by Hal Porter
You don’t really know what life’s about.
I didn’t say I did. I’m merely alive. And I’m learning what others say life is, what others act life as. I’ll learn, I’ll learn, I’ll learn.
I ask one of the girls to gather together such of Wock’s books as are kept in the classroom cupboard. They have all been corrected except one. It is the only one I open. Leave the others closed, as Wock closed them on his smudgings and waverings and blottings: his mother will open them and blot them more. I open his essay book, and correct the last of his essays, the uncorrected one on the topic, ‘Look before you leap.’ There are four mistakes only in spelling; in the essay before there are nine. Steadily Improving I write in red ink, shutting down my face to zero, and shutting the book, and that is nearly the last of Wock for me, for the workaday me who must go on living as he must go on being not alive. Steadily Improving: nearly the last of Wock. Nearly the last of an old me?
Midsummer mid-afternoon: the school is lined up on the drain-edges. A hundred wreaths, florist or back-garden, have gone to the funeral parlour. The school band, with the drum enshrouded in two of the caretaker’s black Italian cloth aprons, has gone to the funeral parlour two blocks away. It is ice-cream weather, swimming weather, a hot hot day. Across the road, with her class, Miss Hart stands under a grey silk umbrella. I know, I know her stays are cutting ridges into her flesh. I know where. The children swing their towels and bathers.
Suddenly, far-off it seems, either in the remotest depths of heaven or the last echoing cavern of one’s own heart, the drum is heard. The funeral is on the move. Everyone becomes, fleetingly, still and silent; a veil of embarrassment drops smartly across faces, and instantly up to reveal faces more alert and different. The newspaper photographers, aloft in the trees, stir like apes and drop their cigarettes. The perambulator-wheeling women stop. The Scotswoman comes from the tuck-shop wiping her fat hands on her girlish hips. Five men, one holding a pot of beer, come from the Bristol Hotel opposite. There is a change in the tone of the thudding of the drum: a corner has been turned, and Wock is on his way.
‘S-s-straighten up,’ hiss the teachers, discreetly. ‘Heads-s-s down. S-s-silence. Heads-s-s. S-s-silence. It’s-s-s coming.’
The men from the hotel take off their hats with slow-motion gestures; the one with the pot of beer drains deep, and conceals the empty pot beneath his empty hat.
Ravished and torn, tough and sentimental, harsh and sensitive dope, I bow my head; I close my eyes; I press my palms on them as I used to in Kensington. Through the dark swamped with phosphenes, Wock’s hand, outstretched for the fall of the strap, pokes itself into the core of my mind.
There is laughter.
Yes, I hear laughter, the laughter of hundreds of children. It is stifled, it is hands-over-mouths laughter, but it is laughter enough to be heard through the thudding and ever nearing thudding, the tell-tale heart thudding of the drum.
I open my eyes.
In front of the mourners’ cars, in front of the cars of wreaths, in front of the flower-covered coffins in one of which are the nasty remains of Steadily Improving Wock (Coffin One? Coffin Two? Coffin Three?), in front of the school band marching out of step, in front of the drum swathed in the caretaker’s aprons, trots a little fox terrier. He is in some sort of step, three or four trots to one drum-thud. That is all I see before I close my eyes again on the laughter-congested faces.
Avalanche.
Miss Hart.
Wock.
In a flash that seems to mean everything, as though I have been electrocuted into another person, as though all the lights have been turned on in another dimension, I appear to see and understand that Romeo and Juliet, Troilus and Cressida, Dr. Crippen and Ethel le Neve, Miss Hart and sex, are terribly amusing, that Isadora Duncan and the scarf, Rimbaud and his cancer, Wock and death, are terribly amusing, that sex is hilarious, and death too screamingly funny for words. Yet, at this discovery from nowhere, this vision that all others can laugh and laugh and laugh, tears crowd into my eyes, for I have no sense of humour at all. I remove these tears, two or four only, behind the backs of the convulsed children as the grinning dog, with the alert perkiness of a racecourse tout, leads the way to the cemetery and its fountain edged by docks (delphiniums? antirrhinums? lavender?), leads the way to some sort of verity.
I have been warned.
I have not yet been completely punished.
I do not much heed the warnings.
I go on writing poetry opalescent and baroque. I run up the Friday stairs of the Cafe Latin—‘Come sta, Camillo?’ I walk, bold and slick as a Colette gigolo, along the carpeted corridor smelling of soup of the evening, bee-eaut-i-ful soup, to Room 12. I smuggle my black suit smelling of new black stitching into Aunt Rosa Bona’s house, and hide it, in its box, in the bottom of my wardrobe. The school year ends. Leaving
Williamstown, and Miss Hart, and Gregan Me Mahon, and Charles Wheeler’s thumb, and Wiggy Binder in her tutu—oh, leaving everything and much of myself—I climb into the train for Gippsland at Flinders Street station. As the train starts I silently sing Mother’s song: ‘Good-bye, Melbourne Town! Melbourne Town, good-bye!’ I do not consider bursting into tears. I am smoking a cigarette, a Goliath, in a holder. I am hatless—this is bold and dangerous of me still. I am hatless and, I tell myself, heartless.
Oh, you fool, you fool, you fool!
My first impression of Gippsland and Bairnsdale, a dozen years before, was of infinity and light; one felt oneself the speck in the core of an illimitable globe of crystal.
In December 1928, returning hatless, and chastened to what I call heartlessness (‘I am world-weary! What is Life? What is Truth?’), with my supply of romantic hopes already diminished, and many of my story-book illusions and gim-crack ideals mauled by myself and others, it is uplifting to be bowled over again by the same impression of space and dazzle. This was no heaven to nose-dive from like one’s own self-appointed Lucifer. It maybe that, adolescently chasing the dreams and fantastic lanterns of others through alleys and cafes and studios and dishonesties and pretensions and ageing flesh, I am only chasing what I have run away from, that I am much more homesick, much more a bungling, simple country boy than I admit or act. It maybe merely no more than that the weather persists perfect, day after day, and that the months of December 1928 and January 1929 are so diamond-bright, and saturated in such a purity of heat, that they are, in memory, two of the most delicious months of my life, months cleansing and electrifying and sensual. I tear through the flashing streets presenting a city-burnished self at the back doors of my acquaintances. I find everything about them beautiful. How wide their streets! How wise and recognizable their gestures! How uncultured and fearless their voices! How strong as ambrosia their cups of tea!
I remarry, as it were, my four frivolous friends of High School Days. We swim hour after hour after hour in the green water under the willows by the Rowing Club under which I never did stroll hand in hand with Olwen Connor, and under which Francesco Floriani from Purgatory and Napoli either waited or did not wait for me. We five gallop horses up into the hill-billy, derelict gold-mining towns to steal walnuts and limes from orchards belonging to no one. We row on the glittering river, or travel by steamer down it, past hop-kilns and peach-orchards and maize-crops and pumpkin-paddocks, under the cliffs of Eagle Point, between the silt jetties, through the lakes crowded with black swans, to the Ninety Mile Beach, where we are thrown about in the green champagne waves of the ocean, and then lie, hour after sensuous grilling hour, powdered with sand and salt on the three-hundred-yards-wide beach, or in the valleys of the dunes, murmuring funny filth and wild scandal and inanities. We dashingly wear Palm Beach bathers which are just in, and be-bobbled sombreros, and spectacles of blue glass set in wire that cuts the bridges of our sun-raw noses. About us, reading novels by Elinor Glyn under Japanese sunshades, sit women, their faces glossy with cold cream, in wide-legged beach pyjamas: the first, but hardly—alas!—the last, women I am
to see in trousers.
Breasts are not fashionable. Nevertheless, I find myself, covertly, from under the Mexican brim and behind the blue glass, spying on those fuller breasts that defy fashion.
Bunty becomes reformed, in my opinion, to someone else tempting and exciting. I conceive her to take on a resemblance to Lila Lee the film star. Pressing more closely to her than in the old days, I dance with her in the Fire Brigade Hall, in the Mechanics’ Institute, in the Picnic Point Hall, whirling giddily around in the Valeta and The Pride of Erin and the Gipsy Tap, even attempting the Varsity Drag. After the dances, I fervently wrestle with her under the overhanging shadows of garden cassias on the way home, or, under the stars, at her front gate, sophisticatedly nibbling at her earrings, fondling her little flat breasts, licking the nape of her shingled neck and introducing my tongue into her mouth, but never succeeding—she is not Miss Hart—in getting my hands near where they have decided they would like to get. These struggles with Bunty exhilarate me much more than Miss Hart’s struggles with me: I have several seminal accidents. For the first time in life my face is slapped. This is, for some atavastic reason, a shocking and humiliating experience, almost an emasculating one. It is particularly so for a green city slicker who is less interested in getting what he does not get than in displaying the few technicalities he has acquired on and in a body bulkier than Nigger’s used to be, more shameless and shameful and unreal than Bunty’s which, like mine, has bones that are near the surface, angular lithenesses, a waist, and the acid freshness of immaturity.
As much as I am in love again with my old Circe Bairnsdale, so I am in love again with home. This love makes me drift, giddy with affection, my hand outstretched to touch and stroke, among objects familiar from the first: the Renardi, the red design on the Rockingham plates, the silver with its sharp edges, and incised and incisive crests, blurred by years of Saturday morning polishing, the fading gold on the reeds and cranes of the Japanese screen, the iron boilers large enough to stew a warthog in, the battered copper saucepan in which eggs are always boiled and the Christmas Pudding money, the apple-corer, my own wooden egg-cup and tooth-marked silver spoon. I can stand, dizzy with sun, and the burring of bees, and the flicker-flicker of skippers; savouring that recaptured sense of abundance, among Mother’s cucumber vines, the rows of butter beans and red beet and celery and shallots, the loganberry canes, the loaced plum trees, the taller bushes from which I stole camellias for Olwen Connor—always the perfect one that Mother had been gloating on, and missed, and had to be told lies about. I am interested—objectively, I make clear to me—to discover that, whatever I think of the family, however much I curl this or that affected, seventeen-year-old Up, however much they irritate or bore—my brothers and sisters, Father, Mother—I love them with an animal blindness, a nerve-shot conviction more powerful than duty. This is an intensification and refinement of the feelings I used to have in the tumultuous Sale days when, in a riot of child cousins and bubbling babies and squealing aunts and swearing uncles, I knew it would be no trouble at all to grow on the spot a beard and a German-Swiss accent, and stomp about crying, ‘Cut ’em! Slash ’em!’ to the still existing past.
It is now the present. Mother’s last baby is a boy of six who has already cut off the top of one finger with the axe, even though he is not to go to school until next year. I wonder if Mother will walk to school with him on his first day. She is now a different mother. All that early intensity is bygone. Or is it? Are her needs, and the needs of youngest sons different? I do not know; I do not know.
I have hidden my cigarettes, washed my mouth, and chewed a clove, well before the train gets to Bairnsdale. I see Mother before she sees me, and am upset at what I think the light of the almost vertical sun is doing to undo her powdered and discreetly painted face, to make her appear thinner and drawn of face and agonized-looking. Her eyes seem raking the carriages with a distraught forlornness as though I might not be there, or as though something she does not wish to meet has come riding in and now hides its taunting smile behind one of the closed jalousies. Then she sees me, and all that illusion is over. The cruel sun, no more than the cruel sun! She is smiling and alight, and not ravaged at all, and is foolishly running. She is as young, as girlishly silly, as unembarrassedly noisy as ever.
From the moment I see her, and the moment I set foot—Mother hanging on to my arm like a hussy—on the divine gravel, on the divinely weedy gravel, outside the station, I am struck silent and cut down to size again, I am miraculously, passionately and immediately in love with Bairnsdale again. Poor yokel from the Cafe Latin and the Bal Masque and the corridor of the Rifle Club Hotel!
Since I am, for the first week, also home-dazzled, and cock-o’-the-walk, and out-and-about displaying myself and my hatlessness and my city ties and cultural platitudes like a sandwich-board, it takes a while for me to become uneasily aware that, despite Mother’s prattle and singing and domestic oaths, she is up to something, that it is not the cruel sun that lends her face that look of fear when she thinks no one has an eye on her. It is fear itself. Why? And what has she to say, for something to say she has?
I am imperceptive enough and guilty enough, the hypocrite protecting Mother from indefinable corruption, to mistranslate Mother’s haltings and suddenly fraught glances into pauses on the brink of a question, I fear, answerable by a lie Mother will not believe. I have not prepared a lie. Idiotlike, I never do. I await to side-step, by whatever leaps to mind, the questions I conceitedly think Mother is too nice to ask: ‘Do you smoke, Laddie?’ or, ‘Do you drink intoxicating beverages?’ or, ‘Will you explain to me exactly why that woman at your school gives you autograph albums and silk socks from Henry Buck’s? Henry Buck’s isn’t cheap, you know.’ To save myself the trouble of grave and patent lies, I bibble-babble on, like a bar-room raconteur, of my art lessons, of the fancy people I have met in Gregan Me Mahon’s room upstairs at the Bijou; I gurgle along, not taking a breath, about those touched-up aspects of life I deem suitable for her to hear. She is easy to side-track from her intention, whatever it may be, by accounts of the luncheons at Ambassadors Restaurant: Uncle John, Consomme Julienne, Louis Lavater; Uncle John, Chicken Maryland, Frank Wilmot; Uncle John, Lemon Pancakes, J. S. Macdonald.
The device of talking fast and shallow, and with the pinch of mockery I have inherited or imitated from Mother herself, pays off. The fear runs like rain from her face. She becomes flushed, and skittish, and dim-witted with happiness for her self-extolled Life-of-the-Party son. Ignoble skulduggery and varnished half-truths lull Mother’s astuteness.
Looking back, it is easy to know what she needs so much to pour out to her eldest son, and to know with a sickness of horror that he has used trumpery guile to switch her from sharing a terrible secret of fear, that he has so white-anted her confidence that she denies herself this relief of sharing lest one tear of blood fall on the page of his comfort and importance.
As she has done every year, she sterilizes the Christmas Pudding threepences and gewgaws; bakes the ham in its thick jacket of dough; roasts several fowls. I observe that the ham is smaller, that there are fewer threepences, and not one sixpence, in the little copper saucepan. I observe, but say nothing. Nothing is gained by telling one’s parents what they themselves have already learned—that they are poorer than they should be. I observe that Mother, tilting the brandy bottle to examine how much there is for the Christmas Pudding flames, says of the little remaining, ‘That will have to do, this year.’ I hate to be not able not to observe signs of poverty all about: the turned and patched sheets, the darned damask of the table-napkins, the rubber spout covering the broken spout of the everyday china teapot, the kitchen-chair cushions covered with the cretonne of old curtains, the electroplate on biscuit-barrel lids wearing thin enough to reveal the goldish metal beneath, the tines of the kitchen forks worn sideways. When the Christmas decorations are brought out, and the family is rounded-up into tacking them up, I recall that once these now shabby frivolities were crisp
and glittering.
On Christmas Eve, I help Mother—where is Father?—fill the toes of the younger children’s hung-up socks with the customary bits and pieces: the sixpence, the handful of Jordan almonds, the blood orange, the pieces of crystallized ginger. I am selfishly and Big-Man glad that I have been unselfish enough to buy, partly with the remains of Miss Hart’s fee, partly from my own junior teacher earnings, some frivolous city toys because, I observe—struck with one sort of pity for the children, and another more disconcerting sort of undeserved pity for Father and Mother—that the presents she is putting in the pillow-cases that hang by the socks are presents of a largely practical kind: shoes, belts, singlets, ties, school stockings. I flush with yet another sort of angry pity when, after Mother and I have tiptoed back to the kitchen, and are having midnight lime-juice and shortbread, she says, she standing with the glass jug, I sitting like a Cavalier lord, ‘You’re a good boy, Laddie, a good boy.’
A good boy!
‘We really couldn’t afford many toys this Christmas.’
Shall I say, ‘You shouldn’t have had so many children. It’s both your faults. Lower middle-class carelessness. Why didn’t you and Father realize that. . . .’ Et cetera, et cetera?
Of course I say nothing; but my face must be marked by the colours and flickerings of the emotions I cannot put into words, and these must appear to be the marks of embarrassed modesty to Mother. She puts down the jug. She puts the palms of her hands on each side of my face. She bends to kiss me on the forehead for the fourth last time in life.
Quickly—oh, instantly—she sees she must get out of this too prettily sentimental scene. She tips me a wink wide as self-denial, and then, opening her eyes babyishly circular, pouts in the bee-stung manner of Mae Murray, and sings in a squeaky boop-a-doop voice:
‘You made me love you,
I didn’t want to do it, I didn’t want to do it. . . . ’
