The Suburbs of Hell

by Randolph Stow

  JULIAN RANDOLPH ‘MICK’ STOW was born in Geraldton, Western Australia, in 1935. He attended local schools before boarding at Guildford Grammar in Perth, where the renowned author Kenneth Mackenzie had been a student.

  While at university he sent his poems to a British publisher. The resulting collection, Act One, won the Australian Literature Society’s Gold Medal in 1957—as did the prolific young writer’s third novel, To the Islands, the following year. To the Islands also won the 1958 Miles Franklin Literary Award. Stow reworked the novel for a second edition almost twenty-five years later, but never allowed its two predecessors to be republished.

  He worked briefly as an anthropologist’s assistant in New Guinea—an experience that subsequently informed Visitants, one of three masterful late novels—then fell seriously ill and returned to Australia. In the 1960s he lectured at universities in Australia and England, and lived in America on a Harkness fellowship. He published his second collection of verse, Outrider; the novel Tourmaline, on which critical opinion was divided; and his most popular fiction, The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea and Midnite.

  For years afterwards Stow produced mainly poetry, libretti and reviews. In 1969 he settled permanently in England: first in Suffolk, then in Essex, where he moved in 1981. He received the 1979 Patrick White Award.

  Randolph Stow died in 2010, aged seventy-four. A private man, a prodigiously gifted yet intermittently silent author, he has been hailed as ‘the least visible figure of that great twentieth-century triumvirate of Australian novelists whose other members are Patrick White and Christina Stead’.

  MICHELLE DE KRETSER was born in Sri Lanka and lives in Australia. She is the author of four novels, the most recent of which is Questions of Travel.

  ALSO BY RANDOLPH STOW

  A Haunted Land

  The Bystander

  To the Islands

  Tourmaline

  The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea

  Midnite: The Story of a Wild Colonial Boy

  Visitants

  The Girl Green as Elderflower

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  Copyright © Randolph Stow 1984

  Afterword copyright © Michelle de Kretser 2015

  The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

  First published by Secker and Warburg, London, 1984

  This edition published by The Text Publishing Company, 2015

  Cover design by WH Chong

  Page design by Text

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters

  Printed in Australia by Griffin Press, an Accredited ISO AS/NZS 14001:2004 Environmental Management System printer

  Primary print ISBN: 9781925240313

  Ebook ISBN: 9781922253125

  Creator: Stow, Randolph, 1935–2010.

  Title: The suburbs of hell / by Randolph Stow ; afterword by Michelle de Kretser.

  Series: Text classics.

  Dewey Number: A823.3

  CONTENTS

  The Suburbs of Hell

  Chapter01

  Chapter02

  Chapter03

  Chapter04

  Chapter05

  Chapter06

  Chapter07

  Chapter08

  AFTERWORD

  Like a Thief in the Night

  by Michelle de Kretser

  The Suburbs of Hell

  For WILLIAM GRONO

  —twenty years after

  ‘The Nedlands Monster’

  Gasparo

  You have acted certain murders here in Rome Bloody, and full of horror.

  Lodovico

  ’Las, they were flea-bitings.

  The White Devil

  Security some men call the suburbs of hell,

  Only a dead wall between.

  Bosola in The Duchess of Malfi

  But the demon, a black shadow

  of death, prowled long in ambush,

  and plotted against young and old.

  Beowulf, tr. David Wright

  In the Bible it says: Behold, I come as a thief. And: The day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night. That always seemed so strange to me, to find talk of thieves in such a place. And not in any condemning way, but dignified, almost understanding; which, when I first heard the words, struck a chord in me, being a thief.

  In this little town where I find myself again, mist hangs unmoving in the few narrow streets. It is a winter day, at the very point when autumn is over at a stroke. Winter began this morning, with brittle light, air keen in the lungs. Across the estuary, which was calmer and had more blue in it than usually, woods and tawny stubble-fields had drawn close, showing details that at most times are blurred by haze. This special day of the year has a smell of its own as well: of chrysanthemum leaves in small hidden gardens, and of woodsmoke from the first open fires.

  A thief is outside. He passes in the street, peers through windows without seeming to. He wants to be in, to handle things, to know. Lonely, one might think; wistful—but not so. A thief is a student of people, knows so many that his head is full of company. I have stood in a pub and seen a face, heard a voice, and slipped out and entered that man’s house, calm in my mastery of all his habits. But then—ah, the thrill then, after my many studies; to find his things, his self, lying opened before me, all his secrets at my fingers’ ends. For some thieves the excitement of that opening is a drunkenness. It is the intoxication of inside. Because a thief is, as he knows, an insider, a master of secrets. But the waiting may be long.

  It is not envy or anything of hatred that brings me again to this little place in the mist which I have known so long and wished no harm to. I have no quarrel with the figures—uniformed in blue jeans and fisherman’s jerseys, for the most part—passing quickly and alone in the dim distance. Nothing that the housewives prize, in the houses crammed cheek-to-cheek along the mediæval streets, touches my desire. I wish them well, or well enough, and their offspring: the divers from the quay, expert in flags and fish and sailings, whose sleep throughout childhood is agreeably troubled by foghorns and exploding maroons and the haunting sea. No; it is never hostility or malice. Simply, it is correction, a chastising.

  In the mist, in the failing light, I pause before a door. He is never here, at this blue hour. The two windows of his large bedroom are open. I think mist must be wreathing above that lonely bed.

  He has looked at me, several times, with a shy curiosity. Once I thought he was going to speak.

  He is in a fury of resentment, in a gambling mood. He is undone by hurt. He has written to his brother to come and live with him. He will buy a boat, which he cannot afford, they will sail it to warm seas.

  In the Bible it says: Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee.

  1

  THE MIDDLE YEARS OF HARRY

  Harry Ufford woke in his armchair and removed from his lap his faithful cat, Rover. ‘Goo and sit on your own self,’ he complained.

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nbsp; An open bottle of whisky and a smeary tumbler were on the table beside him, and he poured himself a large drink and sipped it. The cuckoo-clock showed a quarter to nine. Drinking, he considered the room which he had now got exactly as he wanted it, the frame for his middle years.

  It was a place full of ships and horses: of model ships in and out of bottles, china Suffolk Punches, and many horse-brasses. Over the fireplace, with its dying fire of coal and driftwood, hung a huge print of Constable’s Leaping Horse, faced on the other side of the narrow room by Turner’s Fighting Temeraire. Behind the glass of a bow-bellied cabinet were other knick-knacks, long in the gathering, also bearing on Suffolk or the sea.

  It was a small room in a very small house, in a street which had preserved its mediæval outline and ran towards the place where the landward gate had once opened in the borough’s walls. But Harry Ufford did not feel the narrowness. He had lived in a caravan, on ships and fishing-boats, and for an early year or two in a Borstal. What he felt was warmth and freedom, the privacy of his own special place, the comforting profusion of all those things, so lovingly chosen, which he had carried home to mark his patch. Harry Ufford, at forty-seven, drinking whisky he could pay for and smoking a cigarette of Dutch tobacco, from his usual matey source of supply, was at home like a cockle in the mud.

  But the cuckoo would soon be out; it was near nine on a Saturday night. He glanced at the television set, at the bucket of coals by the dying fire, and, as he set down his empty glass on it, at the vivid paperback about sensational true murders. He was a devotee of real-life murder. But the forms of his society called him out once a week; and dutifully he heaved his large frame from the chair, stood for a moment in thought before the fire, then reached out a tattooed arm to a doorknob, and so made his way upstairs.

  In his brand-new bathroom, the pride of his heart, he washed and shaved. In a brand-new mirror he faced his face. Broad-boned, still lean, a little flushed. He bent nearer to inspect himself, and with a fingertip touched a spot on the side of his nose, made up of little veins. ‘Hot cobwebs, boy,’ he warned himself. He ran his fingers, tattooed L-O-V-E and H-A-T-E, through his black hair. It was thick and long, with no more than a spike or two of grey.

  On his bed a cocoon of army-surplus blankets still kept the shape of him. He had no time for sheets, was not used to them. He changed his underclothes, and carefully fetched from the wardrobe some of his more formal gear. He put on blue Levis, a fisherman’s jersey, a short black leather jacket. Over seaman’s socks he pulled leather boots the colour of Ovaltine, with rather high heels. Then he paused to check on himself in a long mirror, while attaching his front-door key to a belt-loop.

  He was in order. He wore the uniform of an Old Tornwich Saturday night.

  Level with his eye hung a photograph of his father, a very good one, taken by somebody famous in that line. It had appeared in a book, with the caption: ‘Suffolk Fisherman’. A face lined and spare as driftwood, prickly with a few days of white stubble, the bright eyes among the weather-lines cautious, guarded, yet kind.

  ‘You weren’t such a bad old boy,’ said Harry Ufford, out of the wisdom of his middle years. ‘Sorry.’

  As Harry was coming down Red Lion Street he heard, from the mist, a sort of hoarse shout, muffled, neither male nor female. Then plimsolled feet were running towards him, and a short body hit him amidships.

  ‘Watch where you’re gooin, boy,’ Harry said, irritably. ‘Whass that you, Killer?’

  Killer was a twelve-year-old boy, and looked very tough. But his face, in the mist-muted light of a streetlamp, was not self-confident.

  ‘Sorry, Harry,’ he muttered, in an unsteady treble. ‘Harry—’

  ‘Did you sing out just now?’ Harry asked. ‘I thought I hear someone yell.’

  ‘It was me,’ the boy admitted, reluctantly. ‘I seen something. I seen—I dunno. A thing.’

  ‘What you on about, boy?’ Harry demanded. ‘What kind of a thing? A hooman thing?’

  ‘Yeh,’ Killer said, ‘but—I dunno. I weren’t expectin it, it give me a turn, that did. I was comin down the street, from this way, and I was goin to go down that passage, on the left. Then this—this person come out of the other passage, on the right, and stop for a moment in the middle of the street and look at me, and then go away down the other passage where I was goin.’

  ‘Whass so special, then,’ Harry asked, ‘about this person?’

  ‘I’ll tell you this,’ said the child, more bravely, ‘that was something ugly. A loony, I reckon. With an anorak with the hood pulled up, and underneath this mask, the worst I ever seen. And hands with hair on, and claws.’

  ‘Why, I sin hands like that,’ Harry said. ‘You buy them in a joke-shop. George Butt buy one, about a thousand years ago, for makin hand-signals from his lorry.’

  ‘I int daft, Harry,’ said Killer, with returning spirit. ‘I knoo that. What I mean is, that person is mad. Out of his tree. Thass something I could feel, kind of.’

  Harry stood reflecting, thumbs in his wide leather belt. ‘I’ll tell you what, boy,’ he said, ‘thass a joke that’ll make sense to someone. There’s four pubs he could have been headin for, gooin that way. In one of them all his mates are peein themselves just now. Or else he’s disappointed. In this life, dear boy, practical jokes are mostly let-downs.’

  ‘Are you goin by mine, Harry?’ the boy asked.

  ‘I weren’t, but I shall,’ said the broad protective man. ‘I kind of envy you your imagination, young Killer. There int all that much drama in Old Tornwich. Yeh, I shall see you hoom.’

  ‘There could be,’ the boy said, defensively. ‘Dramas, I mean—bad things. There’s that many little passages and empty houses and dark yards and places where the street-lamps don’t reach. What if there was someone mad among us here, in this fog?’

  ‘Fog, he call it. This int no fog, boy.’

  ‘All right, Harry,’ said Killer, restored to normal, ‘you know your way about. I always stick up for you when they call you a dozy prat.’

  ‘I think you’re lookin for a thick ear, doughnut.’

  Companionably they turned into the passage, Harry’s boots ringing on its flags. The stillness of the little town was stiller there, among high narrow buildings. The only light was from lamplit mist in the streets at either end. As they passed, Harry looked carefully into two pitchdark doorways belonging to empty houses. ‘Now you got me started,’ he confessed.

  In the next street they stopped outside a small Georgian house. ‘You carry a key, boy?’ Harry asked.

  The child shook his head, and banged loudly with a shining brass knocker in the shape of a dolphin.

  ‘Well, I shan’t wait,’ said Harry. The reason bein, I have a dark suspicion your mam fancy me.’

  ‘No,’ said Killer, ‘no, thass me dad what fancy you.’

  ‘I hope you have nightmares,’ Harry said, ‘you percocious brat. See you.’

  He walked on down the street. Through the mist the lights of the big ferry, the St Felix, shone bright and blurred. He stopped on the quayside to look at her.

  ‘Great days,’ he said to himself. ‘Great mates, great fights, great piss-ups.’

  He turned and walked on, beside the mist-breathing water, towards the sign of the Speedwell, dimly shining at the far end of the quay.

  Inside Old Tornwich Speedwell, wearers of the Saturday night uniform were out in strength. Somebody’s small dog was wandering, bewildered, through thickets of blue denim legs. Here and there the more formal uniform of a pilot added the touch of class which the Speedwell’s landlady was always pleased to see.

  ‘You don’t get in much lately,’ Frank De Vere said, drinking with Harry at the bar. The sound of his voice caught the ear of retired Commander Pryke, an irritable tippler, who turned to his neighbour and muttered in disgust: ‘De Vere. Bog Irish by origin, and he’s a De Vere.’

  ‘Bog Norman-Irish, perhaps,’ Paul Ramsey suggested peaceably, and puffed at his pipe. He and the Commander
sat a little apart at a table by a window. Outside, the masts of a fishing-boat swayed unsettlingly in the mist.

  ‘It come to me on my birthday,’ Harry was saying, ‘that my wild days was over. I said to myself, I say: Once a week is enough, boy, just to keep up the social intercourse, like. Well, I mean, at my time of life what you’re fittest for is watchin the telly.’

  ‘And I suppose you never drink indoors,’ Frank De Vere insinuated. ‘I suppose you wouldn’t be half-cut at the moment?’

  When scenting an offence Harry’s face took on an odd expression, mild yet grim. Not moving his head, he said: ‘Psychologically speakin, young Frank, you’re a sort of a Peepin Tom. What the Frogs call a voiture.’

  ‘Voyeur, you tool,’ Frank murmured.

  ‘Is that it? Where did I get voiture from, then?’

  ‘Off the car-deck on the Felix, I should imagine.’

  ‘Oh my mind, my mind,’ Harry groaned, running a hand through his hair. ‘Forty-seven, and my mind’s in the state of an old Brillopad. Just you remember what I always tell you: this Abbot Ale causes brain damage.’

  Frank emptied his pint nonetheless. ‘No Dave tonight,’ he said. ‘Courting, I think.’

  ‘Courtin?’ Harry’s glance was sceptical.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘He never shew much interest before. Another thing about him: seem to me he have a surprisin amount of money for a young fella on the dole.’

  ‘All right, then,’ Frank said, ‘he’s out robbing a bank. You senile fucking voiture.’

  Harry looked at him suddenly, really looking, with his jaw set. ‘I think you’re a bit of a nasty bugger,’ he said, without heat. ‘Sometimes I don’t enjoy listenin to you.’

  ‘Joke, mate,’ Frank explained, uncomfortably. ‘Here, drink that up, I’m waiting.’

  While Frank hovered, trying to catch a barmaid’s eye, Harry studied his own thick fingers drumming on a drip-mat on the bar. L-O-V-E; H-A-T-E. Those fists had got him into trouble in earlier days; the optimism and easy affectionateness of his nature turning to violence when he felt affronted. Now he was weighing up the case of Frank De Vere.