by Peter Carey
The bookseller was a slim young man with a blond moustache. He looked at Charles and frowned. He took in the loud checks, the large hat, the hearing aid, the shape of the head, the width of the neck, the bow of the legs, the size of the boots, all the time wondering how such an apparition fitted in with Phoebe Badgery whose charms he much admired.
The bookseller asked where it was he'd heard of such a book.
Charles fiddled with his hearing aid, banged it with his fist, and placed it on the counter. His eyes were as big and soft as a sheepdog's. His hands were large and tightly clenched. His fingernails were broken.
"Where", the bookseller said, unnecessarily loud, "did you hear of this book?"
"'I was told." Charles's face was aflame. He wished he had never come to Sydney where everyone wished to insult and abuse him.
"By whom?" said the bookseller, enjoying the game of speaking so loudly. He glanced around to collect the tributes of his fellow workers, the rolled eyes, the wry smiles, the hand across the lipsticked laugh. "By whom", he said, ending the word with a real hum, "were you told?"
Charles became angry and stamped his foot. "That's for me to know, and you to find out."
"Now, now." The bookseller extended a pale placating palm. "I meant no offence."
"None taken." His voice was too loud. He could not hear it exactly, but he could feel it was too loud. "Just get me the book."
"There is no book."
"Then I'll go elsewhere." He began to stuff his hearing aid away in his jacket pocket.
"There is no elsewhere. There is no book by Phoebe Badgery. I take it", he said, "that you are a friend of Mrs Badgery's?"
Charles's ear suffered a hurt, a sharp crack, and he misheard.
"Then you're a fool for saying so," he said.
In the street outside, amidst the stink of car tyres, he burst into tears, and when he arrived back in Bondi (having spent ten shillings on a taxi rather than put up with the rudeness of one more tram conductor) Leah was alarmed to see his swollen face. She asked him what the matter was and he burst into tears again.
It was then he told her the whole story and they sat at the kitchen table, drinking tea, both crying together.
It was in the aftermath of this incident that he decided he would go to Spain. There was much in his decision, of course, that was immature and there was a part of him that looked forward to his death in Spain as a suitable punishment for the mother who had not loved him sufficiently. Yet there were other, finer threads to the fabric of his character, motives so simple and obvious that when Izzie and Leah quizzed him about them, he moved them, even Izzie, with the simplicity of his answer.
Charles said: "Because I am for the weak and against the strong, not the strong against the weak, and I've got the money for the fare."
That, at least, is what Leah reports him to have said, and I have always intended to ask if he really did make so fine a speech. I was much affected by it at the time.
Whatever he said, Izzie Kaletsky was the one who wrote down the address of a comrade who would help make the arrangements 10 George Fipps was not meant to vet Charles. Nor was he meant to accept the fare money from him. All he was meant to do was provide the boy with a letter of introduction to the International Brigade in London. And, indeed, he came to the meeting with the letter neatly folded in the breast pocket of his shirt.
But in the steamy beer-sour shadows of the Sussex Hotel, Charles -who had misunderstood the purpose of the meeting -pushed an envelope towards the comrade who left it where it was, not an inch from his beer glass. The envelope contained one hundred and twenty pounds in purple fivers.
Perhaps George Fipps already sensed what the outcome of the meeting would be and that was why he neither pushed the envelope away nor picked it up. He studied it, as if it were fate itself lying there on the damp towelling, slowly darkening.
George Fipps was thirty-six years old. He was a big, handsome, sleepy-lidded man whose blond hair, after twenty-one years of Brylcreem, had begun to take on a slightly green tinge. In his youth he had been a larrikin and a street-brawler and he was still proud of his strength and his fighter's skills. He rolled his white shirt sleeves as high as they would go.
He had not intended to go to Spain himself. But then he had not realized, until his meeting with my innocent son, how much he hated permitting young comrades to fight when he could have done it better himself. He helped collect the money for their fares -those painfully arrived at zacs and deeners – but he had never let himself know, until he saw that envelope, how much he loathed being one of those old men who send young men off to war.
This was not a thing he could confess to afterwards. All he would say was that Charles had not been suitable. He told Izzie: "He was a keen young fellow, but he didn't have no theory. Jeez, mate, I couldn't let him. I couldn't have the comrades in Spain think we was all so bloody ignorant."
But to Charles he said nothing so cruel. He talked to him gently, talked so softly that he might have been with a woman in bed and Charles had to bring out his hearing machine and put it amongst the spilled beer on the bar. By the third glass he had convinced Charles that the best thing for the international working class would be for Charles to buy George's motorbike and sidecar and for George to go to Spain instead.
You would expect both men to be surprised by the outcome, but in the daylight darkness of the bar, with the soft nasal excitement of the horse races on the wireless, it had seemed – to both of them -sensible. It was only in the street outside that they saw what they had done. George Fipps began to spit and slap his hands together. Charles stood and grinned at his new motorbike – it was black and gold and it gleamed, it dazzled, in the sun.
George quickly taught him how to drive it and then they went over to the Balmain Police where George's brother-in-law issued a driving licence.
Outside in Darling Street the two men grinned at each other and shook hands. George Fipps spat three times into the gutter, winked, and set off towards his boarding house. Charles drove back to Bondi, drunk in charge, singing tunelessly, with a sidecar full of whitewash cans.
It was only when he started to tell the story to Izzie and Leah and he saw the look on Izzie's face that Charles saw his story could be looked at from other angles, i. e., that he had been cheated, that he had let himself be cheated because he was a coward. It was then, his head aching from beer, that he shouted at his host and threatened to punch him. He said he hated Sydney. He said it was full of liars and cheats and snobs. But what made him really angry, what he couldn't admit, was that he suddenly felt the sneer on Izzie's face was deserved. He was relieved he no longer had the money and no longer had to go.
The next day he read about the mouse plague in Victoria.
11
It was seven in the morning, and although it was not cold, although he had wrapped himself in a greatcoat, my boy's teeth were chattering in his head. He sat on the crackling AJS while Leah talked intensely, holding his gloved wrist as if, by doing this, she would retain him.
He had overfilled the machine with oil and it sounded, idling, like someone slapping jelly on a plate. Lenny came and stood on the front doorstep in his pyjamas, his hands, comically, over his ears. When Charles did not see him he went back inside and waited for Leah to fetch him his paper.
But Leah was suddenly too overcome with guilt to notice anything as silly as Lenny. She had neglected the boy. She had been selfish. She had left him alone to be patronized and insulted by city people. He was alone in the world and she, his only friend, had betrayed him.
"Listen to me," Leah said. "Somebody has to give you advice. Don't stay in the country whatever you do. The city is a lot better than you think. When you come back I will have more time. I'll forget my bookkeeping. I'll take a holiday. I promise. When you come back I'll work on an education for you somehow. You can live here with us. You can go to night school. Would you like that? You could have a pet shop, anything, to make a living."
Charles' e
ars crackled, shrieked and knocked. The AJS slapped and spluttered. Against all odds, like a willow seed lodging in a hair-split rock, the pet shop slipped through the explosions and found a welcome.
"You could have a pet shop, anything, to make a living."
12
Kevin Simmons (and that other chap whose name eludes me) escaped from Long Bay in 1958 and you may remember what celebrities they were, running all over the country with the coppers panting at their tails. It was Simmons who was the smart one, and it was him the coppers hated.
The gaol they put him into was Grafton and you only have to drive through those ugly big gates to get the smell of what sort of place it is. Even before I saw my cell I knew this was no ordinary country lock-up. And although they boast in Grafton (town) that there has been only one execution in their gaol, the Brylcreemed chemists and clerks who tell you this do not mention the sane men who have hanged themselves in their cells.
It is a gaol dedicated to knocking the bejesus out of people, and if you are a tough guy they put you in "trac" and the warders come and visit you in your cell each night until you weep and beg to God to let you die. They are not nice noises to hear coming through your walls at night and, believe me, you hear everything. You hear a button brush against a wall and when poor Simmons hanged himself at last, his biggest problem was doing it so he would not be heard and I have read no sadder thing than the official account of how he used blankets and coir mats so he could take his life in total silence.
When I was an author I was party to a book called Gaol Bird which claimed I was a prisoner in Grafton Gaol, but once I had read the tattooed messages on the screws' arms I knew that I must get myself transferred out of there. Gaol Bird was a pack of lies -I spent no more than one soft month in Grafton during which time I made myself into a nice old man. I shuffled and tottered and you would not recognize the fellow who came cycling up from Nambucca a week before so cocky about his life that he abandoned a pretty widow with a business of her own.
Oh, you would not believe what a brown nose I was, a smiling snivelling wretch of a thing. I bent my spine and let my dentures clack when I smiled.
I got my transfer. They shipped me up to Rankin Downs near Coraki. Rankin Downs was brand new at the time, a sort of Promised Land for prisoners according to the Grafton grapevine. There were no locks on the door and you could get an education or work in the bush planting flooded gum.
Rankin Downs was a lovely idea. This was not apparent when you first saw it, but I am sure the intentions behind it were good. I am sure it was not the plan, not originally, to build it on the edge of a paperbark swamp, but perhaps its creator, its champion, had too many enemies in the department. Perhaps he lacked stamina and they wore him down, getting him to accept one compromise and then another. He saw it on a map and it looked perfect. It was only later that he saw they would have to build the camp on a gravel platform on the edge of a swamp, but he was an optimist. He kept going forward. He nearly lost his scheme countless times and in the end he was pleased to accept the long huts from the army. Perhaps he did not appreciate that they were cold in winter and boiling in summer, or perhaps he did, and still thought it a superior situation to a proper gaol. He was right, this weak tender soul in the Department of Corrective Services, but there is many a man who would have thanked him if he might have fought, just a little harder, and got us some wire to keep out the mosquitoes.
Rankin Downs may have been a prisoners' paradise, but it was the lowest rung for the screws who did not care for either the isolated site or the standard of their own accommodation. We were not put in the charge of bashers – they were right at the top in Grafton – but we got the moaners, the whingers, the ones with flatulence and bad breath, the ones their fellows could not stand to watch eating.
I could give you a long list of my complaints about Rankin Downs, that bleak, muddy, dusty, shadeless place – but I will also say this in its favour – you were permitted to look the screws in the eyes and you could sleep at night without listening to beatings. One slept without fear in that place but when Reg Moth was let into my so-called "cell" that night, my balls went tight and my mouth dry. Moth was not a screw. He was the sergeant who had arrested me, a wide square-headed fellow with big ginger eyebrows and thick hairy arms. He had a dented chin, big fleshy ear-lobes and a pair of very pale blue eyes that bulged demandingly from his florid face. He had a voice like a man who smokes forty Craven As a day – hoarse, cracked, given to phlegmy interruptions – but I don't recall him smoking. He parted his hair straight down the middle, across the flat plateau of his big head and although he was neat and polite, there was something contradictory in his eyes as if he were a neat polished chest of drawers full of tangled laddered nylon stockings.
It is not the normal practice for arresting sergeants to pay social calls upon their victims, and even if it were, it would take a keen man to make a journey up from Grafton at night. The last hour to Rankin Downs is along a straight, rutted gravel road cut right through the paperbarks. Having arrived at night I can speak with some authority on the desolate feeling the road produces: the white fire-scarred trunks, the unsettling vision of yabbies moving from one side of the road to the other. In the daytime, they tell me, the squashed yabbies make the bush smell like the Sydney fish markets.
It was the custom at Rankin Downs to receive visitors in the shade under the big tank stands. There was no provision in the "cells" for a visitor. I offered Sergeant Moth my bed. He took it and I squatted on the floor with my back against the cracked asbestos-sheet wall. When my knees got stiff and sore I asked his permission before I sat on the floor.
He talked. I watched his mouth move. I could not understand why he had come and I listened to him talking about Peter Dawson who had sung the "Floral Dance" at the Jacaranda Festival the year before. I had, on the one hand, a thirst for all the details of normal life. I wanted to hear about Dawson, what he had sung, what he had worn, how the trees had looked along the avenues of Grafton. In another way I did not want to hear at all, loathed every word he said, just as I sometimes loathed every word of Goldstein's letters. At the same time I was frightened of being bashed. His manner was not a basher's manner. It was fussy and finicky. This did not calm me, but somehow made the prospect of bashing more certain. I would have liked to stand up and not be so defenceless on the floor, but now I was there I did not like to attract his attention with any sudden movements. I could hear my next-door neighbour, a little apprentice mechanic from Coff's Harbour, crying in his sleep. It was a soft whimpering noise. At first I thought it was a bird. His name was Jacko and he was getting out next week. He wouldn't help me if I was bashed.
Moth brought a bottle from his pocket, an old Vegemite bottle with something – I took it for a little yabby – floating in it.
"I thought", Reg Moth said, giving the bottle a good shake, "that it was a shame to throw it out."
Throw what out?
"So I went", he said, "down to Phelan's, the chemist chap in Grafton, and I said, have you got a little formaldehyde and he gave me a drop of it in a Vegemite jar. It's very expensive, formaldehyde. Have you ever purchased it, Badgery? Shockingly expensive. But he gave it to me, out of the goodness of his heart. Gave it to me and I put Charlie Goon's finger in it, and here it is, see. I've kept it for you, a souvenir."
"Thank you," I said. I tried to smile politely and look grateful but I had a gagging feeling in my throat.
"You like it?" It was hard to get the meaning of those bulging eyes, but he looked surprised. I felt hot and dizzy. I was disgusted with myself for having torn off an old man's finger. It floated before my eyes, suspended in a Vegemite bottle with a little torn skirt of skin.
"You like it?" He picked his lower teeth with a big square thumbnail. "It makes me want to vomit."
For a moment I thought he was a basher after all and that he had to make himself angry before he could get his fists to me. I pulled down my shirt sleeves.
"But I can see", he said,
examining his thumbnail, "that it'd be a different matter for you. It could even be valuable to you. Now, to someone like me, it's a very unsettling thing to have around the house, and there's also the question of the expense I put into it."
"But this chemist chap…"
"Phelan."
"Phelan. This Mr Phelan gave you the formaldehyde." I did not mean to argue with him. I was trying to point out that I had not put him to a lot of trouble. This is how your mind starts to work after two months in gaol.
"Gave me the formaldehyde? Who says so?" He peered around the cell. There was not much to peer at – we had the big black cockroaches that year, not the smaller German ones which, now I think of it, were probably not German at all. He studied the gaps between the floorboards, then the single shelf which was, so early, already crammed with Goldstein's letters. "Who says so?"
"There are no witnesses," I admitted.
"That's right, Badgery." He grinned and winked at me. You couldn't help liking him when he was like that. He didn't look like a copper at all, but a farmer about to set off for the pub. "So who's to know if I paid for the formaldehyde or not? Perhaps I have a receipt, here, on me, from Mr Phelan. He's not exactly what you'd call a Mason."
"Is that so?"
"It is." He was, suddenly, very solemn.
In the silence that followed I realized that I was not to be bashed. It was only bribery that was required. The night was full of the high-pitched whine of the swamp.
"Here, take it," Moth said, suddenly blown along on the gust of a new mood so that where, a minute before, he had been pensive, as still as a pig on a butcher's hook, he was now all eyes and elbows. He thrust the Vegemite bottle at me. "Here, take it. Take it for a pound. I'll settle for a quid. It's a nasty wormy thing you've done and it's a nasty wormy thing in a bottle, and I don't want it. I hope it gives you nightmares, Badgery. I hope it makes you see things when you're awake."
