The Watcher on the Cast - Iron Balcony - an Australian Autobiography

by Hal Porter

  Taken in by his scholastic mediocrity, his decorative appearance, and velvet manners, Mother is more wholly thrilled than I when Alex, who lives in the next block, calls for me every evening after dinner. That whistle in the twilight! It is well for Mother that she cannot see why his eyes are melting, and his boyish wiles on full display, that she cannot guess that he has an anticipatory erection which, his hand through the large hole in his trousers-pocket, he is fondling as if it were an animal other than he himself.

  I may be wrong in regarding the sexual experiments Bairnsdale children of my day idly and baldly, albeit secretly, carry out as being harmless—but too many of the boys and girls involved in them are now citizens of the greatest respectability and moral fibre, are mothers, fathers, youngish grandparents, pillars of this and that and the other. The experiments seem inevitable enough for, in an era when adults have not kindly provided us with television crime, horror films, too much pocket-money, too many comic strips and pulp magazines, we are still the sort of children who play our own games, sex being only one of the many, and merely sandwiched between the others.

  With Alex Macalister the case is different. He is my first experience of a member of that race which puts a greater value on sex than on anything else: self-discipline, moral convenience, tried-out convention, social unselfishness and the need to make carnal nature walk side by side with reason rather than race ahead without a leash. I learn from him that sex is not a game but something more dangerously exhilarating, more deadly, more victimizing, a disease of the feelings, an itch, a rage, a mania. It is necessary, right here, to confess bluntly that my own nature goads me into using the word mania—that is, for uncontrolled sexual emotion. For me this satisfaction of the flesh is among the least of pleasures that this world affords. The peace it offers is beyond doubt; the price of renewal and renewal and renewal of this peace is its danger. It transforms itself to a drug or a false religion. Some dearth in, or addition to, my constitution inclines me to asceticism. The inclination remains, but I have not always, especially when younger and more polite, when my body was less likely to obey the mind’s orders, been able—thank God!—to follow this inclination. My main efforts on asceticism’s behalf have been negative. I have not hunted, importuned nor initiated. This selfish indifference, however inborn, however unrealistic, however cultivated, to an exercise performed on behalf of Nature and her (his?) unforeseeable plans seems, ironically, to turn to hunters those one does not hunt. Big Brother (Sister?) Nature is older, longer in the fangs, more selfish and more brutal than I. Much of my appeal for Alex Macalister is, doubtless, due to my indifference and selfishness and Puritanical streak. My refusal, on aesthetic or fastidious grounds, to carry my lust-affair beyond a certain stage, makes my appeal to him stronger. However, we certainly go far enough.

  His attentions are flattering, as the attentions of the comely always are: he is fourteen and a half, film-star handsome and popular. I am just over thirteen, not handsome and, while acceptable as a cute little bloke, am decidedly not popular.

  I am therefore particularly flattered by the persistence of his attentions and by being the most . . . the most . . . popular? . . . used? . . . of his many victims, perhaps because I live nearest him and am of the age and construction that give him greatest pleasure. I enjoy his fingers moving, evening after evening, with infinitely varying delicacy—sinister delicacy, I say to myself, already losing my senses in the gloom under the oaks of the Tannies—up and down my fly, up and down, until, tenderly as a doctor revealing something to be cured, he undoes my fly from top to bottom. With the skill of someone older, or the born amorist, his finger-tips now skim my growing pubic hairs and, becoming subtly stronger and more dangerous, along my organ. I try hard not to quiver as he peels down the prepuce, and more firmly fondles. I am lost, and he knows it with his hand as well as his instincts. With perfect assessment of my state, ‘Now?’ he says, ‘Now?’

  ‘I don’t care.’ This is my lie.

  ‘Say, “Yes” or “No”,’ he says.

  ‘I don’t care.’

  He knows I will say no more than that. I will not make myself a verbal accomplice, and open to guilt, with, ‘Yes.’ I will not deny myself the delight of a gammarouche by ‘No.’

  ‘Now?’ How honest, and honestly imploring, and natural he is.

  ‘I don’t care’ Liar!

  Next, in a moment of retrospectively moving and too sadly human fever, he takes me in his arms. His breath smells of jam.

  This labour of teaching me innocence under the dark trees is neither a secret nor a lie. It is one of the facts of animal development all may not know or want to know. It is a truth of existence I am thankful Alex Macalister affirmed for me.

  Later we are boys again, with homework to do. I wipe my hand on the trunk of the oak. We button ourselves. We move from the ancient dark under the trees towards the gas-lamp flickering at the gates.

  ‘Tomorrow night?’ he says.

  ‘I don’t care.’

  We often nearly fight. This, now, indicates to me that our affection is deeper and truer than it seems at the time. What is decidedly valuable about the relationship, which lasts for about a year, is the insight I get into feelings I shall never have the courage, power nor free-wheeling desire to have myself. The experience with Alex teaches me early, and scarcely too early (for which I must always be grateful), to recognize in others the first signs of an emotion getting out of hand, and to escape before it gets out of hand. He introduces me to the sort of conversation I am now skilled enough not to let begin.

  ‘Have you ever done this with anyone else?’ His fingers are at the last button of my fly.

  ‘No.’ This is almost a he, but I count it not so since I know what is going to happen.

  ‘Really and truly?’

  ‘Don’t you believe me?’ This means I am lying because, ‘really and truly’, other boys and girls have been at my fly.

  His hand is now on my flesh.

  ‘What about Herbie Bawker?’ I move his hand, hoping he will put it back.

  ‘I’m going home.’ I am sincerely dismayed that Laddie’s Best Friend should defame my best friend with whom I should no more think of messing about like this than I would of smoking with Willie or reading books with Alex.

  ‘I bet you have with Herbie Bawker.’ I hit his hand away again.

  ‘I have not.’

  ‘Well, who else with?’

  ‘I told you no one.’ I wish he would put his hand back. He knows I wish this. He puts it back.

  ‘Do you like me better than him?’

  ‘You’re all right.’

  ‘If you let me do what I’m doing you must like me best, eh?’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  The conversation, half-jealousy, half a hope to involve everyone equally in his own desire, is, like Alex, a thing from stock. It moves on, if not nipped in the bud, to attempts to arouse me to jealousy by telling me with whom else he has toyed.

  Since I find my involvement in lust with him a matter of some pleasure but of no great moment, his involvement with others is of less moment. Incuriosity is the last breeding ground for jealousy.

  More than thirty years later, when I have returned to Bairnsdale to be a librarian in the same building where I read the afternoons away with Willie Finch, I meet Alex Macalister in a pub. We get gently half-molo on this and other occasions, talking to each about our older selves in the manner of people talking to themselves. He has four children, his eldest son is of the age, and almost exactly the appearance, that Alex was when we were . . . lovers? As we drink, and say nothing at pleasant length, now and again Alex, the father, the exhausted-looking bank-teller, the golfer and delphinium-grower, the looker down the front of the barmaid’s dress, releases directly at me one of those molten glances that seem to offer the world. His good looks have burnt down to another sort of good looks, weary and disappointed above the drip-dry nylon shirt and leather-patched Crombie sports coat. His wife, he tells me, is a s
loppy bitch. I am perversely tempted to recall to him the evenings of 1924, the ground pulsating with crickets as we pulsate with emotion. I am tempted to say, wilfully and to shock, ‘Shall we go to the Tannies?’ or, more shockingly, ‘Does your eldest son go to the Tannies twilight after twilight?’ Nothing, of course, is said. Now we are men, nothing is said. Nothing is done. The time for, ‘Now?’ and, ‘I don’t care!’ is past.

  I do not consciously part from Willie, Herbie and Alex. Their necessary departure from me, perhaps, saves me from having to recall that I outgrow them. Circumstance and the school-leaving age of fourteen strike them from the scene: Willie to be a solicitor’s office boy, Herbie a butcher’s messenger-boy, Alex to spend a year in boarding-school. No good-byes are said. They move away, and habits unravel. I am never again to walk down the library stairs with Willie. Alex is not to stand, hand in pocket, huskily charming Mother in the lamplight spilt on our back veranda while he waits to walk with me into the twilight for a demonstration of desire and fever and jealousy beneath the oak trees. Never again will Herbie and I speed barefooted over the paddocks to the cemetery where, year after year, the martens build and breed under the curled-up eaves of the Chinese oven-altar.

  My other particular friends are a group of four boys who satisfy a side of my nature that begins to develop as puberty does, and I pass the age of fourteen; this is the frivolous side, the belonging-to-a-clique side. By the time I am fifteen we five are glued together by our own crazy jargon and private jokes, our matching frivolity, and false conviction that we are the wittiest and most sophisticated boys at Bairnsdale High School. The five of us are merely quicker-witted, more articulate, lah-di-dah, and almost pansyish. We play Mah Jongg and bridge, adore Colleen Moore and Marion Davies, and intensely admire the Artistic Value of the work of D. W. Griffith and Lilian Gish and Richard Barthlemess and Eric von Stroheim. We begin to wear shoes, and file our finger-nails. We all feel that we would like to be Dornford Yates characters, and regard ourselves as arbiters of taste. We commend or denigrate others, adult or children, for accent, manners, clothing and haircuts. We are harmlessly intolerable.

  The other four boys have parents rich enough for us all to have the use of such things as horses, a motor-boat, all the paraphernalia of comfortable camping. There are cooks or maid-servants or gardeners to chiack, private tennis courts, and elegant gramophones to play the newest records. As the poorest boy of the group, I find myself, without duplicity, yet consciously enough, attempting to be very charming and terribly witty in a self-debunking way. It is impossible, now, to know whether these socially suspect qualifications earn me my place in the grou’p or whether the group stimulates me to the sort of behaviour I find it difficult to restrain, even now. When one is always happy, it is sometimes hard to restrain oneself from being irritatingly too happy. While utterly happy for hours alone with writing or painting, utterly happy alone with Nature’s well-hung sunsets, preposterous cloud-scapes or empty, melodramatic ocean beaches (‘Roll on,’ I yelp at the breakers, ‘thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll!’), I am happy in the same proportion, then as now, in being a penniless playboy, in laughing and mocking and loving my way towards the grave—the one form of behaviour not to be committed in solitude. One needs not so much an audience as a sounding-board, or, at least, someone to forgive one.

  We five are noisily inseparable, the toujours gais. In memory a perpetual blazing summer encloses our scampering activities, our hilarity, our puerile witticisms, our almost ladylike ignorance, and our surprising sensitivity in hooking ourselves immediately to nuances in the world of the cinema, painting, writing and the fashionable dross of the moment. We all read and talk far too much. Our accents are tutti frutti. It is indicative of the effervescent shallowness of our relations with each other that we never have a deep enough affection even to bicker. We are joined by things, by enamelled ideas and hedonic activities. We swim and row and ride, we gossip and hysterically guess, we giggle our way—without once mentioning what we all know—that one boy’s mother is crippled with arthritis, that one boy’s father is the town ram, that one boy has webbed toes. We talk sex—no mention from me of Alex, oh, no, indeed—our total information on the subject of man-and-woman contains as many distortions of fact as a mediaeval bestiary.

  Mother would, I feel, despite her own feeling for gaiety, be less happy about this frivolous clan I am part of if she had more time. She has no time. When I am fourteen, the sixth child is born, the final baby brother. As with the births of my other brothers and sisters, I notice nothing, absolutely nothing of what for months, and immediately, precedes birth. I am told nothing. If hints be humanly and maternally dropped they drop right past me as I go chattering and singing and skipping on towards necessary pleasure, my little fame, the wider world and old age. Nurse Mawdsley’s fur coat hanging on the hallstand is the signal that, once again, Mother is to be wearing a baby as though it were a sublime ornament, and that the weather in the house is to be tempered and tepid, and that, for a while, all family noise is to be pruned so that the unskilful but terribly pointed noises of the new animal can be heard gaining a quality like imperative speech. To me all this is now rather old hat; I have already nursed too many babies too many times, folded too many napkins, held too many bottles at mouths sucking away as furiously as lambs. I perform my minimal duties towards the little creature with a politeness Oriental to the point of cynicism but do not gushingly and forlornly love it as my two sisters immediately appear to do. It is too impermanent. It has none of the immortal quality of poetry. Its talcum powder smell and edible arms will vanish. It will grow rapidly as a weed, will chatter and be nasty, and give itself away outside the family, and grow hairs in its ears, and suffer pain, and die. I am, moreover, somewhat irked, on aesthetic grounds, by the entrance of this latest arrived baby brother. It does not go with my conception of myself which is that I am brilliantly clever, and far too worldly and sophisticated to be the brother of something that cannot utter a word, while I, I, am writing:

  It tossed its weary turrets—old, old;

  It tossed them black in the night-grey sky;

  It tossed its age-old scents and sweets untold;

  It lured me ever on and drew me nigh.

  Rusty iron, dew-damp in the moonlight,

  Lichen-covered. Lichen-covered stone.

  Devils in the blue of moonlight sleeping;

  Shattered faces. I am here alone.

  And so on. And so on. Deserted is the title. It is one of the numerous poems I am always writing at this period, the sort of adolescent poetry with its recurring references to aloneness that matches the masturbation that now has its place in the lengthening list of things that must be done, because I am, despite being a smart-alec, a poetry-writer and noncricketer, deeply conventional. Masturbation is what Alex Macalister has taught me to do, and what acquaintances and friends tell me they do, and it is overwhelmingly what Nature orders me to do. Neither Father nor the Church of England nor any grown-up has mentioned the deed to me: it has therefore little of the delicious flavour of guilt one seems always, nowadays, to be reading of in the lives of Europeans. Masturbation seems to me, then, to be no more than a kind of sly and dirty modesty, a form of good manners like not belching publicly or not chewing with one’s mouth open. Alex Macalister’s revelations of the lunacy behind sex add to the particular value of secrecy, and point up again the fact I had learned with Victor Richmond those years and years ago, that sex is not a game for adults. For adults it is a relentless reality offering, as though at a special and unique bargain price what, indeed, it offers to all—the Darbies and Joans, Héloise and Abelard, Achilles and Patroclus, Nietzsche and his sister, Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas—at a price too often too great to be borne. Knowing, I thought, so much, how nothing I knew! How long it is to take me, strolling wide-eyed, year after year, across the minds and in and out of the bodies of so many people, of differing sexes and ages and colour of skin, in so many remembered places and lost years, to find
out again what I knew when I first looked into Victor Richmond’s eyes. How long it is still to take me to learn whatever else is to be learned is guess-work. In 1925, however, I feel I know all: my constant provings to myself of my own virility do not, I feel, have their quality enhanced by the appearance of a baby brother.

  I am, however, gradually aroused into a sort of useless, lopsided and off-again, on-again pity for child-ridden Mother who seems as happy-go-lucky, busy and noisy as ever. I observe for the first time that the gold of her wedding-ring is worn smooth, that the backs of her hands, the texture of her elbows and the skin at the sides of her neck have all changed. Mother is older. Older than what, I am not sure, for she cannot be older then herself (in 1925 she is thirty-six) and yet that is my impression: older than herself. I sense that she has become an engagement of forces within herself, that the ‘natural’ side of her being, with its demands of being maternally omnipresent, has to stand with conscious nobility, as though defiantly excusing its workaday splendour against the sardonic side, the sharp-shooting and self-ridiculing side. It is her outward expression of this inner war, the behaviour and utterances of a younger and gayer person, that make her seem older.