Last Words

by Dickins, Barry

  Anyway, he soon spies Dorothy. A Dorothy who is looking sensational as she rests by the rail of the ferry while everyone is dancing and laughing and having such a great time. Ronald lights up two cigarettes, just as he’s seen done in American films with Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr, and gallantly hands one over. Pretty Dorothy laughs spontaneously and inhales it with panache: she’s seen American movies as well.

  Ronald dips his lid, as taking off the chap’s hat is called, and straight away offers a bow. Dorothy in a state of merry kidding, immediately bows back and they then start to jitterbug brilliantly and dancers make space for them to show their stuff, which they do, of course, without reserve.

  ‘Ron’ and ‘Dot’ call themselves that on the spot as they cavort and corkscrew and fly and hop and land on the creaking deck of the ancient pleasure vessel.

  He treats his new lady love to a piping-hot sausage roll with dead horse all over it, and she asks him for a couple of serviettes. He doesn’t understand what ‘serviettes’ are and just stands there gawking at her stupidly.

  ‘Well, you tuck them in under the hot thing that you are eating and then the serviettes prohibit the nasty tomato sauce from going all down your front, my love!’ laughs she.

  Dorothy is seriously ‘with it’ as they said back then, to allude to sensuousness and spontaneous sexuality. She is prepared to be fascinating and is beautifully read, forever munching into Hemingway and breakfasting with Proust. So she can easily keep up with Ronald as he quotes exceptionally well from Wilfred Owen, the eloquent Welsh war poet slain, ironically, upon Armistice Day. They go for a chilled lemon squash on a rustic park bench not far from the jiggling ferries and pretty soon they’re jiggling too.

  ‘That’s beautiful of you to be so kind!’, declares Dorothy when Ronald bestows a hypersensitive kiss on her quivering upper-class lips. There’s a full harvest moon shining down on the mismatched instant lovers, as they kiss on the park bench with other lovers’ names carved to it. They’re so happy.

  He fetches her to his grotesque boarding house one afternoon the next week to ‘see how the other half lives’ but alas, she is not enthused. It may be the rats that put her off, or the mice that are scurrying around the courtyard, with its overflowing sewer and fruit crates scattered here and there.

  Although Dorothy has always laughed at wealth, this brand of poorness isn’t much of a turn-on. But she puts on a show of strength in the absolutely chronic kitchen as Ronald delicately pours her a cup of weak tea. The tea was once drinkable, even nice, but this was well before it was re-brewed over a dozen times in a row and then continually tipped back into the cracked pot.

  Ronald, with one arm behind his back, pours the muck into her cup with the air of a detached Prince Charming.

  She pretends to drink it and he knows she isn’t having it, which temporarily puts him off. But he is determined to capture this fairy who seems no larger than the forefinger of an alderman. She must look pretty fabulous to this son of a drunken council worker – a man who was so out of it, he allowed his baby boy to lie on the floor all day and all night in a dirty nappy as the hut buzzed with enormous flies.

  But back to the awful boarding house kitchen, where Ronald sits on an upturned galvanised iron trash tin and listens carefully to what Dorothy George has to tell him. She speaks in a very different accent, as if she were something out of 1001 Arabian Nights. Now that was a book that Ronald loved as a boy, largely thanks to his favourite uncle, Wingy. So-called because he only had one arm on him (and could open a cold bottle of beer with his stump), this wondrous and clever uncle used to read to Ronald after they had left the fiftieth-rate bird sanctuary. Ronald adored being read to.

  The affair is a classic case of class opposites: two people needing someone to love who was different from their own lot. Ronald is daring enough to offer Dorothy the golden opportunity to perch upon his knee and he says to her ‘Like this’ when she does it properly.

  ‘Darling!’ he cries in that raspy voice, which comes direct from the drain. ‘Will you share my lot?’

  ‘Yes, Darling, if it is a lot!’ she replies deadpan. This makes them both laugh heartily to break the ice and Dorothy is so happy by this stage that she takes a halfhearted sip of the undrinkable sludgy tea and spurts it back up in a trice. She profusely apologises to Ronald, who is not offended, for nothing offends him, and he swigs the dreadful tea in his army mug straight down his gullet. He has a considerable gullet, as it later turns out.

  He offers to show her through the depressing, dangerous slum but she politely says no. It’s still there in 2016 when I’m writing this, a horrid, old, never-swept-up-nor-ever-painted-once boarding house just opposite the Footscray Botanic Gardens. It sticks out like dog’s balls, actually, and has not altered a whisker since Australia’s last hanged man was living there.

  He tells a bemused Dorothy that he is our country’s greatest long-distance racing cyclist and that’s actually not too far from the truth. Ryan won several scratch races from Melbourne to Warrnambool and once bought the immortal ‘Fatty Lamb’ a cup of tea after the completion of a very gruelling race.

  He tells his new love that he is fixedly obsessed with improving his mind and his image and shows her his room that she’s already seen and wasn’t intending to review again, once being more than enough. Although not untidy, it is very down and hard on the human eye, particularly the young and impressionable female eye.

  Ronald shows her the latest books that he purchased at the University High School book sale, the one that they have once a year. He is proud that he not only bought them out of factory pay but has made himself a bookcase from assorted junk. He shows off by reading a snippet from Oscar Wilde, mispronouncing several words in his enthusiasm. Of course, this isn’t lost on his new girlfriend, but we all try a bit too hard sometimes.

  He walks her to the old, dark and sombre West Footscray Railway Station, the non-metaphorical wrong side of the tracks. But he is ambitious, full of ideas and looks forward to bringing her brand new things each day, even if they technically belong to somebody else. As they ever so leisurely stroll down the ramp of the old station, he kisses her in an entirely new way for someone whose previous kisses came from young members of the Brighton Rowing Club.

  He boasts of sex to his fellow wage slaves at the foundry. He shouldn’t brag about having relations with a wealthy girl from Hawthorn but I’m afraid that Ronald is a bit of a cad. He feels denied pleasures in life and is sick of meaningless slog. Other things such as people’s wallets and ladies’ plush and plump handbags are slowly becoming just too tempting to resist. One plump handbag can be worth more than a whole decade at Good Year Tyres.

  She has fallen in love with a very mixed-up young chap who is proud of his long-distance cycling and what he thinks is a comparable physique to Tarzan’s. He is always going off to church of a Sunday with his sisters. The Catholic side of him is powerful and he loves the mysticism and pageantry. But purses, particularly plump ones, are obscuring his vision of His Lord.

  The young Ryans are taken to Sunday service by their religious grandmother, Cecelia Ryan, who loves them, of course, and hopes all the best things for them. As to Ronald, he kneels and he worships in his fashion because he understands he has kindness in him. There’s good in him too, and he knows it’s a fabulous strength that is handy from time to time. But plump purses begin to upstage his idea of an impoverished Redeemer and, slowly but surely, he becomes a rotter.

  Chapter 5

  WHEN HE WAS breaking up bluestone in the weeks, months and years before the breakout, Ronald Ryan formed a vision in blisters. A vision of aching muscles, complaining shoulders and bleeding toes to never toil for governors of prisons again. To never fall asleep like a mesmerised caveman after twelve straight hours on the mallet and rock. To never again watch his own exhausted arms try to cling to the big hammer and then swing like an ape into redemption. The law isn’t joking when they put a man to hard labour. It is to break his limited resistance,
in body and spirit, but he won’t give an inch.

  A bit of hate helps. He sees in his frenzied mind the exceptional unfairness of well-off people who have holidays; who don’t have to be imprisoned or swing a pick on a rock. They holiday in Europe, some of them, and their kids have private tutors, some of them; not like his kids, pecking away at state schools, where the other kids mock them.

  All through 1965, up until he burst free over that wall, Ronald would have known the penalty for shooting a prison officer could only ever be death. It would have been one of the only things he and his brother jailbirds ever talked about, in those claustrophobic divisions where life was cheap and death was cheaper still. But just imagine the daily depression of trying to get to sleep on a rag, and right next to a smelly shit bucket. Just imagine trying to sleep under that bright overhead light, as it burns through your eyelids like a fire. Just imagine the clanging of metal doors and the screams of complaint, and the sounds of rape or, I don’t know, giggling.

  Once upon a time, he had believed in priests, more or less, but not after his prolonged stay at that hellhole. Those in charge did precisely as they liked to lads like him and there was nothing anyone could do about it. It embittered him, saddened him, hurt him, and above all, it made him revengeful.

  A baton repeatedly beaten into the back is no way to rehabilitate. Punches in the jaw and knees in the back do not lead to enlightenment, they only muck up your smile. Before Ronald accepted the warehouse job, a job he did armed with a rifle, he was relatively innocent of the term ‘violent’ because it just didn’t apply to him.

  He was pressured to commit to the offer of the warehouse and accepted it for the fool that he was. He could have turned it down as too dangerous and tried a bit harder to stay narrow and straight. He could have hung in there as an honest family man, and taken his daughters off to school in the tenth-rate car. He could have chosen to cut their lunches for them and make cold cordial flasks in the summer. That long narrow road to the cold cordial bottle could have saved him from the gallows if he’d stuck to it as his life plan.

  For a time, when he was in his late twenties, he cut railway sleepers in Matlock. He always worked honestly and long and looked after his saws and his tools. His boss was happy with him.

  Ronald saved all his wages and used to send them all, just about, in leafy pound notes in stamped envelopes to his mum and his sisters. He was the new father, since the old one refused to work. He had to play the role of the hardworking timber-cutter and that was a role that suited his personality perfectly.

  He could even be smug about it. This was the pious part of his character and he loved being pious. When Ronald was straight, his voice and his physique were straight and his simple prayers were in alliance with his hopes and fears. When he had the crummy nowhere job at the foundry helping to make car and truck tyres, he admired that part of himself that had the rank and file work ethic. He enjoyed the showing up to work, the spending time with work mates, and the salary that proved that he could be relied on. This was his good self and the satisfaction arose in his throat, because his mother respected him for putting bread on the table. When he propped up his sisters in times of need it was because he was a good boy, really. ‘A good boy’ was in fact his mother’s very phrase, when she was interviewed by Channel 7 before he went to the gallows.

  When he was good, he was just like the rest of us, this young honest chap who was physically powerful and unafraid of honest work out in the scrub. He loved looking reliable, and being reliable, and toiling was its own reward. He loved paying for things in shops that would eventually become Christmas presents and combing his hair so that it looked proper. He loved using his charisma to charm people, and he loved labouring to provide for his loved ones. It was heaven for the Ryan family to gurgle along on the summertime tram to the city from the Good Shepherd convent of a Sunday and feel more than normal peering into posh shops together. They laughed at his exaggerations and made-up stories in the tea rooms and cried with pride when he bought them new things. He helped them to picture a better and fairer world for themselves when he whispered things like ‘Imagine that coat on you’ or ‘Won’t you look nice in that incredible cardigan’.

  He had the gift of the gab and he knew it, of course: the comedian in him, the sunniness, were aspects of his personality that he played to the hilt.

  He wrote elegantly and often sent gorgeous, poetic handwritten letters to the miserable convent encouraging his sisters to keep their chins up. That was his favourite saying, actually, ‘always keep your chin up’, and he was forced to practise that motto more and more. He was good but weak and that was another thing he knew at the end; the worst end imaginable because it was unimaginable.

  But let’s go back to the start, or at least somewhere close to it: to the moulding works where Ronald made tyres. He was nineteen back then and the Second World War had just ended. A day in the life was to arise to the first clang of his cheap but insistent Coles-bought Japanese alarm clock, briefly shower in the sullen, bad-smelling boarding house, ignore the putrescent others as best he could, dress quick as quick and grab a bit of white bread toast between his yellow teeth that should’ve been whiter but he always forgot to brush them. He’d head off early on the pig-headed and oh-so-heavy, old-fashioned, pitch-black, iron-framed fixed-wheel pushbike, and savour the sudden rush of ecstasy that the early morning breeze brought to his sleepy senses. It was a downhill ride to the foundry, and it felt like one as well.

  But that didn’t mean he stopped being a thief. He still pinched other apprentices’ smokes when he had ample income to treat himself to the best cigarettes available. He stowed them in a zip-up Ansett bag that, needless to say, he had pinched from a shop counter.

  Dorothy had never known such ardour. Ronald loved her stronger and harder than any of her Brighton Yacht Club paramours who of course looked a lot better. With their tailor-made suits and dreadfully costly silk socks, Scotch College education and clipped English accents, there’s no doubt that they were a melodious contrast to Ronald, a man who spoke like a crow. But he made up for all that with lots of good-natured winking. Beaming smiles seemed to work okay too. He absolutely doted on himself in the sure belief that if you don’t go nuts over yourself, no one else will.

  Dorothy invites him over to meet the parents one extreme-fire-danger day at the end of 1945 when Ronald is 20 years of age and full of vanity even though he has no right.

  He rides the appallingly old, heavy bike from West Footscray to Middle Brighton to see how the other half do it. He politely leans the oily bike on the family letterbox out the front and stoops to remove his trouser bike-clips that stop his cuffs from fraying in the dirty chain. That is a thing he never forgets to do, not like brushing his teeth, which he just can’t get the hang of.

  Then in he walks as though summoned to heaven.

  The enormous gilt-edged mansion boasts two swimming pools, a croquet lawn and a pair of lyrebirds gargling away in atrocious harmony. Dorothy, looking vastly erotic, rushes down the gravelly path to kiss him on lips that resemble the slit in a letterbox: absolutely deadpan, as they say in the theatre. She is dressed to the nines and makes a great fuss of him, having fallen completely in love for the first time in her young and inexperienced life. She feels a bit disappointed when she notices pie mince on his front and tries to eradicate this mess with her scented wrist-handkerchief but he just pulls away, not wanting any female fascism, as he is prone to call fuss.

  She laughs but is crushed by his pie mince. It’s as though he’s not taking his first meeting with her family seriously and the reason for that is because he isn’t. Ronald doesn’t take anything seriously. He just takes things, full stop.

  Her excellently attired father shakes Ronald’s palm and notices that it stinks.

  The mother, slightly offended by everything, bestows a kiss on his proffered cheek but instantly wishes she hadn’t, as it is like kissing the gutter.

  He is dressed incongruously in denim jeans wit
h a black jacket hoisted over it and a white T-shirt underneath. When he takes off his jacket, it looks all wrong in such a posh mansion, with its gloomy leadlight windows and bright chandeliers and servants beetling hither and thither.

  A butler invites him to sit but he stands, waiting for a sherry, as they do in all the English films. There are displays of flowers everywhere, and tropical fruit: even the tablecloth makes his thieving mouth water. It’s Irish linen: priceless and arctic white. He wonders whether he can get it into his airline bag.

  The entrée – warmed-up black and green marinated olives – does not go according to plan. Ronald has no idea what olives are and decides to suck them, very loudly. The father then raves on about rare roast beef, and talks even more about the chilled white wine. But Ronald has no idea what he’s on about and even less interest. Dorothy’s mama tries to steer Mr George’s erudite conversation towards more common themes, such as classical music, and inquires of Ronald as to whether or not he likes Mozart.

  ‘He’s okay Mrs George, I guess, for a white man. What do you think of him?’

  Silence, then Mr George steers the table talk to the subject of death. And coffins and hearses and timber. The dinner plates (willow pattern) are briskly removed by the servants. Ronald, ever the comedian, rushes after them, and licks gravy off his dish to the scorn of the maids.

  It is quite difficult to get the chitchat going anywhere and Ronald is hyperventilating due to the mix of hot air and elitism.

  So he asks Mrs George whether or not she likes his ponderous, spotted, cotton breast handkerchief.

  Sneering, she says, ‘What should my opinion of your spotted handkerchief matter?’

  ‘I use it to cry into when I can’t see Dorothy.’

  Chapter 6

  IT IS PROBABLE that his courtship of Dorothy returns to haunt Ronald Ryan as he sits in his prison cell awaiting his trial. That those memories of Brighton batter his memory like a flickering home movie as he paces up and down its dark, cramped confines. He lies on his rag bunk and remembers the whirlwind courtship – the extreme oddity of marrying into the extreme ruling class.