Iraqi Icicle

by Bernie Dowling

  I grabbed at a long shot. ‘I’ll fall asleep. How embarrassed will you and Jane be then?’

  ‘I don’t care,’ Natalie said. ‘This is Jane’s big chance. La Boite is almost a professional theatre, you know. Who knows where she will go from here?’

  ‘Yair, right, an 18-year-old first-year student at Kelvin Grove campus of the Brisbane College of Advanced Education in a play nobody ever heard of. Be very afraid, Nicole Kidman.

  I could see it though. Bub had that erratic, volatile quality that you could imagine splashed across the front page of some tabloid rag one day. CRAZED STARLET THROWN OUT OF NIGHT SPOT could be a good fit for Bub.

  At least her college might become a star as there was talk it would be taken over by recently evolved Queensland University of Technology which added to Brisbane other universities, Queensland and Griffith. I had been to all three as each put on free rock concerts from time to time.

  ‘You’re joking,’ Natalie said. ‘Waiting for Godot; nobody’s ever heard of Waiting for Godot? Everybody knows Waiting for Godot.’

  ‘Is that what the play’s called? I couldn’t remember. Come on, Natalie, three months ago you’d never heard of Waiting for Godot either. Admit it.’

  ‘Well, I’ve read about it since. He got a Nobel Prize, you know.’

  ‘Who did – Godot?’

  ‘Don’t be silly. The man who wrote it, he won the Nobel Prize.’

  ‘What’s his name, then?’

  Natalie changed tack in the face of forgetting the playwright’s name. ‘You know you can use my ticket, so it won’t cost you anything. And because it’s opening night, they give you free food and wine after the show.’

  Why did Natalie always do this: leave the significant details till last?

  ‘I’m there,’ I said, and returned to prognostications of the races at Dalby, a rural town I suspect most of Australia has never heard of.

  I had almost been to a play once. I’d been planning to buy tickets for Natalie and me. It was about Sid Vicious, former bass player of seventies British punk band the Sex Pistols. Nat didn’t want to go.

  ‘A play where someone dies of a heroin overdose in the last act? Boring,’ she declared.

  I had to protest. ‘But that’s what happened.’

  Vicious died in February, 1979, but it was not until two years later, when I left the orphanage, that I caught up with this news. At the time of his death, Vicious was awaiting his day in court, facing a charge that he had knifed his girlfriend Nancy Spungen to death. Some people, including his former Sex Pistols’ bandmate, Johnny Rotten, thought him innocent. Vicious, being heavily under the hammer when Spungen died, was not sure whether he had done the dark deed. All this was fodder for a pretty good play, I thought, but Natalie was not having any of that.

  ‘It’s not art; it’s just a cliché.’

  The condescension returned. ‘The artist’s job is to ignore the sordid banalities and find the extraordinary in the mundane; to give us something fresh and different.’ Ah, Nat, with your hands on your hips, cheeks slightly flushed, a wisp of that dark hair slightly out of place, setting the world’s moral compass straight. Is it some schoolteacher fetish of mine that places me under your spell?

  ‘Buddha, I thought a writer’s job was to tell us what’s really going on outside our own front door. Or is that another cliché? I don’t know why I’m even arguing about this. I’d probably be bored to death at having to watch a play anyway. It just sounded interesting, that’s all.’

  Natalie put her arms over my shoulders. ‘And I love you for trying to broaden your horizons, Steele. Don’t worry, we’ll find a play we both want to see.’

  ___o0o___

  SO NOW there I was, on my way to see Waiting for Godot, a play Natalie wanted me to go to because she could not. I am not really a play person. There is some evidence I am John Lennon’s lovechild, conceived during the Beatles 1964 Brisbane concert. Well, not during but after. Or maybe before. Whatever, I did not inherit my Dad’s theatrical bent.

  I fronted up to the ticket booth at La Boite, on the border of the inner city suburbs of Petrie Terrace and Milton. I grabbed a program, thinking it was free. It wasn’t. The first-year drama students of the Kelvin Grove campus of the Brisbane College of Advanced Education took me down for a dollar.

  The form guide in the program told me La Boite was French for The Box, and that the venue presented theatre in the round. Round theatre in a cubic box sounded more like a geometric challenge than an artistic one.

  I looked through the cast list for Jane Applebee. There she was, playing a character called Lucky. Three other actors made up the main cast. They all appeared to be women: Caitlyn Meares, Suzanne Lu and, of course, you all know Alison Kahn. I had never heard of Kahn, but they rarely put the arts pages beside the racing guide.

  Alison Kahn was a professional actor, about twenty-five by the look of her photo. She was a graduate of Kelvin Grove campus and had done the college proud by appearing in plays, a television cop show and even a feature film. Well done, Alison. The director’s notes said it was a coup to have Kelvin Grove old-girl Kahn return to assist the new chums of the drama school.

  Director Sandra Blaine was a drama lecturer at Kelvin Grove. Blaine wrote to us, in the program that, as far as she knew, women making up the entire cast and crew of Samuel Beckett’s Nobel-Prize-winning play was an Australian first. Even the cameo part of Boy was played by a Girl, Blaine herself.

  The director also wrote the first Australian production of Godot had a woman of sorts in one of the leads. The play had a two-week run at the Arrow Theatre, Melbourne, in September 1957, and Barry Humphries, 23, played Estragon. Humphries went on to stardom as the comic Dame Edna Everage, a character he had created two years before doing Beckett. Ah, don’t say any of us would not wear lilac hair, silly glasses and a sparkly dress for a crack at fame.

  ___o0o___

  GIRL, YOU KNOW IT’S TRUE. Or at least that’s what Europop duo Milli Vanilli was telling us during their glory year of 1989, before proof of onstage lip-syncing to pre-recorded vocals sank their career like the Titanic Two. In 1990, during a live performance by Rob and Fab at a Connecticut theme park, the track Girl You Know It’s True jammed in a groove, repeating the line Girl You Know It’s True over and over.

  Smart management might have said the glitch was a remix, but one thing led to another and out came the admission the lads had not sung any of the songs on their hit album.

  This career-ending confession served as a lesson to all of us: life is not always as it seems. A night at the Box would not end as uneventfully for me as Natalie would have hoped.

  ___o0o___

  I RAISED my glass of cheap red to an Australian first for the sisterhood, translating this Beckett stuff into the language of belles. Bells rang.

  And they’re off. Trumpets, bugles or bells, I know when an event is about to start. I was caught up in the crowd surge, and swept up a circular staircase into the theatre, with raked seating in four blocks forming a rectangle outside the curtainless stage. It looked like someone had pinched this theatre-in-the-round from the boxing ring. I took a seat near ringside, the prized spot for Hollywood royalty, from what I have glimpsed on television.

  It was not half bad, this play, once you realised what it was about. Nothing. Nothing was something I could appreciate. The first scenes were like alt-comedians HG Nelson and Roy Slaven doing their routines about bugger all. The only difference was that Suzanne Lu and Caitlyn Meares were spruiking their nonsense as clowns with bowler hats, like those worn by the ancient comic duo Laurel and Hardy.

  Lu was a Stan-Laurel simpleton called Estragon, who came out with some childish wisdom when you least expected it. Meares was an Oliver-Hardy clown called Vladimir.

  They were waiting for someone called Godot, though most of the audience were waiting for Alison Kahn to appear, as a character called Pozzo. I was waiting for Lucky Jane.

  Bub came on as Lucky, shackled by ropes and weighed do
wn with travel bags. Kahn followed, cracking a whip and firing a pistol. It could have made a lasting impression on all of us in the audience, had Suzanne Lu not dropped down dead. Quite an exit.

  3

  Brisbane, spring in late September, 1986

  BUB WAS IN YEAR 10 or something when Natalie said I had to see her sister’s principal.

  ‘I don’t think I want to do that,’ I replied honestly.

  ‘She is being bullied unmercifully at school,’ My Cucumber told me.

  Nat and I were living in our respective Hendra flats in the same building. It was a humble wooden block of flats, but we did have a row of roses growing along the front fence. The roses produced luxuriant clusters of white flowers. Iraqi Icicle, that was the breed of the roses, I think. Neither Natalie nor I was responsible for the roses but we were delighted when we were invited to pick some.

  Nat’s sister Jane was living with her early-retired parents, up the North Coast. I could not see why I should feel any obligation to visit the school in place of her loco parents. I told Nat as much.

  ‘You know Dad won’t do it. He says a bit of bullying is good for Jane; that it’s character building.’

  ‘There’s something to be said for that, Nat.’

  My Cucumber rounded on me, planting her feet solidly on the linoleum floor two feet from where I was sitting. Hands on hips. I couldn’t possibly win. Bound to lose. Game over.

  Technically it was spring, a time for verbal ripostes with your loved one, but actually, it was far too hot to drag out an argument I was sure to lose. Everyone knows our designation of seasons is a joke. But Buddha forbid getting rid of the tradition of pretending Mummy Nature’s Australian climate can be described in the same terms as Mother England’s.

  ‘Since when have you even remotely agreed with anything Dad says?’

  ‘Well, he has to fluke it right some time. I mean, he’s been lucky in the past, siring two lovely daughters.’

  The flattery sounded lame to my ears and failed utterly.

  ___o0o___

  ONE FINE MORNING, before the heat set in, I pointed the EH ute northward, buoyed by the walletful of cash Nat had provided as provisions for my trip. I just love to hear that engine roar, as Robert Forster and Grant McLennan of the Go-Betweens put it.

  The North Coast is north of Brisbane, rather than being in North Queensland. Whoever made up the geographical concepts of Australia decided state capitals are the centres of their respective universes and all other places exist only in relation to them.

  Another quirky thing about the North Coast is that it does not officially exist. There is a collection of addresses known as the Sunshine Coast, which is the area a lot of people, including me, known as the North Coast.

  What a coy name, the Sunshine Coast. Sounds like a Disney movie setting, where the bad guys come to destroy the idyll. For bad guys, it can’t compete with the Gold Coast, where a spiv or hustler lurks on every street corner. Don’t get me wrong: I love the Gold Coast, or the Goldie, the coy name the stiffs give it, but its thoroughfares are an acquired taste if you plan to consume them regularly. The North Coast seems friendlier, but I visit rarely and I don’t see much of the scum floating on the ocean waves.

  Coastal towns are funny places. Even when they contain enough people to be touted as a city, there is invariably a small-town mentality that does not tolerate blow-in eccentrics like Bub. There is also the importance of being cool, way cooler than the tourists who are totally gross. American blues-rocker John Cougar Mellencamp could have been singing about any Australian big small-town when he sang his syrupy tribute to rural life, which had enough subtle unease about it for cynical city-dwellers to make it a hit single in 1986.

  We had no doubt that John learned the fear of Jesus in a small town, but we would need more evidence to believe that same small town tamed his L.A. girlfriend.

  Bub’s high school was a State institution, like most in Queensland. Having been educated by nuns in an orphanage, I believe I was setting a record – my first day at high school, at age twenty-one. I found the office and asked to see the principal. He was down on the sports oval with most of the school, it being Sports Day.

  There was something strangely lacking from the scene outside. All of these sports going on and not a single bookie to keep the punters interested. Hundreds of students sat around on the grass outside the oval, with lime-marked running tracks up and down and round and round it. Flags indicated the winning post, or the finishing line as the betting-deprived know it.

  I looked around but I couldn’t make out Bub. This pleased me as I did not want to see her, anyway. Just make a quick lame effort at heroism before hitting the nearest totalisator with Nat’s cash: that was my A-plan.

  Exchanges with a couple of teachers led me to a tallish, black-haired man in his late forties, bare-headed and thick-necked, yelling in an American accent through a megaphone. I reached Principal Carter just as he screamed at a field of runners to get ready.

  The boys aged about fourteen, reacted to a sharp bang of the starter’s gun by racing down the oval over a distance that looked to be about a hundred metres or half a furlong if your mind operates that way. By the time the bunched field of nine had gone forty metres, they had left a tenth runner twenty metres behind. He was a long, ungainly lad, his feet splayed out from either side of bandy legs. I had to look away.

  I introduced myself to Principal Carter, who brushed me aside with a downward motion of his left hand. He looked towards the cheer squads on either side of the running track. Some students were laughing at the bandy-legged straggler, who had only covered thirty metres when the others were at eighty. This abject loser was crying profusely and noisily.

  I looked over at Principal Carter and saw that the bastard had a smirk on his face. I yanked at the cord on his megaphone, introduced myself again and asked Carter why he allowed the inept athlete to run.

  ‘If it’s any of your business, it is compulsory for all students without a severe disability to compete in sports. And I have never heard of you, Mr Hill. Have you an appointment?’ That Yankee twang made my shoulders shudder.

  The sobbing teenager finally limped across the finishing line and the laughter died down. One or two students began to clap his ineffectual effort and some of the laughers joined in, either out of shame or thinking it added more spice to the fun.

  Carter grabbed back the megaphone cord. ‘Congratulations, Tom West, on winning your heat. And Joshua Banks, though you came last, your effort to finish was brave. Let’s give the two of them and all the runners a big hand.’

  Half-hearted applause emerged from the students. I eyed the hypocrite with the megaphone and shook my head. He turned slightly towards me, keeping his gaze on the runners for the next event. ‘Are you still here?’ He chopped the air with his free hand to emphasise each word of a command. ‘Make an appointment with my secretary.’

  I took a business card from my wallet. It was not my business card; just one I had picked up somewhere. I wrote two sentences on the blank back of the card and handed it to Carter. He glanced at it, and then re-read it at least twice, maybe three times. He put the card in his shirt pocket and gave me an assessing look. I responded with my best dead-eyes. I’ve practised, watching old film noir, starring Robert Mitchum. Ah, everybody loves film noir and monochrome slapstick flicks. They are the only true peacemakers in the world.

  Carter went over to a teacher, said a few words to her and handed over the megaphone. As I followed him to the shade of a tree 200 metres away from the action, I heard a woman’s voice call up the runners for the first heat of the under-fourteen girls’ one-hundred metres.

  ‘What is it you want that can’t wait?’ Carter asked, retrieving the note and handing it back to me.

  ‘You keep it,’ I said and watched his face redden. ‘You’ve got a girl at school here, her name’s Jane Applebee.’

  He nodded; the name was familiar. I explained to Carter that Bub was being bullied and I was assign
ing him the task of putting a stop to it. ‘What’s an American doing teaching over here, anyway, unless you’re Canadian?’ I asked him.

  ‘I was born in Chicago,’ he replied proudly.

  ‘Yair, I knew you were American. I’m pretty good with accents. Just wondered if you might claim to be Canadian.’

  ‘Why would I want to do that? I’m proud of my heritage and I’m a graduate of the University of Queensland. I have as much right to teach here as anybody else.’

  More than some, I thought, recalling a punter I knew – thirty-two year-old Bob Somers, who had bestowed a couple of education degrees on himself, after a few disappointing years in his previous chosen profession of pro gambling. At the start of term, I waved him away as the Sunlander train took him to a North Queensland teaching post.

  Buddha knew what he had put himself down for instructing in. I did not ask. Bobby was never the brightest light on the Ferris wheel of life. He had stumbled into his previous job of professional punting because it took more guts than brains. He had never quite got on top of probability theory and had few connections with those in-the-know in the racing game, so he had survived longer as a pro gambler than most expected.

  All of us who knew him decided that inventing teaching qualifications was the cleverest move he had ever made by a street. While the odds were always in favour of him being exposed, a few North Queensland bookies and casino operators would celebrate Somers’ late and temporary entry into the academic ranks.

  Having justified his own teaching credentials, Carter was becoming more comfortable, slipping back into principal-in-control mode. ‘We do not tolerate bullying at this school, Mr Hill. I’ll look into it. You could have written me a letter and saved yourself all this trouble. What relationship do you have with this student, for the record? I need to know before I can divulge any further information.’