Wild Cat Falling

by Mudrooroo

  It’s a broad low loft, the walls plastered over with unframed daubs, mostly in the same style as Dorian’s psychological masterpiece in the Uni coffee shop. I turn my back on the room and fake the big-shot art critic, thinking culture thoughts. Dorian spots me and comes skidding across the room. He slaps me on the shoulder and calls me “mate”.

  “Come over and have a grog,” he says. “There’s beer and wine. Take your pick. I’m doing a fantastic picture I’d like to discuss with you, but got to get this party kicking on first.”

  We down a beer together and the atmosphere of the place starts to grow on me. I begin to dig it in a way.

  “Good boy! You came.”

  I look round and June is there. She has on the same rig as the afternoon and I am glad. It would be awful if she was togged up flash. She sees me looking at her clothes.

  “No time to go home and change,” she says. “I lead a dog’s life.”

  “Yeah?”

  “First party I’ve been to in months.”

  “Why?”

  “One does have to work sometimes to pass exams, you know.”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “It’s a pity. You’d make a good student.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No really. You’ve got the brains. You did Junior by correspondence, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah, in jail. How did you know?”

  “Someone in the Department checked for me. He said you did a pretty brilliant pass.”

  “So what? It killed the time.”

  “Ever feel like going on with it?”

  “What’s the use?”

  “There are such things as scholarships.”

  Sure I’ve got brains and sure there are scholarships. I could blind this mob with science. Why not? Because it’s too late. Too late from the day I was born I guess.

  “You’ve mugged up all this psychology,” I say. “Why can’t you understand?”

  “Understand what?” she asks.

  “What makes people tick who don’t think your way.”

  “That’s what psychology tries to teach us,” she says.

  “Schizophrenia, dypsomania, nymphomania, hydrophobia, paranoia. . .

  She laughs easily. “All those things you suffer from? Like reading a medical book and finding you have symptoms of everything. You’ve had a lot of bad breaks and you’ve built up your own sort of defence against life. Otherwise you’re as normal as they come.”

  I search for words to explain the unexplainable.

  “Wanting to win games and races, get top in exams, the competitive spirit, getting up and on — you’d say that was normal, I guess?”

  “It’s human nature,” she says.

  “What do you call it if you just don’t dig this success jazz? Or maybe dig it in a way, but not really inside you? That human nature?”

  “Of a kind, yes.”

  “Of another kind, see? My kind.”

  She’s a nice doll this one. I even think she believes there’s not all that difference between her sort and mine.

  “Anyway, who cares?” I down another beer. “Let’s dance before I feel sober.”

  We move into the centre and are swept away with the old life force pulsing from a black man’s horn, weeping, wailing, laughing, loving. Mind blank to everything but rhythm and sound. Rhythm and girl. Getting to like this doll. Might even like her a lot. Mind and body heat with desire. Phoney emotion. Phoney crowd. Rich daddies and faking life. Got no place here. Don’t want to stay.

  “. . . jazz as an art form,” Dorian says to his partner as we pass.

  I think he’s telling someone the bull I put over in the coffee shop. Phoney stuff but this mob will swallow anything. The black man’s jazz has got them like it’s got me, but give it a name and they can fake they’ve put it in its place, put it back where it belongs. The master race, and all that crap. Got to show this girl they can’t put it over me. Walk out on her when I like. Snap the fingers, just like that.

  Music stops and she throws back her head.

  “I’ll say you can dance,” she says.

  Damn her. Not the colour so much . . . the way I move . . . more supple than a white boy. . . .

  “You’ll be all right now, won’t you? You know most of the crowd.”

  “They’re a phoney mob,” I say. “The bodgies are better any day.”

  I want her to mind but she laughs and pats my arm. The music starts up again and another bloke swings away with her.

  I get a drink and stand about listening to the talk. Phrases blur in my mind, twist and weave patterns of no account. Word associations rise like bubbles, break and dissolve in air. I flop on the floor with a glass of wine and smoke the long white sadness of a cigarette.

  A girl sits down beside me. I don’t look at her. Don’t say anything. She can come crawling and I will reject her. Cool, like a god.

  “You’re with this jazz, aren’t you? It means a lot to you.”

  I thought it was June, but it’s some other broad.

  “Nothing means anything to me. I dig it, that’s all.”

  “It must mean something to you then.”

  She is a fool.

  “Meaning is an illusion,” I say.

  “Don’t you believe in anything — nothing at all?” She is drunk and leans against me with half-closed eyes.

  “What is belief?” I ask.

  “Got to believe in something,” she says.

  “Like God and all that supernatural jazz?”

  She wrinkles up her face. “Not God. Things like freedom, equality, rights of the common man.”

  I grind out the butt of my cigarette. “They are the absurdest illusions of all — except love.”

  “Don’t you believe in love?”

  “Love is lust.”

  “Then you must believe in lust.”

  “Don’t believe in anything, only jazz. Jazz is love and love is lust and lust is nothing. So nothing is anything.”

  Oh hell! Who cares about love and lust and jazz? I lapse into silence and look at her through the smoke of another cigarette.

  A man drifts into my vision, smoke clears and I see that it is Dorian.

  “What about that picture?” he says. “I’d like to know what you think of it.”

  I look vaguely around the walls.

  “Which one?”

  “It’s downstairs as a matter of fact.”

  The girl hooks her arm through mine. “Go away,” she says. “He’s my baby.”

  He ignores her. “I’d like your advice on a title actually. We could discuss it after the others go.” He looks at me intently under drooping lids. “I want to get something cosmic into it.”

  Suddenly my senses clear. My moment of clarity in drink has come. Everything stands out stark and separate.

  “Call it A Queer World,” I say. “That ought to fit all right.”

  The girl giggles. Dorian gives me a long strange look and drifts off to another group.

  “You don’t approve of poor Dorian,” the girl says. “Right, darling?”

  “Wrong,” I say. “To disapprove of something means that I must approve of something else. It means that I must believe in right and wrong, but I don’t. Both are illusions.”

  “Your philosophy fascinates me,” she says. “Tell me more.”

  I seem to be thinking clear thoughts and search for clear words.

  “Nothing is right; nothing is wrong. Everything exists in itself and by itself. All things are separate and alien from each other.”

  She snuggles closer.

  “I don’t feel alien from you right now.”

  “All things are alien from me. I am rejected and I stand utterly alone. Nothing is mine or belongs to me and I belong nowhere in this world or the next.”

  “Then you believe in a next world?”

  “I believe in nothing and nobody. There is no refuge or comfort anywhere for me.”

  We lapse into silence and I listen to the
fragments of conversation floating to and fro against the rhythm of the canned jazz.

  “ ‘They make a noise like wings,’ ” I murmur sadly. “ ‘A noise like feathers, like leaves, like ashes, like sand.’ ”

  “Are you a poet?” she asks.

  “That was a quotation,” I tell her.

  “What does it mean?”

  “Nothing and everything,” I say. “Like ashes, like love, like sand, like life.”

  “Poor lonely darling,” she says and begins to cry.

  “You’re drunk,” I say.

  “Beautiful boy, we are both so beautifully drunk and this little girlie wants to go outside.”

  She gets up, staggering. I take her arm and we stumble out together. She knows where the place is and then she says: “Don’t let’s go back. Come in here and talk a bit.”

  She pushes open a door and I feel for a switch. “Don’t need any light,” she says.

  I understand her now. She pulls me down with her onto a bed and sighs as her arms twist round my neck. My body is as warm as hers but my mind is detached and cold. This time I don’t feel anything like hate or love. Only feel sick. I throw off her stranglehold and fling myself out the door.

  A trumpet blares a cynical laughing tune as I run out into the lane. The buildings sway inwards on either side. The ground writhes under my feet. I look up and the sky is blurred with reeling stars. Nothing stable and true in all the universe. The footpath rises and sends me sprawling on hands and knees. I get up and struggle on. . . . Like ashes, like sand, like life . . . no refuge anywhere.

  III

  RETURN

  eleven

  Stop running. What’s the hurry? No place to go anyway. Just walk on. Not to somewhere, to anywhere.

  The lights of the milk-bar draw me across the road. In the doorway, I hesitate. At the end of one dark journey, why start on another?

  Two short steps into this place and where will they end? Who will I meet in there and where will the meeting lead? . . . “Boys, boys learn to avoid the occasions of sin. Keep away from bad company as you would keep out of an all-consuming fire.”

  While mind draws back, body takes the fatal step.

  No sign of Denise or anyone else I know much. I sit at a table by myself and watch the make-believe- they-are-alive kids moving like zombies to the jukebox will.

  I look around the familiar whitewashed walls as though for the first time — names scribbled in chalk or lipstick, lovers’ names encircled by diseased hearts. Over there a red wine stain like a misshapen cross, red drops streaming from the arms. Blurred vision of agony. Bitter taste of defeat, the vinegar of futility.

  This bloody place, the occasion of discovery. This table, the one where the youth that was me sat that afternoon on his seventeenth birthday, sucking up coke, relaxed, not expecting anything. . . .

  “Hi, man, where’d you get those sharp new shoes?”

  “Father Christmas put them in my stocking.”

  The door opens and a man comes in. He stands thick-set, hard eyes taking in the room, moving from table to table, face to face. The attendant puts down his paper, talk drops to a murmur and the juke-box stops dead.

  The youth sucks and slouches, playing it cool. He glances out the door. Rain splashing in the street, swirling down the gutters, bouncing off a big black car beside the kerb. . . . The cop could be after anyone in here. It wouldn’t, be him, he hasn’t skited to a soul about the bust. Nothing else they could have on him — unless they found the cosh.

  He gets to his feet, like bored, fumbles for a coin and drifts over to the music box. Rainbow lights flash as he touches the switch. He scans the song list casually. . . That stolen stuff in his room, nice and ready for them to find. Good job he’s spent most of the money.

  A heavy hand falls on his shoulder and he swings round. The big man turns the collar of his coat and flashes a badge.

  “I’m a police officer. Come along with me, please.”

  The youth shrugs violently, but the clasp is firm.

  “How about one last little number like, before we go?”

  “Come on. Get moving. I haven’t got all day.”

  He answers with a what-the-hell gesture to the crowd, and goes out, joined hand to shoulder with the cop.

  The rain has ceased but a few big drops hit hard and cold as they cross the footpath to the waiting car. The detective pushes in after ham in the front seat and the driver cop starts up. The rain pours down again in an angry burst. Windscreen wipers swish-swish, click-click, clearing two watery arcs through which the road curves like a black monster rearing out of the sea. Swish-swish, clicketty-click, juke-box baby seventeen.

  The theme clicks over in his head through the long days before the trial. He sits at last waiting his turn on a bench against a passage wall, fat policeman at the exit, barred window at the other end.

  Juke-box baby seventeen, graduated and got that twist. Seventeen, seventeen. Juke-box baby seventeen.

  Real grouse birthday this. First time he’s had a party. Crazy celebration. Big thrill. Going to get what he deserves — a real big present at last. . . . Payment for the cosh they found in the lane, the things in his room, the knife under his pillow. . . . Gone, man, real gone. . . . And may they rot in hell!

  Seventeen, seventeen, graduated and stood his trial. Real big kicks at seventeen. . . .

  “Right, boy. Your turn.”

  Gee, that fat old square Robinson’s turned up again. Thought he’d be content with the statement, but no, here he is in court. Dear old guardian angel probation officer. What a trouble the youth’s been to him since he chucked that nice job, and started flitting from hostel to rented room, from rented room to rented room.

  “Now listen to me,” he says. “Don’t get smart with the magistrate. No lip, understand? No talking unless you’re spoken to. Remember to answer his questions politely with a ‘Sir’ and you should be all right. I’ll be behind you all the time.”

  They go in and the cop plonks himself down inside the door. The defendant sits at a table beside old Robinson, long-haired youth and pudgy man. . . . The youth wishes they’d let him sit alone so he could be the centre of attention. Like Marlon Brando, real tough bodgie mumbling out the side of his mouth.

  The special Juvenile Magistrate trots in, trying to stride importantly. No good. He hasn’t the height to command respect. The court rises, the youth rises and towers over the lot of them. The magistrate moves to the bench and sits on a stool that is raised by two fat legal tomes. He sits. The court sits.

  Impressive silence broken by a snigger. Jehovah glares. Guardian angel’s wing digs defendant in the ribs. Business begins.

  The cop who arrested him takes the oath. Exhibits — cosh, knife, stolen clothes — to be examined later by the Magistrate. Detective sits. Guardian angel is summoned and flaps to his feet.

  “Your Honour, the Child Welfare Department has had trouble with the defendant ever since he left Swanview, where he was sent at the age of nine, after being charged and found guilty of breaking and entering. There he received a fair education and the annual reports showed him to be not unintelligent. You have the Department’s report on this matter, sir. At the beginning of last year, he was released and placed under my guidance. The Department found him a good position in a reputable firm and accommodation in a boys’ hostel. Unfortunately, even with these advantages, he failed to make good. He moved from the hostel and left his job without my knowledge. I lost contact with him until I was notified by the police that he had been picked up on a car stealing charge. He was committed to the juvenile section of the jail for a term of six months. After his release, I again found him a job and respectable lodgings, but he again eluded me. I understand that then he went to live in a Native Settlement where he consorted with some of the most undesirable elements. He is of part aboriginal descent and this appears to have made him acceptable there. After some weeks, he left the camp and rented a room in the city, but he did not reform or try to find a jo
b. Instead, he frequented a milk-bar, which is known to the police as a breeding place of crime. I have stated that he is intelligent and could quite easily find work if he wanted to, but he spurns all efforts to help him and I honestly believe him to be one of the most difficult types to deal with. Sir, may I hand you the statement which he dictated to me at the Receiving Home?”

  He passes up two typewritten sheets of paper. The Magistrate adjusts his glasses and puts on an expression of deep concentration. Traffic noises filter into the room. A cop shuffles his heavy feet. Coughs echo intermittently. Asthmatic breathings wheeze about.

  The Magistrate relaxes his brow and looks up. “Will the defendant take the stand, please.”

  There is no stand. It means he must stand out in front.

  “You say in your statement that you do not believe in God?”

  “Yeah.”

  A nudge from the probation officer.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “So you do not want to be sworn in on the Bible?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Will you give your word of honour then, to speak the truth?”

  “How can I?”

  A nudge from Mr Robinson.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That’s better. Why did you commit the crime?”

  The youth clutches wildly at a thread of hope. “Couldn’t get a job and had no money. I needed the dough for food and rent.”

  “Did you try to find work?”

  “No.”

  “And why did you steal the clothes?”

  “All mine were shabby and out of date so I couldn’t mix with the mob. You know they look down on you if you don’t look sharp.”

  “I hope you will answer this question correctly now. Do you feel any guilt for what you have done?”

  “No. I was starving and my rent was due. That square had what I wanted and more than I did. Those people lived in luxury.”

  “What does the word ‘square’ mean?”