Iraqi Icicle

by Bernie Dowling

  ‘Who isn’t? They tell me the three Rs are up to ess.’

  Lavinsky either didn’t know or didn’t care I was taking the piss. ‘They are so sheltered these days, my students,’ he continued.

  He turned away from me when a barman approached, and he ordered a bottle of the club’s best red. The barman said they sold wine by the glass.

  ‘Fine,’ replied the professor. ‘I’ll have five and a one fifth glasses of wine. In the bottle. Thank you.’

  The barman went to consult with another bloke, and Lavinsky began to sing in a harsh Irish accent while he awaited the decision.

  Now that my ladder’s gone,

  I must lie down where all the ladders start,

  In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the human heart.

  The barman returned with a bottle of red, from which Lavinsky poured a glass for me and a thimbleful for himself.

  ‘Driving,’ he muttered.

  I asked him if the song he had sung was from the Irish folk-rock band The Pogues, because he sang it in the rough and ragged style of the band’s lead singer Shane MacGowan.

  ‘William Butler Yeats,’ Lavinsky said. ‘Great poet. As far as I know, he was never in a popular musical group.’

  The professor changed the subject. ‘I’m looking for someone like you, somewhat representative of the underclass. I hope you are not offended by that term. I find “underclass” less patronising than “lower working class”.’ He opened his eyes wide and nodded three times at me. ‘Do you agree?’

  ‘Very much so,’ I answered. Always agree with whackos: first rule of life on the streets.

  ‘From looking at you, I feel you fit to a tee,’ he decided. ‘Sharp, inquisitive, but wary, looking out for the next obstacle in your path.’

  I took a swig of my wine and thought the well could dry up with my next comment. ‘Look, Mr Lavinsky, I don’t know what two-legged lab mouse you want for your students, or what that mouse is supposed to do, but you’re knocking on the wrong maze here.’

  On cue to my maze metaphor, the Beat’s speaker system pumped out the chorus of the Go-Betweens’ Your Town.

  Round and round, up and down

  Through the streets of your town.

  Every day I make my way

  Through the streets of your town.

  The rumours of the previous summer proved right. The Go-Betweens did announce their break-up in the first half of 1990. Everyone said it was a shame. By everyone, I mean the small fraction of the Australian population who had heard of them.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Lavinsky. I had clearly declined his offer and he moved his chair back, as you would when you’re leaving.

  Only, he was just making himself more comfortable. ‘I did not even tell you what I teach. It’s Cultural Studies.’

  ‘Yogurt?’ I asked, which puzzled him till the penny dropped. Then he laughed more heartily than the quip deserved.

  I continued. ‘I don’t know what Cultural Studies is; I don’t know what an underclass is, and it’s odds-on I won’t know whatever else it is you have to tell me.’

  I guess you need persistence to end up as a professor. ‘That’s just it, Steele. You speak a different language to my students. All I want you to do is to talk them through your lifestyle.’

  ‘You don’t even know me, Joseph. I might be an accountant in a bank.’ I stood up and started to walk away, to find My Cucumber.

  ‘As a guest speaker, you could earn probably $500, maybe a thousand.’

  Now he had sparked my intellectual curiosity. ‘Can you write down all the details, and tell me if I need to wear a silly cap?’

  It turned out that Joseph Lavinsky wasn’t a bad style of bloke. All he wanted was for some youngish, street-smart person, with a few run-ins with the coppers, to lay it on thick for his students. He told me this in a lot of big words, but I figured, if the truth were known, he was boring his students shitless with his enriched brain fodder. All he wanted from me was a few half-lies to keep them awake for an hour or two. I could do that.

  To show I was giving value for money, I told him about the subsequently defrocked nun from the orphanage where I was raised. She insisted I was John Lennon’s lovechild. I added I did not believe it myself but shrugged my shoulders to suggest it could be true. It was an old routine of mine and it worked best out on the street when I could raise my granny sunglasses to reveal my honest eyes as I also raised my shoulders to indicate impartial scepticism. The bit had a reasonable indoor strike rate as well.

  Lavinsky looked closely into my face. ‘Your disbelief is wise,’ he said. ‘You look nothing like John Lennon.’

  I quickly changed the subject, or, more precisely, I allowed Lavinsky to leap from topic to topic. Then I made a mistake. During one of his raves, I said he was wasting all his philosophical musings on me; that he should talk to my SP bookie mate, the Gooroo. The professor perked up.

  He wanted to know whether the Gooroo was a convert to Hinduism. I told him I had given Gooroo the moniker, derived from an Aboriginal word for ‘deep place’ or something like that. Lavinsky wanted Gooroo’s phone number. I thought I had just talked myself out of the gig, but Lavinsky assured me that I was still the pea for the job.

  When I told Nat about my uni gig, she was keen on the notion of my placing myself in a room full of students. I think she hoped some of that erudition might rub off on me. She said she would take the day off work to sneak into the lecture but I made her promise not to do that.

  11

  THE NOTE WAS STUCK TO THE DOOR of Lavinsky’s unit in the middle-class suburb. It told me the keys to the professor’s unit and four-wheel-drive wagon were in the letterbox. What a trusting fellow. The professor had ridden his pushbike to uni and I could take the 4WD, if I liked. I liked, and slid into the driver’s seat of the green Toyota Landcruiser V8, leaving the ancient EH ute to fend for itself in this rich people’s street.

  I wonder what the poor greenies are doing this evening, I thought. Evening it was, 6:30 on a Tuesday. The greenies would be tucking into their lentil soup, as I gunned the 4WD to meet my date.

  With murder.

  ‘He’s got a killer smile,’ said Clarissa Dunne, as we stood outside the lecture theatre at ten to seven.

  No one else was around to hear the teenager’s appreciation of Professor Lavinsky’s mouth. My guest appearance was scheduled for seven and I had checked with Dunne, a pale-skinned attractive redhead, that I was at the right place.

  I pondered how a woman some eight years my junior had come to notice the fatal smile of a professor some thirty years my senior. I prompted Clarissa to expand on her appreciation of the professor.

  ‘Do you really understand what he’s on about?’ I asked.

  ‘Sort of. It’s only my first year at uni. I’m still learning the ropes.’

  I persisted, displaying all the commercial savvy half a working life on the dole imparts to you. ‘But what good is this Cultural Studies stuff going to do you?’

  ‘I’m studying arts-law.’

  I volleyed. ‘I’ve never met any lawyers with ’arts.’

  ‘Aven’t you?’ she replied. It’s great to talk to educated folks who can appreciate a bad pun.

  Joseph Lavinsky hurtled around the corner of the corridor and lent us his killer smile. ‘Clarissa. And you have met Mr Steele Hill, our guest lecturer for tonight.’

  I raised my eyebrows at being made a lecturer without so much as having to cut out an application form for a dodgy correspondence school.

  ‘I have, Joe,’ she replied. ‘And I’m sure he is going to be witty, incisive and thought-provoking.’

  ‘Or your money back,’ I added. ‘But then you don’t pay fees, do you?’

  Dunne and Lavinsky looked at each other to see if I was making a cryptic joke. It was plain I had said something stupid.

  ‘I thought tertiary education was free in Australia,’ I defended myself.

  ‘It was,’ Lavinsky replied, embarrassed by my stupidity. ‘For a l
ittle while, but we are now in the era of “user pays”.’

  His student steered the subject away from my ignorance. ‘What’s your lecture about, Mr Hill?’ asked Clarissa Dunne.

  ‘I’m glad you asked,’ I said, and I was. It was about time for me to think about that. ‘I’ve given it a lot of thought.’

  Totally untrue, but I couldn’t tell the young woman that the lecture was about five hundred to a thousand dollars. I got in some practice for winging it. ‘Part of it is about the question, if we citizens are supposed to intuitively understand our rights and obligations under law, then why do we pay lawyers hundreds of thousands a year to interpret laws for us?’

  Lavinsky was pleased. ‘I told you last week, Clarissa, we were in for a treat tonight.’

  I was pretty pleased myself. I didn’t understand what I had said, but it sounded good. Excusing us both to Clarissa, Joseph Lavinsky tugged my arm towards a corner. ‘I feel bad about this,’ he said.

  I all but groaned. That had to be the straight man’s opening to my punchline: ‘not half as bad as I’m going to feel’. Sure enough, I was about to be stiffed.

  ‘Not even $500,’ I moaned.

  Lavinsky shook his head.

  ‘$250?’

  Shake of the head. The cultural studies department of the university with a multi-million dollar budget was giving me an expenses allowance of fifty dollars.

  I had to vent a protest, though I knew it would be useless. ‘But you said . . . I mean, that can’t be right . . . look, you’re the professor of this whole show, you should be able to fix it.’

  Lavinsky joined in the bluster, defending himself. ‘But I’m not head of department; it rotates, and Jan Russo’s got it at the moment. I’m not even sure that Jan could have got you anywhere near the payment we talked about. Still, it’s my fault. I was complaining about my kids being naive. I don’t even know how the university works anymore, let alone how to get around those workings to make it morally accountable.’

  I was deflated and beyond further protest. ‘Let’s just do it, professor. Every rock band in the world has been stiffed on more than one occasion. I’ll put it down to entertainment that won’t cost me anything.’

  ‘That’s the spirit,’ he said.

  Yair, I thought, the spirit is willing, but the wallet is weak.

  About 100 bodies trundled into the lecture theatre. How many minds and spirits were attached to those bodies, I couldn’t guess. I knew one of the bodies at least had an active mind, as I saw Jane ‘Bub’ Applebee settling into a corner of the last row of seats. I knew that Bub had transferred from Kelvin Grove campus of the Brisbane College of Advanced Education to the University of Queensland after the unfortunate death of Suzanne Lu at La Boite Theatre. It hadn’t occurred to me that she might be doing a Cultural Studies unit as well as drama.

  Or that she might have given me up to Lavinsky as the kind of underclass representative he wanted. The Professor probably thought his young student was currying favour, but this was another of Bub’s sick jokes. She knew Nat and I were going to the Beat that night; she probably suggested the professor would profit from being there as well. In the distance, Jane’s right hand protruded above the bench in front of her seat and she waved her fingers up and down. I did my best to ignore her, but couldn’t stop myself from shaking my head in her direction.

  The professor introduced me as a hybrid of the Kellys – bushranger Ned and folk-rock singer Paul – grafted on to the mean streets of Brisbane. Without a word of a lie, he used the words ‘mean streets’.

  I opened with the line that, as I hung about Chinatown, they would have to be ‘chow mean’ streets. I dredged for sympathy by mentioning my upbringing in an orphanage. Most stared up at me like cattle. I didn’t know if I was doing well or slowly dying. So I pictured the Gooroo sitting there in the middle of it all, with a mug of tea in his hand, in his comfortable armchair. That made the bullshit flow more easily.

  I was about to tell them how I had changed my name by deed poll to Steele Hill after the billboard I saw when I left the orphanage. But I wondered if these hip teenagers would think I had done a daggy deed. For similar reasons, I did not say my best mate was a sixty-year-old illegal bookmaker, called Gooroo, after an Aboriginal word for deep place or something like that.

  Leaving out my being told I was John Lennon’s lovechild was the hardest. I figured the odds were, only a fraction of the class would believe me even when I added the ambiguous clincher I did not quite believe it myself. Quickly weighing up the odds, I decided to ditch the Lennon bit, but it was a photo-finish decision. If a few students sought me out for a post-gig discussion, I would bring Lennon out then.

  I told the students of my love for horse racing, and how I was unjustly barred from all Australian racetracks for life. For simply doing my job, placing a few bets – well okay, a lot of bets – on a rank outsider.

  I’m a good spieler, even if I do say so myself, once I get warmed up, and forty minutes flew by. When Lavinsky called for a break, sighs of protest preceded much applause for my efforts. I was quite surprised at that, because I had told only as much of the truth as I felt you should give a bunch of stiffs without sacrificing your self-respect.

  Lavinsky said the break would be fifteen minutes, and we would play the second part by ear, as a question-and-answer session, letting it run until all concerned had had enough or wished to retire to the nearby Royal Exchange Hotel for port, cigars and more bullshit. Well, okay, Lavinsky did not say the pub part, but I figured enough kindred spirits in the audience would join me in the hotel and some city haunts to while away the night. My lousy $50 fee would cover a few wines and the taxi fares after I handed Lavinsky the keys to his Landcruiser

  The professor indicated for me to follow him up a flight of stairs, and down a corridor. He stuck his head in after opening a door. The nameplate read Postgraduate English Students.

  ‘I hope you’re looking after those computers,’ Lavinsky said to no one in particular of the four students hunched over keyboards.

  His head popped back out the door as quickly as it had invaded the room.

  As we walked on down the corridor, I asked him what that was about. The English students were getting new 486 computers, he told me, and Cultural Studies would inherit the hand-me-downs from that room. Just on spec, I looked back to take in the room number.

  We came to an office bearing Lavinsky’s name and designation, but scurried past it and into a staff room. Four people sat about, three of them drinking alcohol: two glasses of red wine and one scotch. The fourth was a cola.

  One of the red wines I had already met – the vibrant Clarissa Dunne, who had beaten us there from the lecture. Then again, I suspected her as a fast mover. The other red wine was a woman in her early forties, thin, glasses, wrinkles, and a face that hinted at a history of beauty savaged by late nights doing whatever. The scotch was her male alter ego – also thin, mid-forties, ravaged.

  The cola was a drop-dead-gorgeous teenage girl, obviously too young to be a uni student. She was the first to speak, as we entered the room. ‘ProJoe,’ she said to Lavinsky. ‘You made it.’

  I noticed the female forty-something red wine wince.

  ‘Of course, Cassandra. But shouldn’t you be studying Greek mythology, if that is still your latest fancy?’ Lavinsky teased.

  Cassandra did not get a chance to answer, as the professor wheeled on the older woman to introduce me. ‘Jan, this is Steele Hill, our lecture guest. Steele, this is Jan Russo, our head of department. Precocious Cassandra here is Jan’s daughter.’

  We exchanged nods and mutters, and Lavinsky turned to the scotch – Steven Dupont, senior lecturer, though Lavinsky said senior lecher, a pretty lame joke, even by liberal academic standards.

  Lavinsky’s weak jibe offended Dupont. ‘At least I don’t cavort in a 4WD,’ he retorted, ‘the fuck truck of the middle-aged Aussie male.’

  Was I detecting a bucketful of hostility here? You bet.

 
I took the glass of red I was offered, as it seemed a useful prop. But I really needed to do a deal before I went back for the second half of the lecture. I downed the wine and excused myself.

  I tried a few of the keys Lavinsky had left for me and opened the door to his office. No surprises: wall-to-wall books lined two shelves of the cramped cubicle; papers were strewn over the desk, and a telephone sat on top of a book called Eros Revisited. I leafed through the thick pages, containing scholarly text above and below obscene drawings, etchings and paintings. Porno for Pundits would have been a suitable subtitle. I put the book back under the phone and dialled.

  The Gooroo answered the phone from his unit. I told him the computers were not hot; they were payment for a job I was doing. I said he could have the lot for a grand. He should enter the twentieth century, when we were so close to the twenty-first. The Gooroo still wasn’t quite sold. He wanted to know for whom I did the job. I was mildly offended at the inference that I might be trying to pass off dodgy goods, but I gave Lavinsky’s name, thinking it couldn’t do any harm.

  Not such a good idea.

  ‘Joseph? Why didn’t you say so? We had quite a yak the other night. Three hours yarning. We talked about everything from semiotics to sex.’

  ‘You’re slipping, Gooroo. I thought you would say “everything from aardvark to zoon”. But what’s this about Lavinsky and sex? Do you reckon he could be a pants man, Gooroo?’

  ‘I’d say so, Steele. Didn’t you get that impression?’

  ‘Kinda,’ I admitted. ‘But he struck me more of an eleven-letter word man than a four-letter one.’

  Silence at the other end suggested the bookie was doing some calculations.

  ‘Like fornication,’ countered the Gooroo.

  I laughed and conceded the point. I asked Gooroo if Clarissa Dunne, Jan and Cassandra Russo or Steven Dupont had cropped up in his conversation with Lavinsky. Dupont, Gooroo remembered.

  ‘Lot of bad blood there,’ he said, obviously meaning between the two academics.

  When I asked for more info, all the bookie would say was I should ask Lavinsky.