by Bruce Pascoe
It was the magic dusk when A Midsummer Night’s Dream works best. We were doing Lysistrata, but it didn’t matter. Bud lights glittered in trees like cicada eyes, and the stage was a confection of nonsense, someone’s drawing board of dreams propped up against the real thing. People knew they were in for an entertainment and were already laughing for the froth and bubble they were to see.
Yes, the pittosporum had drugged them. Fucked them with flowers. Just the mood you need to watch Lysistrata.
Actors from stage and screen strode about the boards saying improbable things, engaging in bits of bawdy pantomime to a willing audience. Oh, he’s had his bum whacked with a bit of board. What fun! Oh, look, she’s got a pillow up her dress. How droll. Of course, the cicadas saved us all from the interminable dialogues of pomp and power.
Backstage, all I can hear are the portentous creaks of chipboard and pine as famous feet ham it up beneath the dark and soughing trees. I stand with my back to the flats as women tear off one lovely gown to tug on another. I look across the onyx bevel of the river trying not to think about love slipping from my hand.
The main actress returns after a strident competition with the cicadas to which the audience was well disposed. Everybody defers to her because she’s famous and her name is on all the billboards, but it has to be said that she’s no Rhodes scholar. Of course, this hasn’t deterred her male co-star, because he’s in love with her in the way that stars fall in love with other stars. This means he has spent the best part of a fortnight faxing the production office on the hour and mooning about at rehearsals, trying not to catch the eye of the comedians, most of whom appear regularly on a TV show with the sock puppets and fluffy ostrich.
Outside, in the night air, with a real river lapping at its banks a metre from the lighting box, it’s hard to take the theatre seriously. It’s so obvious that all of us are real people striving to overcome our disbelief that we are other people.
But the actress is ready, and I have to help her climb the ladder so we can hide in a chipboard box from which she will make her final, cataclysmic cicada speech. We’ve had to do the ladder five times because she doesn’t like it, and I’ve begun not to like her, so that lifting her gowns and steadying her feet as she ascends to our hide is not a calendar event. In the box we stare into each other’s eyes, listening for the cue which we hope to hear in between cicadas and the slapping of plywood swords, because six or seven intricate things have to be done with ropes and bodices, hinges and crowns. It’s a nightmare. The director should be shot.
Twice we think we hear the cue, but it’s only an actor searching for the right line and another retrieving a cue for the second time. They get it right just as I notice the actress has lost her slipper. Now, it could be a moment, like the girl with the pittosporum in her hair, where I reach and secure the silver shoe on the queen’s foot while our faces are centimetres apart and her hand is on my shoulder – but we stopped liking each other at ladder attempt number three.
Her eyes see the shoe go on and say thanks, you saved me, but that’s all, and off she goes to be Medea and confuse the cicadas with talk about Olympus and a chariot full of other gods. When she finishes, the audience goes ape, and actors chuck wigs, ply and paste into a corner and go off to be hugged by the insiders, showered with flowers like real Olympians while we, at the back, pack boxes and sort out tackle.
Later, I go up to the dressing tents to compare notes with the director and to see how we’ve ruined his art this particular night. The comedians sit around in steamer chairs, drinking cans of beer and gazing sardonically on the people as they pick their summer selves up off the terraces and out into the park.
The producers and investors are an excitable bunch of councillors, doctors’ wives and Greek travel agents who plunge glasses of champagne down their necks and laugh into each others’ faces knowing that they’re onto a winner, knowing they won’t have to deny they had anything to do with Lysistrata by the river.
And she is there talking to a Sydney friend. He’s the man who casts all the movies and miniseries. Beautifully dressed, a haircut you can’t get in Coburg, a look of intelligence and breeding in his eyes, and she is engaged in earnest, astute theatre-type conversation with him, and everything tells me not to allow my lumpen self to approach this tête-à-tête.
Do trout eat old worms? Do salmon eat mangled and smelly whitebait? Do businessmen fall under trains? My feet approached and she cast me a glance, not of disdain or dismissal, but of what appeared like despair. As though she wanted me to be cooler, smarter, better dressed, capable of social interaction beyond the plaintive look and the gruff hello. But whatever skills I’d ever possessed in this area had leached away during that fifteen minutes in a chipboard box waiting for the actress to risk herself on the eggshell balcony and the jerry-rigged ropes of her harness. The shoe was the last straw; if she’d stumbled once she would have plunged to a quick death for herself and an early bump out for the rest of us. It wasn’t the time to comment that we’d saved a fortune in insurance by not mentioning her name on the policy. My clothes had absorbed a gallon of sweat while I prayed the star with the modest voice and tremendous cleavage wouldn’t die in a tangle of my ropes and hardware.
I wasn’t in the mood for love by the time I climbed down that bloody ladder, but the slinking river, the sigh of leaves, the aching scent of pittosporum made me clumsily, bloodhoundedly intent on a declaration.
The casting agent cast one look at my damp shirt and knew that no wardrobe department in the land could dress a bunch of limbs like mine. He left, and we, she and I, were face to face. She wouldn’t look at me, so I reached out my hand.
Here comes the violence.
She gathered a jacket and bag and marched off in brittle strides to the car park. I should have let her go, but does a trout eat worms? I was fascinated by the bait. I crunched across the gravel like a portent and reached her just as she opened the door of her car.
I took her right arm below the elbow after missing her hand and said, Please.
Please what, you’ll all say, but it was just please: please don’t get in the car, please turn to me, please succumb to the pittosporum and drape your arms around my neck as all the other lovely arms in the park are slender about the necks and waists of their men.
But she just gritted her teeth in unendurable frustration and tried to draw her arm away, and me, oxen-dumb, my hooves digging into gravel, resisting.
You’re hurting my arm, she said.
Please, please, I said, don’t go.
This was stupid. Under no circumstances could this plea work, nothing could be more assured of driving her away, but still I clung, and at last she tugged her arm free and I saw the white print of my blunt claw and then the door shut, the car reversed away and I was left in a night strung with stars, murmurous with the whispers of lovers, as warm as the inside of a woman’s elbow and saturated with the perfume of sweet flowers.
But what does that mean to an ox, or a trout, or a salmon? What do they know about starlight, warm flesh and perfume? No, it’s just us, the brute and violent people, who know anything about pittosporum and have to suffer its irresistible promise.
STAFF DINING
for Aunty Barbara, Aunty Cath and the brothers of the interior
If you split yellow stringybark you get a remarkably clean, flat face, but inevitably, several knots intrude on the plane, evidence of branches fallen in the tree’s history.
In this case there are two small, almost horizontal knots for the eyes and a narrow, recessed split for a mouth made mean by ignorance. A cruel, unnecessary thing to say, you might think, but there’s confusion in those squinty pits, a constant bafflement at the small, difficult matters of life. And there’s been a trauma. An accident as a child, a pinched nerve, a stepfather wanting to erase evidence of his paramour’s first love.
The face flinches once or twice every minute, and that quick grimace seems to compound the confusion, a terrible accumulation of doubt that
makes his hand reach down to caress his certainty, a bunch of large, brass keys, smoothed with use.
The staff dining room seems to specialise in big, gruff men, refining the Australian idea of masculinity to a stern contempt. One massif. The belly a solid rising plain, jaw jutting above it like a crag likely to defy crampons, pitons and ice axe. He’s been adzed from wind-exposed manna gum, the trunk so writhen by gale that when split by blade a slab is hewn on a tight curve, giving the face a perpetual twist of distaste. Or hatred. Because the escarpment of his mountain is both tall and wide, it is necessary for his arms to be held a little away from the body and the hands to loll with the knuckles facing forward. This is so, not because I want to invent a brute, but because I saw a man whose arms are simian. Does he have more keys than everyone else, or is their jut made more threatening for bristling beneath such a glowering cliff?
And then there’s sallow wood. It’s a blond, waxy timber that splits nicely to a clean, well-modelled face. Perfumed, too, like vanilla or a summer night when gardenias exhale. But should you paint two unblinking eyes on that wood, it is a betrayal of the sweet timber. If those steady eyes level at yours with their controlled stare, you feel as if the pretty wood has decided that all others are criminal, beneath and beyond the courtesy of empathy. Do not burn sallow wood for warmth.
So many of the timbers here are like this, as if repressed rage has kilned them hard and sapless, as if a million locomotives have hammered the grain of the sleeper to tight resistance.
Well, whatever the case, they have a thing about doors. They like to hear them slam. Shut. The door is designed for positive closure. Steel on steel. Clang.
One, maybe two, hold the door so that it can ease into place. Still secure, still shut, but silent. More or less. All the others, especially those with the more prominent keys, the more impassive slabs of face and mind, seem to take comfort in the clang. Shut. Positive closure.
We are waiting in the timber museum, readying ourselves, pretending to have enjoyed our free lunch of ham croquettes, the shape and texture of a pitbull’s turd. Three days old. No warmth and a dry, resistant crust. Hand grenades are more palatable and less dangerous. The cook responsible reminds you of Swelter from the Gormenghast kitchen. Your glance must land on him for less than the blink of an eye, for he condemns your gaze, punishes candour with another hand grenade. Keep your head down.
Is all this gruff neo-violence just the guard of the guard, or are they recruited for being in possession of a visage capable of turning blooded beings into stone or salt?
We have plenty of time to observe this room. We are invited to remain there for approximately ninety-seven minutes. We are intimidated by the percussive blast. Perhaps it is meant that we should be. Blackfellas. Free blackfellas. The worst kind.
Aunt is a wallaby. Solitary. Alert. Steady gaze intent above the grass. Watchful but easily alarmed. Black wallabies stay alive due to their intelligent vigilance. Aunt is alive. But I see pain in her face with each blast of the vicious door. It tells her something that causes her to flinch. Simon shields himself with an impassive, watchful face, and Muk Muk – well, he resents the restrictions, the dumb cynicism, and you can see Bolshevism brewing beneath his pastel-kitted beanie, glowering like a furious gumnut baby.
We look down. Wait. For release. To visit those for whom there is no release, just the heavy smoothed key turned by a knotted hand. These other men are so nakedly blooded, so tenderly fleshed, so vulnerable to the wounds from eye and mind. They look away from the timbered face, fighting with their pride and defiance. Look away. Look away. Don’t meet that eye or you will fall as a sparrow in a meek flutter of feathered breast and curling claws. Look away, my brothers, Medusa doesn’t specialise in stone here, she enjoys clumps of spent feathers and the excuse to extinguish the brave. Look away, my brothers.
Slab points to a door as if it might be our abattoir, but inside there is no evidence of blocks waiting for the axe. Every wall is covered by paintings: Maori, Chinese, Fijian, Samoan and ours. Plain old blackfella. There are Maori warriors with moko and weapons held across their chests; Fijians with aggressive tongues and murderous eyes; Buddha, inscrutably calm but depicted against the Great Wall from which the Chinese fought the hordes with lance and sword.
And the blackfellas, what do they do? Do they grimace or scowl or threaten the throats of lambs who dare? No, they plait baskets, kick footballs, offer their fists cushioned by gloves; they dance, befeathered by colourful birds. It breaks your heart to see the peace of our people: the mildness of our hope, the sweetness of our defiance.
Sweetness, Bookman? Surely you’re gilding the lily. Admirably loyal, but misleading, don’t you think? Well, no, even though our boys are clad in the bottle green of their penitence, our difference is in the gentle finning of our cross-hatched fish, the brolga still warmly tucked and folded in the egg, blue wrens screenprinted on a shirt, a man’s shirt, the sweet gaze of the kangaroo. Yes, sweet, lashes long and girlish, batting above the eyes of does.
We value different things. Unfledged birds within the egg are no match for haka or the fish hook carved from the bone of a Maori slave who has it explained to him by the cousin who cut his leg off that when he gouges the eye into that hook with a gimlet, it is his eye, the slave’s eye, so that when the shark takes the hook, his leg bone, he will see deep into the mouth of his consummation.
No, we are different. This is not to boast, compare or deride, but to explain how we in this country think of different things. When allowed.
We have left the lumber yard of impassive flitches and have entered the singing forest. We are surrounded by art. How could it be any different? Today it is just our boys. Koorie Day. We watch as twenty different brushes draw colour in unerring lines. Fish, kangaroo, echidna, brolga, wren. We are different.
Alan is silent, his face downcast, but even at that angle you can see him struggling with emotion, as if nursing a great sorrow, a deep regret. He’s razored a fine paintbrush to within two bristles of extinction, and with whispering caress paints a meticulous grid on the soul of a barramundi. For four days he does not look up from that quiet concentration except to lean on his elbow and stare at his fish or draw those two bristles through his tight lips, sharpening the accuracy of his intent.
‘My mother is dead,’ he says at last, in answer to a question I have not asked.
Brad has a scar across his shaven skull that stretches from ear to ear, and another old injury that has crimped one eye so that the pupil glints from beneath the damaged lid. It’s not a face you want to meet for the first time after dark.
We’re supposed to be teaching writing, but they are painting in such deep peace, only malice or paternalism would ask them to attend to anything else.
Aunt, arms akimbo, but heart still exposed, leans across to him. ‘That is gorgeous, my brother.’ The look of alarm and doubt that crosses his face would make any Aboriginal cringe with the knowledge of that doubt, the knowledge that sometimes such compliments, such acknowledgement, is often accompanied by an intervention or an Act that requires you to disown your cousin. I know that look, my brother, and I know that Aunt will not let you live with the doubt. And before I’ve finished wishing her to smooth the feathers of the startled owl, she touches his arm and says, ‘Truly, my brother, it is beautiful.’
And I see that other look pass across his wounded face, because I know it well, feel it on my own, which is why I pick up a brush as if its brand is of great interest to me. I dread that he might cry. If that’s what men did.
Len sits beside me, toying with a brush, as if he too is fascinated by logos and quality. He passes things to other artists: tracing paper, paints, cups of tea, cotton-covered boards. And then he sits back and watches. Silent, but his face open, young, a tic of eagerness at the corner of his eyes and lips.
At last he dips a brush into a pot of umber and paints one single straight line directly on the table, as if he’s been reading too much about Giotto.
I
stare at the line. He lays down his brush. ‘It’s true what you said, Uncle, yesterday. We talked about it last night. We are learning our culture. We want to learn. We’re sick of this shit. We want to become good men.’
I stare at the brush through glimmering eyes, too afraid to look up unless I do that thing men do not do. I touch his sleeve instead. ‘Too late, my brother, you already are.’
Anthony brings a cup of tea. Every day a cup of tea, and for a single teabag they have to queue and look penitent.
‘I had a dream, Unc, last night, it happens a lot, nearly every night. Bunjil comes down and picks me up in his talons and carries me over the wall. And when I wake up and find it’s not true I … you know I’m … Do you think it’s true, Unc?’
‘Bunjil will come, my brother, he always does. Bunjil never holds a grudge. You wait, bruz, he’ll take you over the wall.’
He reaches under the table to grip my hand because we’ve been told not to touch. ‘Thanks, Unc,’ he says. ‘I believe you.’
We don’t look at each other. Boys don’t. And neither of us sweats from the eyes because we don’t do that either.
I glance at Aunt. The watchful wallaby has become a crouched owl, puffing feathers on a branch. This might be the hall of bright carvings, but it’s cold and it’s got into her bones. A young man is seated at her elbow and his beanie is pulled so low across his brow you can see but half of his irises. Two owls crouched on a branch, murmuring about the long night. She catches my eye in one owlish glance and I can see that her fellow bird’s lanced pain has crept down her throat and gripped her windpipe.