed Carolyn, how quickly he’d adjusted to the absence of the woman he’d once imagined spending the rest of his life with. He’d anticipated a difficult few months of mutual hostility and recrimination but what he’d felt instead was relief. Sadness, too, but mostly just relief.
There were two bouncers. From what Nick could see they were turning away as many people as they were letting in. The pair of girls in front of him were clutching cards: tickets to the wake of someone they’d probably never heard of. Typically, Danny hadn’t bothered with a formal invitation, just a terse message on Nick’s voicemail.
The girls were standing with their arms in the air being frisked. For what, Nick wondered. Pills? Cameras? Weapons? Or was being groped by the bouncers just part of the cover charge?
He half-recognised one of them, or thought he did. Somewhere beneath her Gothic disguise she resembled the daughter of one of his colleagues at the Daily Star—a gamine teenager who used to sit in the staff canteen on Sunday afternoons with her Nintendo while her father hammered away upstairs at his weekend football round-up. Even if it was her, she and Nick had only exchanged a few dozen words five years ago, and this was hardly the moment to jog her memory. He half-smiled and got a half-scowl in return and decided it probably wasn’t her after all.
The bigger of the two bouncers had his palm on Nick’s chest. ‘Ticket?’
‘My name’s on the door,’ said Nick.
‘Yeah?’ answered the bouncer, looking down the list on the clipboard dangling from his neck. ‘And what name is that?’
‘Carmody. Nick Carmody.’
The man didn’t look like the steroid-crafted automatons Nick was used to meeting outside Sydney’s nightclubs. With his gelled hair, olive skin, white shirt and cufflinks he looked more like a guest at an Italian wedding. He let go of the clipboard. ‘Sorry, mate,’ he said. ‘Name’s not on the list.’
You’re not sorry and we’re not mates, Nick wanted to say. ‘Look,’ he replied. ‘Danny Grogan asked me to be here.’
‘Show me the invitation.’
‘We spoke on the telephone.’
‘Listen, mate. If your name’s not on the list, you’re not coming in. It’s as simple as that. No invitation, no entry. This is a private party.’
‘It’s a wake, not a party,’ said Nick. ‘And Mr Grogan invited me personally.’
The small group behind Nick—each of them holding a ticket—was becoming impatient. Nick wasn’t sure why he was even arguing. The bouncer was refusing him entry to a club he had no desire to enter in the first place. He was only here because Danny had invited him. Nick pushed his right hand into his pocket. The bouncer watched, vaguely curious as to what he might do next. Nick’s wallet was full of business cards, souvenirs of his protean reporting career at the Daily Star. Most of his colleagues disposed of their old business cards the moment a new set arrived from the printers but Nick always kept a few in his wallet: a portfolio of his former selves. There was a journalists’ code of ethics that, among other things, prohibited misrepresentation, but three years of consorting with criminals and corrupt police had taught Nick to interpret the code loosely. He wasn’t above flashing an old business card when the need arose, as it did from time to time. His fingers hovered for a moment over a card that said:
NICK CARMODY
ENTERTAINMENT REPORTER
He was on the verge of pulling out the card when he noticed a familiar hawkish profile standing on the corner. He called out, ‘Bruce.’
The hawkish profile turned slightly. For the great self-publicist he was, Bruce Myer had always seemed self-conscious about hearing his name. Myer spat the boiled lolly, or whatever it was he was sucking, into a paper tissue which he then disposed of in the pocket of his peach-coloured suit. Nick walked towards him. ‘Bruce. Am I glad to see you.’ He extended his right hand. ‘Nick. Nick Carmody. The Daily Star. You fixed me up for the Elton concert.’
‘Of course I did…Nick…how nice to see you.’ Myer paused. ‘I think we got a few words out of you, didn’t we?’
Elton had been in his cocaine and powdered wig phase; Nick had panned the concert without mercy. ‘It was a great night,’ he said.
‘They were all great nights,’ Myer remarked ruefully.
Now in his sixties, Myer liked to think of himself as the doyen of Sydney publicists. When the Crypt had first opened its doors Danny Grogan used to fly the odd big-name British or American DJ to work the turntables for a night and Bruce Myer often handled the publicity, though his own tastes ran more to Bruckner and Judy Garland.
It was said that Myer would advertise his own funeral if he could be sure of getting a couple of paragraphs in the next day’s Herald. It was probably Myer himself who’d said it, back in the days when his name was on every second hoarding in Sydney, before he let his own publicity go to his head and tried his luck as a promoter. As a publicist you couldn’t lose money—Sydney was a publicist’s town—but as a promoter you couldn’t help it, and Bruce Myer Promotions went bankrupt inside two years.
‘Don’t tell me you’re behind this,’ said Nick.
Myer looked aghast. ‘No, no…Julian’s parents asked me to represent them. You’d know how awkward these things can be. I’m just—how shall I put it—managing the message. If you know what I mean.’
Nick knew exactly what Myer meant. Marks Park, where Glazer had been wandering before he stepped off the cliff, was a notorious gay beat. Somehow Myer had managed to keep the precise location out of the papers. Nick only knew about it after speaking to an old mate in the police.
Myer looked around distractedly. ‘Did you know him?’
‘We were at school together.’
‘Poor fellow.’
Nick nodded. The Glazer he remembered was a fat timid boy whose father owned a string of laundromats. Nick remembered hearing jokes about front loaders and rear loaders—trivial schoolboy stuff, but Glazer probably hadn’t seen it that way. He’d never thought of Glazer as being a friend of Danny’s—but then what did he really know about Danny these days? Apart from what he read in the paper, and occasionally what he wrote in the paper, not much. If Glazer was a friend of Danny’s, good luck to him. And if not…what did it matter anyway? The poor bastard was dead.
‘So what have they got you doing now, Mick?’
‘Nick,’ said Nick.
‘I beg your pardon. Nick.’
Since his brief incarnation as the Star’s second-string rock critic, Nick had done the standard Cook’s tour of reporting jobs (property, courts, local government) before winding
up as the paper’s crime reporter, with his own tiny office beside the stationery cupboard. But for a two-bit villain named Darren Milhench, Nick would still have been the Star’s crime reporter. While out on parole, Milhench had broken his pregnant fiancée out of the remand section at Mulawa Correctional Centre. The pair fled west and for the next few weeks Milhench had taunted the authorities with phone calls to the media, earning himself a catchy sobriquet: the Phonecard Bandit. A caravan park attendant on the south coast recognised the fiancée and Nick had received the tip-off ahead of the police. Nick had always intended to share his information, but not until he had his exclusive. The fact that Milhench and his fiancée absconded before the tactical operations group arrived wasn’t his fault—the police had gone to the wrong caravan park—but Nick found himself the scapegoat, accused by a hysterical police minister of conspiracy to obstruct justice. Since then Nick had been cooling his heels on the Star’s foreign subeditors’ desk.
‘This and that,’ he replied.
‘Wait a minute.’ A lopsided grin spread across the publicist’s face. ‘Carmody. Nick Carmody…the Phonecard Bandit. You’re the one who found him.’
Nick shrugged.
‘He had the cheek to ask me to represent him.’
‘Milhench?’
‘The fiancée, actually. She was rather a charming girl. Told me her boyfriend was writing a book and needed an agent. I reminded her that I’d handled Patrick White’s first play. I don’t think she knew who I was talking about. Anyway, I told her I’d love to represent her boyfriend only my books were full.’
‘Listen, Bruce,’ said Nick. ‘Do you think you could get me in? My name was supposed to be on the door but—’
‘But someone left it off by mistake. It happens all the time, Nick. Of course I’ll get you in.’
Until Danny Grogan got hold of it, the Crypt had been the Church of St Sophia, a dilapidated shell that provided solace to the second-hand building trade through looted supplies of lead flashing and copper pipe. Danny had saved it from demolition with a couple of million dollars from the family trust fund and turned it into one of Sydney’s hippest venues.
