by Mark Dapin
Australian Playboy’s low production values left the cover looking like a colour photocopy, and the discreetly nude women inside appeared faintly jaundiced. It was printed cheaply in Hong Kong, and the colours were matched by film separators who had never seen a white woman naked, and did not realise their skin was not white but pink. For a while, they turned the Playmates a diluted shade of orange.
There were probably only two groups of people in the world who ever did only read Playboy for the articles – proofreaders like me, who never got to see the photography, and the blind readers of the Braille edition, which has been distributed by the US Library of Congress since 1970.
The design company where I worked was trying to get rid of its typesetting arm. It could smell the death of the trade, and it coveted the new Macintosh computers that would revolutionise the design industry. The company regularly enticed managers to run the type shop, and then tried to sell them the business. The new managers hired, fired and fled. Both South African Jims were disappeared by a new regime. In the chaos that followed the coup, I was told to retrain as a typesetter. I could not type, but I learned.
A plausible old digger named Bob came over from England to run the shop. He was an affable, gregarious boss, with a beard like lichen and blood thinned by Foster’s.
In the Excelsior Hotel, Bob sat with his mates, including an incomprehensible old Chinese man, a silent Aborigine, a fat Irish bloke, and me – four characters in search of a joke – draining the national supply of tap beer and pipe tobacco. Part of my job was to accompany him to the pub, at lunchtime and in the late afternoon. The Excelsior was a workers’ pub that filled up at 3 pm, when the garbos and the taxi drivers knocked off, and was empty by 8 pm.
My working-holiday visa expired after a year. Bob promised to sponsor me to return to Australia as an Apple Macintosh operator, even though I had no idea how to operate a Mac. It was supposed to take about three months for sponsorship to come through, and Jo and I decided to spend the time in the South Pacific.
We flew via Nauru to the Solomon Islands, where we lived for a few weeks with Chris, then went on to Fiji, Tonga and Samoa. We came back to Fiji to pick up my visa, but discovered my application had been turned down.
For the second time, Jo gave Australia to me. She was born in the former RAAF base in Toowoomba, Queensland, but her family had left Australia for Malta when she was six weeks old. We did not realise this qualified her for Australian citizenship until we arrived in the country, and the passport officer asked why she, an Australian, had come to Australia on a working-holiday visa. I could have had residency all along, since I had unknowingly cohabited with an Australian citizen for eight years, but it could take months to prove. I asked the staff at the Australian Embassy what I could do to get back to Australia quickly.
They said, ‘Marry an Australian.’
Jo and I then asked the woman behind the desk if she would like to be a witness at our wedding.
We were married in a bandstand in a park. We considered having a traditional Fijian ceremony, in which the groom wears a fish tied to his head, but settled on a muu-muu dress and a lei for Jo, and a bola shirt, sulu skirt and sandals for me. It was a lovely day, marred only by a drunk guy asleep in the bandstand, who appears in several of our wedding photographs.
Jo went back to a job as a welfare worker in Australia. I hung around Suva waiting for yet another visa. I resolved to use the time to improve myself. I gave up drinking, started jogging, ate only vegetarian food, went to the gym, and took a driving lesson every weekday. When I was eighteen, my grandad gave me money for driving lessons. I took to the road like a duck to quantum physics. I could not see how it was possible to maintain a safe distance from the both the car in front and the car behind. I gave up after four lessons, and spent the money on beer. My grandad did not mind, since he could not drive, either, and he spent all his money on beer.
My instructor was a gearstick-thin Fijian Indian called Malik. Every morning, he came to my hotel and honked the horn of his small red car. I climbed in, turned the key in the ignition, and stalled.
‘Why can’t you do it?’ he asked me angrily. ‘Why do you always stall?’
His brow furrowed and he gazed up at the blue skies for inspiration.
Malik had the same revelation, day after day.
‘It is because you are an idiot,’ he said.
As we drove down the quiet streets of the Fijian capital, I made every possible driving error. I crunched through the gears as if they were Coco Pops. I lost control of the steering. When I parked, I forgot to put on the handbrake. When I tried to reverse, I took the car forwards. ‘What am I doing wrong?’ I asked Malik.
‘It’s just that you are stupid,’ he told me. ‘Try again.’
Malik chatted as we drove. He asked about Australia, and how much money I would earn. When I told him, he was astounded. ‘And yet you are such a fool . . .’
After my first ten lessons, I started to get the hang of driving. I still stalled a lot, but the gear changes smoothed out. Outside the city, on the wide, empty road that runs around the island of Viti Levu, I could steer a fairly regular course, easily avoiding the rare oncoming vehicle. There were no parking regulations in Fiji, and only one set of traffic lights. I felt quietly confident.
Malik refused to acknowledge my progress. Instead, he started attacking me, lunging at my leg with his long, bony fingers, squeezing deep into my muscles whenever I made a mistake, crying, ‘Stupid! Idiot! Fool!’
On the day of my test, he drove me to the test centre, a dusty complex of offices outside the city. My examiner assured me that no European had ever failed his driving test in Fiji.
I started the car and I stalled. I started again and stalled again. I started again and the car jerked forward, out of the car park gates and into a rabble of squawking chickens engaged in the time-honoured chickenly practice of crossing the road. I swerved to miss the chickens, and aimed the car directly at a group of schoolchildren on the pavement. The examiner grabbed the wheel and saved their lives. I started again. I brought the car up to a speed of 20 km/h, and tried to change gear. The car made a noise like a giant clearing his throat. I tried again and produced a sound like a lion eating a train. My driving test was supposed to last one hour. In fact, it was over in ten minutes, once it became obvious that I had no idea how to change gear. I had not realised Malik’s car had dual controls, and he had been working the clutch for me.
There are fifteen categories on the Fijian driving test marking sheet. Candidates are scored ‘poor’, ‘fair’ or ‘good’ for each one. I received six ‘poor’ marks (for things such as steering, control, braking and changing gears) and only one ‘good’ – for weather conditions.
After the test, I told the examiner I needed my licence to start a new life in Australia. ‘So you won’t be driving in Fiji?’ he asked. ‘You should have told me. Come back tomorrow, and I’ll give you a pass.’
But I returned to Australia unlicensed and married. Bob re-employed me at the typesetters, but retrenched me a few months later. I had given up drinking at lunchtime, and started going to the gym instead, so I was no use to him anymore. As a typesetter, I was underskilled and overpaid, but I would happily have gone back to the reading room if I could have stayed. I had only had one proper job, and had no confidence in ever finding another.
I applied for everything in the paper, without expectation. My manufactured CV looked irrelevant and bare. The time as a typesetter sat oddly beside my fabricated period on UK newspapers. I was terrified we would have to go back to England. We had spent a lot of money in the South Pacific, and had only a couple of months in reserve.
In 1992, I went for a sub’s job at People, which I thought was a ribald general news magazine. I was interviewed by David Naylor, who said I did not have enough experience, but offered me a tryout shift on The Picture, which I refused. I would have drunk my own urine to stay in Australia (I drank Foster’s, anyway, so it would’ve been no great hard
ship) but I would rather have been unemployed than a pornographer.
For six weeks, I worked as a bloke who packs books in boxes and a telephone survey guy, until I found a position at POL, a boutique publishing company that produced the Australian Way, the in-flight magazine for Australian Airlines (TAA). Instead of an interview, applicants were given a subbing test. I knew my proofreader’s marks, had a lazy eye for literals, and I could always press a pun into headlines. I came second in the test, but the journalist who was given the job left within days, and it was passed down to me.
The woman I replaced had been chief sub-editor of the group. The editor-in-chief wanted me to drop the ‘chief’ from my title, because I did not have any Indians, but I clung on to it like a tramp to Special Brew. I subbed Australian Way; Meridian, a quarterly magazine for Midland Bank gold-card holders in the UK; and ultimately the self-explanatory Company Director. At POL I was careless, creative and popular. The staff became a big gang of mates, and we drank together in the Glengarry Hotel in Redfern, where Aborigines bought slabs of VB to take back to Eveleigh Street, and folk groups played in the back room. I miss that pub. The building is still there, but a pub is the people, and the people are all gone.
I learned a lot – although I tried not to be seen to be learning. The editor of both Australian Way and Meridian was Maggy Oehlbeck, a beautiful woman in her fifties who immediately became my friend, and let me build a portfolio writing for Australian Way. I was thrilled to be working as a journalist at last, doing what I always knew I could do, choosing the right words and sliding them into place.
My brother came out from England to see us. We all wanted to go scuba diving on the Great Barrier Reef, but I had an asthma attack, so I had to join the cruise from Cairns as a snorkelling passenger. The trip was designed to take trained divers out past the Great Barrier Reef to an obscure, lesser known formation that could be called the Okay Barrier Reef – or, more accurately, the Crap Barrier Reef.
My brother was happy. He had completed his diving beginner’s course in England, in the North Sea, an act similar to pulling a black bin-liner over your head and plunging into a cold bath. He had never seen anything underwater, apart from his hand. To him, the Spartan submerged gardens of the Crap Barrier Reef were lush coral jungles.
We were joined on the boat by an American fisherman, a small gang of Finnish boys and two women in their twenties. The captain looked like a sailor. His skin was prawn-pink; a nautical cap shielded his fish eyes from the sun. He enjoyed a hearty can of beer for breakfast. The walls of his cabin were decorated with a photo-mosaic of topless women, paparazzied on deck during previous trips. The divemaster affected the burning stare common to psychopaths and men who take themselves very seriously. He guided the divers into the water in buddy pairs. I stayed on board.
The captain tried game fishing and immediately caught a marlin the size of a small child. He reeled it in, whooping and hollering, screaming to the cabin boy, ‘Sacrifice the virgin! Bash her! Kill her!’ and I realised he was both drunk and insane.
The marlin thrashed around on deck, breathing air like an asthmatic through its gills, while the cabin boy beat it to death with a club. Rivulets of blood run onto the boat’s drainage system.
My brother, Jo, and the others surfaced, full of dull stories about the not-particularly-wondrous wonders of the deep. I learned that the Coral Sea was largely composed of water. We pulled up anchor and headed off to our next mooring spot. Darkness fell. The marlin was skinned, filleted and fried and we all sat down to a fish supper – apart from the captain, who had a beer. There were two more place-settings than there were diners. Somebody went off to raise the two women from their bunks. Their bunks were empty.
They were not on deck. They were not in the shower, or the toilet. There was nowhere else on the boat. A realisation slowly dawned. We dropped them off four hours ago and they were still in the water. The shorthand term for this is: dead.
Immediately, the divemaster turned spinmaster and commenced damage control by Big Lie. ‘I never saw them go in,’ he swore. ‘They went in without telling me.’ He did nothing to help find the girls. Instead, he hysterically repeated and edited his alibi, out loud and in the middle of the cabin. ‘I never saw a thing . . . I saw them come back on . . .They must have gone in twice.’
The captain radioed for a spotter plane. Spotter planes do not come out at night because they cannot see anything. Somebody suggested we return the way we came. The captain said the girls would have drifted away by now. He meant he did not know how to plot a course back in the dark. Once he admitted this, the American fisherman took over. He rolled out the charts and explained that we must tack our way back to cover as wide a passageway as possible. This idea never occurred to the captain and he seemed confused about the mechanics involved.
The sea was as dark as the sky. The boat’s engine made a noise louder than screams, so we had to continually shut it off to listen for the cries of women in the water. The Finns called out their names. The night dragged on. The water grew colder. Every hour we searched, it became less likely that we would find them. The American fisherman was completely in command. He ordered the captain around. He ignored the divemaster. He studied the charts until he was convinced we had reached the dive area.
The Finns reported the sound of distant whistles.
Everybody rushed to the prow, crying, ‘Where are you?’
Shrill voices replied, but everything was just an echo. The whistling was an echo of the engine winding down; the words were an echo of the young Finns. At one spot, however, the echo continued when the boat was silent. We powered up and headed in the direction of the sound. The voices became clearer.
Our spotlight swept the water and found the two women, strangers this morning, hugging each other like lovers about to part. It was unbelievable that we should come upon them in the dark when they had been drifting at sea for seven hours. They were only 40 metres from the reef. They were safe because a passenger knew more about seamanship than the captain.
The pair said very little when they climbed on board. Each had already told the other her life story, every secret thing. When they realised they had been abandoned, they had inflated their life jackets and dropped their dive weights. The divemaster reprimanded them, almost threatened to invoice them. They said they were happy to continue the cruise; that they had never given up hope.
My brother had worked in the same camera shop since he left school at sixteen. He spent his savings on coming to Australia for three weeks. When he got back to England, his boss made him redundant.
Back at POL, I met D. She was older than me, but she kept herself looking twenty-one using ti-tree oil and sorcery. She had red hair and I fell in love with her, and we started an affair, and my life became a raw, howling lie. I wanted to leave Jo and be with D, but I could not leave Jo. She was the reason I was in Australia. I always felt I was using her money, long after I was earning my own wage and the profits from the house had been spent.
I was a socialist because I believed in fairness. I thought workers should receive a fair share of wealth. I thought white people should give black people a fair go. I thought schools and hospitals and universities should be fair, and nobody should be able to buy privilege. I thought people should treat others with kindness and understanding, and realise that the only message of art, the only lesson of life, is that we are all the same. I thought the worst thing a man could do was to hurt somebody who had not hurt him. I thought it was not right to leave Jo. I thought it was not fair.
Jo and I had planned to go back to the UK for the first time in four years. We had been living off only half our wages, saving up for the big trip home. We were going to travel through Indochina, Korea and Japan to Canada, and across the USA to Europe.
I could not let Jo go home alone. I told D I would do everything I had told Jo I would do, then come back to Australia to be with her. She said she would wait a year for me. I don’t know if either of us believed it.
/> I rang D from Bangkok, after two and a half months touring Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. She said she was trying not to hate me, but she didn’t want to see me again for a long time. She was casually dismissive. She no longer felt bound by her promise. In the last ten weeks, her career had jumped ahead ten years. She had found a job as a staff journalist, then another as a magazine editor. She would not suffer on her own, trying to sustain a relationship with somebody who was on the other side of the world with his wife. She said she was not going to be a martyr. She said goodbye. My soul screamed.
I was determined never to tell Jo what had happened, not to let it hurt her, but then it exploded inside of me in a cafe in Khao San Road, and Jo laughed because she could not believe what she was hearing, then we cried and cried and cried. I had no plan, no idea of what I, or we, might do now. We decided to continue with our journey, and we flew to Canada, but we could not stop crying and we could not stop smoking and I had to go back and talk to D. I needed to let her know I was not the person she thought I was. Nobody had spoken to me the way she did, as if I were nothing – not since school.
I believed in fairness. I believed when you put pain in the world, it multiplied with each person it touched. When a father beat his son, the son beat all the kids who were smaller than him, who beat all the kids who were smaller than them. If the son had turned on the father, given back what he was given, taken back what had been taken from him, then violence would have become a circle, not a cycle – and when the circle was closed, it would have been over. I believed revenge was a duty, that the person who was hit first should hit back twice as hard, otherwise it could never be over. D had wanted to hurt me, and I could not stand the idea of that, because I only loved her. I loved her but, now she had attacked me, I wanted to kill her.
