The Complete Stories of Alan Marshall

by Alan Marshall

  George started it.

  He said: ‘You look white. What you want is plenty of raw liver. It makes blood.’

  ‘I don’t like the taste of raw liver,’ I said.

  ‘You take it in pills,’ he said. ‘It’s concentrated. Each pill represents half a pound of liver, and you take four before each meal.’

  I did some calculating.

  ‘That makes six pounds of liver a day,’ I said. ‘A fellow would be likely to get haemophilia at that rate.’

  ‘Must have it wrong,’ said George. ‘Probably each pill only contains the equivalent to half an ounce of liver. But, anyway, you take four, although, if you like,’ he added, ‘you could take six.’

  ‘I think I’d better begin with four,’ I said.

  ‘I think so, too,’ said George.

  Next day I met Bill. I told him I was taking liver to keep going.

  ‘I’ve got just the thing for you,’ he said. ‘Remember the tonic I told you my wife has been taking?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Well, I’ve been taking it, too, and I’ve never felt better. It’s a prescription from a Collins Street doctor. ‘I’ll get it for you.’

  He got it.

  ‘It’s got plenty of iron and strychnine and arsenic in it,’ he said.

  ‘Good,’ I said.

  ‘About your hair,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘You’re going bald as an egg.’

  ‘It’s a fact,’ I lamented.

  ‘I’ll fix that,’ he said.

  He went away and brought back a tobacco tin full of a yellow ointment.

  ‘I made this myself,’ said Bill. ‘It’s a mixture of lard and sulphur. It’s been handed down for years.’

  ‘What, that tin?’

  ‘No, the prescription.’

  ‘The ointment smells as if it had been handed down,’ I said.

  ‘Mix scent with it,’ said Bill. ‘You rub it into your head three times a day.’

  ‘Before or after meals?’

  ‘After,’ he said.

  Alf came to see me one day. I explained how I was ‘keeping going’.

  ‘You can’t beat black coffee and glucose,’ he said. ‘Take it in the morning and afternoon. Do you drink olive oil?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Drink it,’ he said.

  ‘I will,’ I said.

  I was finding it harder and harder to keep going. I got indigestion.

  George gave me the powder I am taking after meals and Alf the powder to be taken before eating. My grandmother recommended the cod-liver oil and the inhalation.

  But the indigestion got worse.

  At an impromptu meeting of friends it was decided that I cut down my lunch to a diet of nuts and raisins.

  ‘I’ll never keep going on nuts and raisins,’ I said.

  ‘It’s a natural food,’ they said. ‘Look at the animals.’

  But there were no animals to look at.

  I began to wish I didn’t have to keep going.

  I had to prepare for bed an hour earlier to get through all the things I had to take. Then I couldn’t sleep.

  I told George.

  ‘I can’t sleep,’ I said.

  He took me to one side and gave me some tablets. They were the smallest tablets I had ever seen. You’ve never seen such small tablets.

  ‘Take one when you get into bed,’ he said. ‘It’ll fix you, but don’t tell anyone that I gave them to you. They are prohibited,’ he said. ‘I got them from a chap that knows a doctor and they’re only to be taken when you can’t possibly sleep.’

  I took two on Sunday night. When I woke up the house was full of my friends. There was a doctor standing by my bed and it was Tuesday afternoon.

  Cripes! I must have slept.

  All my friends had their hats off and they’re the sort of friends who wear their hats anywhere.

  I could see that it was the narrowest escape from not keeping going that I’ve ever had.

  Tomorrow I’m off to the bush.

  Keeping going in the city is too dangerous, what with George and all that.

  Tips for Birthdays

  Birthdays are never the same to me since the tip in front of our place has been reclaimed and turned into a park.

  A bed of calliopsis now blooms where I found my birthday present for Grandfather in 1936, and where Joan, my eight-year-old niece, discovered the E.P.N.S. toast rack that she placed before me at the table on my birthday last year, a sign now reads ‘Keep off the Grass’.

  Ah, that most interesting week before the birthday of a friend when I tramped the tip in search of a present. No dipping into my pockets, only dipping among carrot tops and turning over retired bath heaters.

  I never realized the possibilities of the tip as a source of cheap birthday gifts until one day, when we were celebrating my arrival on this earth, my nephew presented me with a solid silver cigarette case with the initials R.A.L. engraved on the front.

  I was impressed. He handed it to me open. I tried to close it, but that was impossible.

  A horse had stood on the back and the catch had gone.

  However, in our family, we never look a gift horse in the mouth. I put it, opened, in my pocket and set off for the tip immediately.

  Fortunately our tip was only patronized by the best people. The dustman informed me that the cans he cleared were owned by some of the most influential families in Melbourne. Therefore, our gifts were all of a very high grade.

  On my last birthday, Grandfather gave me the body of a motor car. He left it down at the tip and told me I could get it whenever I wanted it.

  I never seemed to want it much.

  Now it is buried under loads of soil and men have planted a small tree there. (Acacia harpophylla-S.Q.)

  In return, on his seventy-fifth birthday, I gave Grandfather a cracked phonograph record featuring his favourite song, ‘Come into the Garden, Maud’. When the singer reached the name, ‘Maud’, he kept repeating it, ‘Maud, Maud, Maud, Maud’, until the machine ran down or until you bucked the needle over the crack with your finger.

  This was difficult because you could never get it on the right line again and the soloist would often sing:

  ‘Come into the garden, Maud, Maud, Maud—To faint in his light and to die, die, die.’

  It was not a very good birthday present, although it was most interesting and educational in that it showed you what happens when cracks get in records.

  I remember one year Joan and I were getting desperate. We were each faced with the problem of finding a present for a friend in the one month. For weeks past the refuse had been of a very poor quality and produced only a few prongless forks and knives without blades.

  Joan found the lower jaw bone of a sheep. It was dry and clean.

  Now the lower jaw bone of a sheep is a most interesting thing to look at, but it is absolutely useless as far as a present is concerned. None of my friends is interested in such things.

  Joan and I differ from our friends in that we can look at the lower jaw bone of a sheep for quite ten minutes and enjoy it, so when Joan asked, ‘Is this any good?’ I replied, ‘The lower jaw bone of a sheep is a good thing, but only to you and me.’

  Anyway, we brought it home, but they wouldn’t let us bring it inside.

  Joan once gave me a book marked ‘With love from Gladys’ in the inside of a plain cover. I don’t know the name of this book, because all the front pages were torn out.

  The first page in this copy started at the top with the words: ‘. . . gasped tragically’.

  To this day I can never find out who gasped or why. I used to lie in bed and wonder what he or she was gasping about, but a friend told me that’s the way to insomnia, so now I never think about it except on my birthday, and anyway, one never sleeps on birthdays for various reasons, mainly reasons of eating, so it really doesn’t matter.

  Tomorrow is Grandfather’s birthday.

  Excuse me,
I must go and buy him a present.

  The Donkey

  The donkey was a very ordinary donkey, shabby and abstracted, and he stood with drooping head and half-closed eyes at the entrance to a circus tent that had been erected on the only patch of green land left close to the big city.

  This was the first circus the city had seen for a year and along the roads that led to the vacant plot of ground, long lines of cars moved and stopped then moved again. People, walking rapidly, crossed footpaths and stepped over kerbs. They moved in groups and lines that met and converged till, when the plot was reached, a mass of people advanced across it, their heads lifted to see over shoulders ahead of them.

  Way down beneath this layer of lifted, superior faces, down to where big hands gripped little hands, were other faces, excited and smeared with ice cream, that peered ahead through a bush of legs to where other legs were moving like those around them. In this world of trousers and silk stockings the little girls and boys who owned the faces could not see the tent or the elephants moving loosely near the painted wagons; they just had to wait till powerful arms came down to them and they emerged to a lift that raised them above the heads of the people. And there, confronting them, was the wonder of the donkey, standing just inside the entrance to the circus tent.

  The tent was a large one. The bright posters that, for some weeks had been halting people in front of stained brick walls in back streets and alleys, announced that the tent was the biggest in the world and held four thousand people. Since the donkey, tethered to a peg by a worn rope, was directly in the pathway of the people hurrying towards the tiers of seats that rose back from the lighted ring, they all had to pass him after they had purchased their tickets.

  Each Saturday three separate shows were held; thus twelve thousand people passed the donkey on those two days.

  At least three-quarters of those twelve thousand people patted or touched him as they passed, therefore nine thousand hands beat a tattoo somewhere upon the donkey in the course of the day. It would be hard to calculate how many tiny blows fell upon him during a week.

  The pattings took various forms. Some were demonstrations of superiority, others were apprehensive gestures of need. There were pats that denoted love of self and some that denoted love of donkeys. Some were the boastful displays of fathers wishing to impress their children while others were gentle pats transformed by imagination into magical experiences.

  A mother being dragged along by an excited little boy would stop while he moved a timid hand gently on the donkey’s shoulder. Smaller children held aloft by proud fathers, bent and scraped their pudgy fingers along his back, or scratched the top of his head, or pulled his ears.

  Unaccompanied children with no parents to restrain them, exhibited a hastily manufactured bravery by leaning on the donkey or rubbing his nose while they looked around for approval.

  Sometimes kind people would try and force peanuts or lollies between the donkey’s lips but this was hard to do since he kept his teeth firmly closed and shook his head when he felt their hands on his mouth.

  About every ten minutes a Man Who Understood Donkeys came along.

  ‘Ah, a donk!’ he would say with an impressive familiarity that made the patting people withdraw their hands and look at him.

  The Man Who Understood Donkeys would then slip his arm round the animal’s neck and address it in terms that established him as an authority.

  ‘So you’ve come to this, old chap, eh! No more hard work for you! Well, that’s how it is!’ Then in a change of tone he would explain to the listening people, ‘In the East they carry more than their own weight, you know—regular beasts of burden.’

  The people murmured their understanding and gave the donkey a final pat of sympathy before they passed on.

  The donkey accepted the attention of this multitude of people with a submissiveness that suggested he was reconciled to a lifetime of pats.

  If there were times when he felt the stirrings of rebellion within him he never showed it. He stood on three legs, one hip dropped, his unkempt hair disordered by hands that failed to disturb the dream in which he was lost.

  On the final day of the circus a stout man with a navy blue suit stretched tightly upon him came confidently through the entrance. He paused in front of the donkey and subjected the animal to a critical survey. He pursed his lips and shook his head then moved back so that he could look at him from rear. He moved round to the other side of the donkey and examined him from there. He completed the encircling of the donkey by a long contemplation of his head. Now there was nothing more he wished to know about this donkey. In the same movement he made to turn away he let his hand fall heavily on the animal’s back. It was the eight thousandth pat of the day.

  The donkey had seemed asleep but the sudden weight of the man’s hand upon him affected him as if it were some signal for which he had been long waiting. He lifted his heavy head with a jerk, turned and snapped at the man’s arm with teeth that went off like a rabbit trap.

  They closed on the sleeve of the man’s coat and ripped from the material a ragged patch of blue cloth that remained projecting from the donkey’s mouth as the animal turned his head away to continue his dream.

  The man was astounded. He staggered back against the people with startled eyes and open mouth. He clutched his arm with his hand and looked at the people for confirmation of the amazing thing that had happened to him.

  ‘He bit me!’ he exclaimed in horrified tones then added, as he looked unbelievingly at the donkey, ‘What a vicious brute!’

  The people passing had all stopped to look at the man and at the donkey with the piece of cloth in its mouth. They all nodded approval at the man’s words. This donkey was indeed a vicious brute. He had bitten the stout man on the arm and all the man had wanted to do was pat him. What an ungrateful, vicious creature!

  For quite five minutes after that no one patted the donkey. It must have been his first taste of peace for years.

  Along the Track

  Pat knew quite a lot about Australian bushrangers. The songs he sometimes sang always contained lines that suggested bushrangers busy at work:

  ‘Stand and deliver, Johnson.’

  ‘I’ll have your gold, McPherson.’

  ‘He galloped hard the whole night through.’

  Most of the songs presented the bushrangers as courageous and resolute fellows, and I have no doubt Pat’s opinion of them was coloured by the songs they sang.

  He regarded ‘Thunderbolt’ as a ‘gentleman’.

  Whether Thunderbolt was a gentleman or not, I do not know, but Pat also credited him with being a great rider and a crack shot. He was famous for his ‘leap’—‘Thunderbolt’s Leap’ Pat called it.

  Thunderbolt’s Leap was unique in that, according to Pat, ‘the police never saw the like’.

  It appears that Thunderbolt was once hard pressed by the police when he found himself galloping towards the edge of a cliff. He gave one look back, struck his heels into his horse and sailed out into space in a manner that ‘staggered the coppers’.

  ‘They all reckoned after, they’d never seen the like,’ Pat told me.

  Thunderbolt’s real name was ‘Ward’. He was eventually killed by a policeman called Walker, a fact I learned from listening to Pat singing:

  Bold are those mounted robbers

  That on stolen horses ride.

  Bold are those mounted police

  That patrol the Sydney side.

  But few of them, though flash they be,

  Can ride, or few could fight.

  But Walker fought for life or death

  With Ward the other night.

  At one stage in the journey we were taking to Queensland in a truck caravan, we passed through the township of Uralla in N.S.W. The name must have meant something to Pat for he suddenly thrust his head out of the cabin window as if the ghost of Thunderbolt had hailed him from a paddock.

  ‘This is where Thunderbolt leaped,’ he exclaimed excitedly
. ‘Pull up.’

  There was nothing in the landscape around us to suggest the existence of cliffs suitable for leaping, so I kept going for a little way until we reached two men working on the road. I pulled up beside them.

  Pat, still excited at actually being in country over which Thunderbolt had ridden, didn’t waste any time in preliminary remarks about the weather.

  ‘Good day,’ he said enthusiastically. ‘Where’s Thunderbolt’s Leap round here?’

  One of the men raised himself and rested on his shovel while he considered the question.

  ‘What do you mean—his leap?’ he asked in the manner of one demanding all the evidence before committing himself.

  ‘Thunderbolt,’ persisted Pat. ‘You know—Thunderbolt, the bushranger. The coppers were after him and he leapt a chasm or something. The coppers never saw the like. It’s round here somewhere.’

  ‘Never heard of it,’ said the man decidedly. He turned to his companion.

  ‘You ever hear of Thunderbolt’s Leap or whatever it is, Jim?’

  ‘No,’ said Jim intent on rolling a cigarette. ‘He never leapt in these parts. He is buried in the cemetery here, they reckon. You can see his grave any time. Who told you he done this here leap?’

  ‘I read it,’ said Pat, confident in his facts.

  ‘You can’t believe all you read,’ the man with the shovel said, smug with knowledge.

  This pronouncement depressed Pat who had great faith in the printed word. But he had need of his belief, and refused to relinquish it.

  ‘He leaped somewhere,’ he said with conviction. ‘They wouldn’t have called it “Thunderbolt’s Leap” for nothing.’

  ‘Would you like to see his grave?’ I asked Pat. ‘We could drive up there. It wouldn’t take long.’

  ‘No,’ said Pat to whom Thunderbolt’s grave had no significance. ‘I’ve always wanted to see where he leaped. The coppers never saw the like, they said. I lent the book it was in, and never got it back. I should have hung on to it. If I could buy it again, I’d buy it.’

  So we never saw Thunderbolt’s Leap, but we did see a pile of rocks behind which he is supposed to have hidden while waiting for a coach to pass, and that was some satisfaction to Pat.