by Mudrooroo
She turns to the others. “This is the boy I told you about. The one I met on the beach.”
I take a deep drag on my cigarette. Nerves, but I eye them straight. Some of them look like queers, but I could be wrong. Maybe that’s just the look they get round here. Anyway they are a new sort to me. I make a motion of accepting them, but I am on my guard. They sit at my table and I hear them call the girl June. They order coffee and she talks to me. Trying to make me feel at ease, I guess, but I am tongue-tied and miserable as hell. What did she tell them about me? That I am coloured and an ex-con? Does that make me interesting? A sort of curiosity?
“Frank and Bill are doing Social Anthropology,” June says, like reading my mind. “I thought you might be able to give them some fresh slants.”
“Why?” I ask.
“Oh, because you seem to have ideas and you’re not afraid to express yourself.”
Frank is a thin, intense looking chap with a neat dark beard. Bill has a round smooth face with a stuck on smile. They look at me and I look back at them. “So what?” I say. “What do you want to know?”
“We wondered for instance, whether you might have any personal views on this Austral Grove experiment? I mean, do you consider it a good idea — a sort of stepping-stone from camp life into the general community?”
I listen to their bull-dust questions and I hear myself make the sort of answers they expect. ... Yes, I have been to the Grove a few times. It might work out. Some of them are really trying to make the grade. Drink a problem of course. . . .
The other part of my mind mocks the phoney words. . . .
A problem all right. Getting onto the stuff to start with. Can’t trust just anyone. Might be a police pimp laying a trap. Got to know a good sympathetic white to buy the grog and sell it back to you for double the price. If you can’t find him, wood alcohol, metho and so forth will do. Doesn’t taste so good, but gets you drunk quicker and costs less.
I remember the last time I was there. Found an empty hut with broken window-panes and settled down with a bottle of cheap sweet wine. Some of the men came in with a few more bottles and the women gathered round like flies. A big full-blood gin cottoned onto me.
“Give us a drink, yeller feller. Just a little one and I’ll be nice to you. . . . Come on. . . . Jesus, that was good. Just one more. Come on. . . .”
Shrieks of laughter, sound of breaking bottles, angry argument and drunken couplings. . . . Warm brown breasts and heavy nipples rising and falling in drunken sleep. . . . I staggered out, vomited and stumbled to a tap. . . .
This Bill is still talking with his all’s-right-with-the- world smile. “It is obvious of course,” he says, “that given ordinary decent conditions they would behave like ordinary decent citizens.”
“I know,” I agree, as though it is as simple as that. I don’t even know how his “ordinary decent citizens” behave or whether they exist at all.
A thin blue-stocking kind of girl with big specs and straight short hair pulls up her chair and listens earnestly.
“What I always think,” she comes in, “it’s not the natives need educating so much. It’s the whites.”
I guess from the way she looks at me that this is the closest she ever got to an Aboriginal. She offers me this chewed old bit of white corn as though expecting me to seize on it with pleased surprise. How broadminded, how perceptive to express a big, brave thought like that! I try to think of something withering, but all I can come up with is: “You’re kidding!”
She doesn’t take it for sarcasm. In fact it stimulates her no end.
“Indeed, I’m not,” she says. “I feel very strongly on this point. I think it’s quite arrogant and stupid of us to want to drag the Aborigines into our so called ‘civilized’ society. Why can’t we leave them alone? They have such wonderful beliefs and customs of their own. It’s not as if we had anything better to offer them. Don’t you agree?”
“Sure,” I say and she fixes me with a fascinated stare. Maybe she thinks if she keeps it up long enough I will leap out and do a corroboree in the middle of the floor.
The others seem to realize that the polite possibilities of this subject are about exhausted and the conversation veers from me. I half listen as they rave on about last term’s lectures, musical recitals I have never heard, plays I have never seen, books I have never read. I sit back mute and hide my feelings behind a cynical smile.
They’ve got onto art now, comparing, praising, defending, condemning this artist and that.
“I see you’re looking at Dorian’s masterpiece,” June says suddenly, nodding towards a picture on the near wall. “What do you make of it?”
I hadn’t registered to it before, except to note that it was called for some reason “Man in Revolt of Exile”. I can’t see any man, only a revolting mess of hectic semi-circles and triangles, but I have been listening enough now to get a line on this art jazz.
“It seems to hit something in me,” I say. “There’s a certain mood of — well, melancholy, going off into utter, black despair.”
They all stop talking and give me the floor.
“I’d say it was a sort of battle between light and dark. The dark nearly wins, but the fight goes on. Towards the centre there is this glow of hope, but very faint of course. Here and there it flares up into a rage, but that gets submerged in these sort of frustrated angles. I’d say the whole thing has a kind of jagged rhythm.” The artist chap called Dorian sits listening intently.
“Or am I being too psychological?” I ask.
“No, no, not at all,” Dorian says eagerly. “The whole thing’s intensely psychological. Rage, anger, despair, frustration — they’re all in it as you say. I was in a funny mood when I painted it and you’ve interpreted it very well. Do you paint too by any chance?”
“No,” I say. “I hardly do anything except sit and think.”
Dorian seems pretty much my way now. He points out another picture that he says he painted in protest against interference with the natural bush in King’s Park. This art jargon is a pushover once you have the key to the artist’s mind, so I do pretty well with this one too.
This leads to a heated discussion about whether some of the Park should be converted into sports grounds.
“What do you think about it?” June asks me.
I have no interest in the subject and no views on it at all, but I suppose I have to say something.
“Sport is a bore and the bush is a bore too, but at least nature is a natural bore so why not leave it alone?”
They all laugh at this though I had not intended it to be funny. I was just answering as truthfully as I could. Anyway, I seem to have been a success with this mob. They ask me a few friendly-curious questions about myself, where I come from, how long I have been in Perth, and what my main interests are. I can see June has not let on about the jail part for some reason and I am about to tell them myself. I mean, why not? It is enough of a drag to have been in jail without having to pretend I haven’t. But June cuts in quick.
“He only got here yesterday,” she says; “doesn’t know many people yet, but his hobby is jazz. I mean — ” she turns to me — “you’ve made a special study of it, haven’t you?”
They ask me about it and I talk back some of the book stuff I have read. Jazz, the negro art, evolved in the plantations, in slavery and exile and misery. Triumph of the human spirit. The only valid new art to arise in this century. The only worth while thing to come out of America. They ask me about the
Australian Aborigines, whether they could ever produce an art to rival jazz. I don’t know much about the Aborigines or how they feel, but I have a shot at answering. “For one thing,” I say, “they wouldn’t have a chance against the imported stuff. It’s big business now and anything home grown would be kept off the market. But, anyway, the Aborigines wouldn’t be interested. If there’s money to be made from their music the whites will use and debase it to suit their ends, until there’s nothing left in it of the black
man’s soul.”
Dorian says he thinks jazz is fascinating too and asks me to a party in his loft tonight. The others all seem to be going, so I say O.K. I don’t know why, because I don’t really want to go. Or maybe I do. They’re not my crowd, but I suppose they’re trying to make me feel at home and they’re interesting in a way.
It’s time to leave now and I follow them out. June puts a hand on my arm.
“I’ve got to go now,” she says, “but I’ll see you tonight.”
She tells me how to get to the loft and hopes I enjoyed the afternoon. I tell her it was quite an experience to meet some real, big intellectuals.
“You can hold your own with them pretty well, can’t you?” she says. I think she means it in a friendly way and I smile down at her to save answering. Then I watch her move away across the lawn, calling out to a friend with that easy belonging voice of hers.
nine
It’s early evening time and my stomach’s empty except for the coffee and the grog. I make for a Greek cafe back in town. It is stinking hot inside and the greasy three-course meal is no better or worse than I expect. I gulp it down without enjoyment and without disgust.
My hunger sated, I buy a paper to read the time away till eight o’clock. I turn automatically to the police court news. One acquaintance has been arrested for breaking and entering, two others for attempted rape, and the police have promised an all-out drive to put down the bodgie element. I turn the pages until only the table top remains to be read, its blotches and stains a sickening story of many horrible meals.
I wonder whether I still consider myself a member of this bodgie element. I don’t want to belong to them any more. They are a pack of morons. Clueless, mindless idiots. What about this other mob? No good pretending I could ever belong with them, even if I imagined life would be any better if I did. Maybe they are really as bored in their way as I am in mine and I amused them for a moment or two being like different. That chap Dorian was a fool really. It didn’t occur to him I wasn’t talking about his bloody awful picture, only about myself. Even that whisper of hope I talked about was me. If I let up a minute on my mental discipline it creeps in again suggesting there might be something in life besides absurdity — even a hint of meaning. I have to shut it out because it is a liar. It is the most dangerous illusion of all. Except maybe love!
Another hour to this damn party. Will I go or not, and if not, where? Back to the milk-bar gang? Pay good cash to see the glorious fakery of blown-up life from the United States of Utopia? Not on your life! I could go to the public library perhaps and pinch a book to take back to my dingy little room. I remember the book in my pocket. Not bad, the bits I read of it. Not about anything much except a sort of senseless onward dying. Like life.
I take it out and dip into it again.
“No, no. We could start all over again perhaps.”
“That should be easy.”
“It’s the start that’s difficult.”
“You can start from anything.”
“Yes, but you have to decide.”
“True. . . .”
Hell, don’t say there’s a sermon wrapped up in this somewhere! Maybe not . . .
“That’s the idea, let’s ask each other questions.”
“What do you mean, at least there’s that?”
“That much less misery.”
“True.”
“Well? If we gave thanks for our mercies?”
“What is terrible is to have thought.”
“But did that ever happen to us?”
“Where are all these corpses from?”
“These skeletons.”
“Tell me that.”
“True. . . .”
Good stuff this. Not even pretending to make sense but making it. Eyes read on and mind looks through some backroom window at a miserable boy on a sagging bed stacked with shabby paper-backs. Chair, wardrobe, rickety table, suitcase spilling out unwashed clothes, empty tins in dusty corners, empty bowl on a mass of half burned papers in a blackened fireplace, glossy black cockroach scuttling over a pink nude in an open magazine, dust particles floating like tiny worlds in a beam of sunlight from a window, lean cat silhouetted for a moment against the light. Three hungry days. No coin and tomorrow the rent. . . .
Brrrh . . . brrrh . . . alarm noises shatter his sleep. He slaps at the clock and yawns, his mind slowly absorbing the fact that it is time for action.
Cold hands tidy dishevelled clothes, pull on muddy boots and long black duffle coat, pocket a screw-driver and a cosh.
His feet move reluctantly down the dark passageway and out the front door. He’s got to go through with it now. Got to get coin and some new threads. Nothing to worry about. Cased the joint yesterday. Should be a pushover.
Raining and the night is moonless, starless, bleak.
The best kind of night for a bust. Drops fall on his face, the trees sough and rock in a reeling jive. A lull and the trees seem to wait. Next number starts with a frantic rush and the dance goes on, moan of wind sax, drumming of striking teeming rain, flapping and twisting of wild demon shapes.
The youth moves quietly, hood pulled up over his head, raindrops on eyelashes turning the street lights into rainbow shining gems. Running water splashes over his boot tops, soaks his socks and clamps his jeans damply to long native shanks.
Swell night, real dark and everything fresh like new from the rain. Real beautiful in a way, all aheave with the storm. Real crazy-mad night for a night cat, too numb to feel the cold. He feels belonging in this dark, not like in the day, outcast and naked. Nigger- nigger-go-away-day.
Avenue ends at the shopping centre and not a soul about. Faint light through a plate glass window. He peers inside, making out counter and stacked shelves. Grouse night. Everything’s grouse, except how the hell to reach the back of this place.
He remembers a narrow alley and makes around to it, keeping close to the darker side. Loitering with intent! Hands feel out a six foot corrugated iron gate and clutch the top. Edge hurts but is too blunt to cut. One foot on block and padlock. He heaves up and straddles. Gate creaks. He drops, sinks into soft mud and crouches, listening with panting breath. Nothing but the rain and the wind. Desert boots ruined, but otherwise everything going fine. Hard for him to make out the selected shop from this side. He peers through a small window towards a faint light — no one there. Store-room stacked with cardboard cartons, faintly lit through panelled glass door of the front shop.
He feels round the small window and finds that the putty is rotting and flaking off. If the pane was out he might be able to reach the half-turned key in the back door. Screw-driver swipes off putty and jerks out tacks. He slips the jemmy edge under the pane and eases the glass until it is almost free. Good. Just one last little jab. Crash! Shatter of glass on metal. Hell! He freezes and crouches with nerves strung tight. Faint sound on sensitive ear-drums. Someone turning in bed. Probably some lousy Jew who counts his money every night!
Hand reaches through the window, fumbles towards the key and pulls it out. Hard to turn. Ah! That’s got it. He slips through and shuts the door, pauses inside, dripping water from drenched clothes, face hot and feet icy cold. He peers about, mind and body alert. Door into the shop unlocked. Enters warily, remembering the odd night cop.
He finds the cash drawer on the counter and forces the cheap lock. Stuffs notes and silver into deep pockets and darts swiftly to collect sharp clothes. Finds an empty carton and shoves them inside.
Grouse! Fifty quid at least and all these new threads. Rent taken care of and money over for sharp shoes. Swingiest cat in town!
Off now before the luck runs out. Locks the back door and leaves the key in for kicks. Everything swell. No rain now to wet the loot. Damn! He’s lost the bloody cosh! Hopes it’s dropped in the mud so they won’t find fingerprints. Cops haven’t got his prints yet anyway, so should be safe enough. The night is a friend to the night cat. Nobody sees. . . .
The Town Hall clock strikes eigh
t. Party is on in the loft! I go on reading.
“Let’s pass on now to something else, do you mind?”
“I was just going to suggest it.”
“But to what?”
“Ah!”
“Suppose we got up to begin with.”
“No harm in trying.”
“Child’s play.”
“Simple question of will-power.”
“And now?”
“Help!”
“Let’s go.”
“We can’t.”
“Why not?”
“We’re waiting for Godot.”
To go or not to go? Read on.
“All the dead voices.”
“They make a noise like wings.”
“Like leaves.”
“Like sand.”
“Like leaves.”
Might find a clue in this crazy stuff.
“Leaves?”
“In a single night.”
“It must be spring.”
“But in a single night!”
“I tell you we weren’t here yesterday. Another of your nightmares.”
“And where were we yesterday evening according to you?”
“How do I know? In another compartment. There’s no lack of void.”
“Good. We weren’t here yesterday evening. Now what did we do yesterday evening?”
“Do?”
“Try and remember.”
Denise. Dark hair on the pillow. Soft like silk. Waiting in the milk-bar now I guess. Keep out of that old trap, man, just for tonight. She likes you and she makes you soft. And what about that June doll? What about her? Don’t know. Don’t care, but might as well find out — for kicks.
ten
A dingy lane leads to the party place. Muffled jazz beats the air that has swapped today’s heat for the different animal heat of night. A sea breeze cools me a little as I stand wondering how to get in . . . nighttime, play-time, cool-time is wonderful.
A few others drift along and I go in with them. The music wails louder as we climb the stairs and are drawn into a room pulsating with rhythm and life. It’s like a bodgie party in a way, but not really like. This mob is different, forcing die mood, too much highbrow talk, not drifting easily with the jazz current like the milk-bar gang. I feel like out of place, an outsider looking in, no part of this set-up. But now I’m here I guess I’ll have to act out the night.
