30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account

by Peter Carey

  CHAPTER NINE

  WHEN I FIRST CAME to live in Sydney I daily drove from Wharf Road to North Sydney in my Jensen Healey. I careened across the harbour bridge at reckless speed, hood down, hair whipping my face. From May 1974 until January 1975, the bridge was no more than a road to me. But then, without warning, it became a source of terror.

  One muggy January morning I drove to work as normal. That night I found I could not return across the bridge, although return I must for I was already in the middle of the centre roadway with trucks to left and right of me and all that great weight of dizzy steel above my head. It was seven o'clock and the traffic heading south was fast and relentless. And here some alien panic took me, rushing through me in a great hot wave, chemical terror, administered direct into my blood. Confused, I braked, accelerated, closed my eyes, drove in a jerky fright, certain that I would cross the centre line and hit a truck. I was unbearably giddy, irrationally terrified of the fall to the water, but also the vertiginous height of the arch above me.

  When I finally descended to the Cahill Expressway I was a mess of sweat and shame, but I had little idea of what had happened to me. I certainly did not guess that a second bridge, a minuscule replica of the first, had been formed inside my brain and there it locked fast in place never to be undone, a fast and easy pathway to a previously inaccessible shore of panic.

  Why this occurred does not really matter, although it was the opinion of the New York psychologist Arthur Fensterheim that the root cause was, as is so often the case he said, nothing more profound than too much coffee.

  When, twenty-five years after this incident, I returned home with the martial-arts team, I had conveniently forgotten that the bridge was my Berlin Wall and that I would not drive myself across it to visit Jack Ledoux. Yet on the night I drank my half bottle of Laphroaig, I dreamed that I climbed the bridge, that I conquered it at last.

  In my dream I leap halfway up the Cyclone security fence around the southern pylon at Dawes Point, named for Lieutenant Dawes who had tried to learn the language (Why are the black men angry?). For a moment I cling spread-eagled on the wire, and then I swiftly pull myself up to the top. As in life, the security lights in my dream are quartz white. They wash across the face of the pylons, magnets for countless insects which now rise in dense clouds in the warm night air. The insects in turn attract gulls which spiral above my head, their white plumage shining in the dark. I feel, as I cleverly straddle the razor wire, as I drop lightly to the enclosed square of long dew-wet grass, that all of Sydney can see me. But it is three in the morning and the legal part of Sydney is sound asleep and the end of the lower arch, a great open box girder, waits for me as enticing as a rabbit hole in a child's story and I scurry on hands and knees from brightness into the safety of the dark.

  I am inside the bottom arch of the bridge. I can stand upright. I am laughing, elated, but my heart is also beating fast and I wait a moment to calm down, short intakes, long exhalations, just as Dr Fensterheim taught me.

  I need a torch and I have one, a heavy long job such as you buy, in the US anyway, from those mail-order catalogues containing instructions on garrotting and knife-fighting and other useful arts.

  All in all, says the voice, that's a useful object.

  In my dream I recognise him immediately - the narrator from The Third Policeman, the person who begins his narrative thus: Not everybody knows how I killed old Phillip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with my spade; but first it is better to speak of my friendship with John Divney because it was he who first knocked old Mathers down by giving him a great blow in the neck with a special bicycle-pump which he manufactured himself out of a hollow iron bar.

  In short, a character you would be wise to be very careful of.

  I make some non-committal response to his observation, but at the same time I am confused as to whether he means to say that the torch is 'useful' as a weapon and if I am being challenged to use it against him. I shine the light inside the bridge as if I make this journey every day. I find my view impeded, ten feet in, by a steel plate.

  Ah, says my invisible companion, but there is a dirty great hole in the middle of it.

  Indeed there is, and soon I am crawling through it. And then what do I find? Why, six feet ahead, there is a second metal plate, a second hole. So this is how it is going to be. My passage to the apex will be through a series of rooms, of steel boxes of gradually diminishing size. The height of these boxes is around seven feet when I set out but soon enough I need to stoop to accommodate myself to the engineer's will. This might be expected to produce resistance, then claustrophobia, but although it is increasingly clammy and hot and there is a musty raggy smell which reminds me of old Bertie Booker who cleaned cars in my father's GM dealership, the containment is unexpectedly comforting. I am the worm in the bridge's spine, the enemy it cannot see. I rise inside the arch unseen by all the world.

  If you think to escape the terror, says the voice, then you are seriously mistaken.

  I turn sharply towards him and knock my head so hard I drop the torch. It lands with a dreadful clatter but, thank God, is prevented from rolling far by the steel plate.

  As I continue, the box beam narrows and I know I previously claimed that I had been comforted by the containment, but as I now come level with the roadway and feel the merciless roar of traffic, I drink deep on a whole cocktail of anxieties. Claustrophobia and vertigo flutter like possibilities around the penumbra of my consciousness. But I do not give in. My body is shaken by the traffic, nothing more.

  I had never previously noticed quite how much the arches of the bridge slim as they reach the apex, but the bridge is a structure I have spent a lot of time avoiding. I never knew, for instance, that it is constructed as a mighty hinge, or two hinges bolted together at the apex. I certainly did not know that Jack Ledoux himself had passed along this very route.

  I leave the roadway well beneath me and, if it is hotter inside the beam now, it is also quieter. As I approach the apex of the lower arch the white light of my murderous torch is well ahead of me, seeking the two large wing nuts I know to expect above my head. And there they are, one and a half inches in diameter, but fragrant with WD-40 and as effortlessly turned as spinning tops.

  Ah, this next bit will test you, boyo.

  But I easily push the steel trapdoor aside and lift my eager face into the sky.

  The air tastes of rock oysters and I watch with a kind of ecstasy as a great train of white cloud scuds across the heavens.

  You are thinking of Van Gogh, the narrator offers. It is Starry Night you're seeing.

  I admit this is so.

  There's madness, he says, that's insanity for you.

  I am now at the apex of the lower arch and to reach the upper arch I must climb this stairway which is but three feet from my hand. Foolishly I clamber on to the wide flat section of the arch. I try not to look at anything but the stairway which has been built by some cruel surrealist rising upwards in the middle of the wind.

  Now, I cannot deny it, I am afraid. I tell myself it is just a dream and I grasp the two-foot-wide rungs of the ladder and lift my now leaden sneakers up through the nor'-easterly, ascending through three landings to the top arch of the bridge, and there I find my old friend Panic has been waiting for me all the time.

  It is just a dream, but now I am whimpering like a child, shutting my eyes, lowering myself flat on to the slippery dew-wet bridge. I try to perform those long J-shaped breaths that Arthur Fensterheim taught me but I am pinned, like a live butterfly fluttering on a board of steel.

  And there I stay, for how long I cannot say except that in my dream I fall asleep and dream, and in this dream within the dream I cunningly manage to create my own escape. Through this ruse I am able to actually stand, and stretch, and look down from the bridge, and look out across the small fortified island of Pinchgut. But no sooner have I stood than Flann O'Brien's man is pestering me once again.

  Jesus help me, what's that?

 
I make no answer.

  Might a man not ask a civil question? What's that flapping in the breeze down there? Answer me.

  It must be Francis Morgan, I admitted.

  Who in Christ's name is Francis Morgan?

  Governor Phillip had him hung in chains until he rotted and fell into the sea.

  And what's that blue plastic?

  They're building a restaurant.

  My God, that hanging chap would kill the appetite.

  I gaze pointedly away from him, surveying first the Heads, the mighty incisors that protect the port of Sydney, then the ridges to the north where I can now see the headlights of a single car moving along Military Road, so called because it is the military highway to the batteries down which at Eastertide, with drums beating, colours flying, go the gallant guards of the city and colony.

  The gallant guards of the city and colony. That's a quote.

  In so saying he reveals that he can read my mind. It is from A Traveller's Tale, I confess. From Manly to the Hawkesbury.

  Is not that hanging fellow making you giddy?

  But I cannot see the hanging man and I am not giddy in the least. The bridge, it seems, is finally conquered. Now Sydney can be really mine. Now I actually dare to look calmly down into the quay where I can hear the comforting squeak and groan of the big steel ferries protesting their moorings.

  And there, sweeping above and behind the ferries, a single motor-cycle comes off the bridge and sweeps down the Cahill Expressway.

  Down there is the birthplace of modern Australia, although you would not know it. The expressway is like a steel wall, cutting water off from earth, slicing like a knife across the moment of our birth. Further back, in the midst of all that very ordinary architecture, is the towering building at Australia Square, beneath which runs the Tank Stream, which was our nation's breast, at which our founding fathers and mothers, jailers and jailed, all drank side by side. Now, of course, the Tank Stream is buried, a sandstone drain which will take a week of phone calls to get access to and where, in the freshly disinfected air, cockroaches flee before your light.

  Above my head the clouds are racing, but I am in a sort of ecstasy where everything means something and I am awash with the giddy thrilling feelings that must come to schizophrenics when all the secrets of eternity are suddenly laid bare.

  Read the signs to me, my companion demands.

  Staring down into the Central Business District, I see the street signs have begun to burn like glow-worms in the velvet night.

  Phillip Street, I offer.

  And who was that?

  Our first governor, a naval officer.

  Hunter Street?

  After the foolish second governor, a naval officer.

  King Street? Not the damn King of England?

  No. Another naval officer.

  Bligh Street. This cannot be the same bastard who drove his poor crew to mutiny?

  Yes, the Colonial Office appointed him governor. He was recommended by Sir Joseph Banks in fact.

  Why would you celebrate a tyrant with a street name?

  Oh, we rose against him, I said.

  Ah, at last some heroes. It takes great courage to go against a bastard like that. Were the rebels hung for it? What were the names of the martyrs? Which streets are theirs?

  The leader was a Captain John Macarthur. The event was called the Rum Rebellion.

  Macarthur? That is not a name I see. There is a lot of arse-licking: Kent and Bathurst and Goul-burn and Sussex and York and Pitt and George. But where is Macarthur?

  Well, Macarthur is a complicated figure for us. He's a hard one to embrace. He was a Tory.

  But did he get rid of the bastard Bligh or did he not? Was he not a brave man?

  Yes, very brave, and headstrong, but he was in no way democratic. His notion of a parliament would be four cronies and himself in charge. The only convicts he had time for were those that worked as slaves for him. He lined his own pockets. He was an army officer but he used his privilege to get rich. He and his officer mates controlled the rum.

  Ah, so a man who will not share a drink.

  It was a monopoly the soldiers had for themselves. It was like being in charge of the mint. This was a place where a man would work for grog when he gave not a damn about the lash. If you earned twenty shillings you would be paid a pint of grog instead.

  Wait a minute. Is this the same Macarthur who is called the father of the Australian wool industry?

  The very same man.

  And is wool not the business that made the colony feasible? Should you not acknowledge him in some way? A Tory, yes, but is he not worth more to you than Kent and Sussex? Should you not have a monument to him at least?

  And then, in my dream, I peered down from the top arch of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and had the insight which would never leave me, not even in my waking hours. Asleep in my bed in Woollahra I saw the Central Business District as if for the first time. I saw how it held itself back from the edge of the beloved harbour as if it understood how vile and crooked it had always been. In a society which values the view above all else, here was the heart of the city, a blind place with no vistas, a dense knot of development and politics and business and law. This was Macarthur's monument. A physical expression of two centuries of Sydney's own brand of capitalism, the concrete symbol of an unhealthy antidemocratic alliance between business and those authorities which should have controlled it.

  Staring in horror at this ugly thing that we had made, I heard a pitiless grinding noise, some infernal machine, some engine of gears and chains, grinding very, very slow.

  Come on, come on, the voice called, you can't let down your mates.

  Far beneath me I heard Kelvinator's garage roller door growling on its axis. It was six am in Woollahra. Time to drive to Bondi Beach to take our morning walk.

  I stumbled in the dark and as I heard Kelvi-nator start the engine of his Jaguar I was very grateful to feel the floor beneath my feet.

  CHAPTER TEN

  TEN MINUTES AFTER THE grinding door had rescued me from this satanic vision of the CBD I was walking with Lester and Kelvinator and his mad brown kelpie along the firm yellow sand of Bondi Beach. In all the world, what metropolitan beach could equal this? Rio? I've never been there. Venice? Santa Monica? Don't make me laugh. This was the great joy of Sydney, that you could have THIS, the embracing yellow cliffs, the breakers long and slow, the texture of the Pacific like a polished Cadillac, a gorgeous eggshell blue with pink showing in the froth of the breaking waves.

  This is what my Sydney friends could do each morning. They were never blind to where they were but they never stopped bantering, heckling, joking. On this particular morning they affected to be astounded that I had not yet got Jack Ledoux's story from him.

  Jesus, we gave, said Lester, his voice rising in that self-mocking plaintive tone which was so characteristic of him. We gave our story, miss.

  We bloody gave the damn storm of the century.

  Kelvin and Lester had been taking these walks together so long, they had become like a pair of high-speed cockatoos, their brisk steps punctuated by familiar patterns of call and response. Pedant, pe-dant, fucking's too good for him. Worn-nin, worn-nin.

  What sort of reporter are you anyway? Doorstop him.

  Door-stop?

  Put your bloody foot inside his bloody door and refuse to leave until he tells his story.

  Jack doesn't have a door. In any case, I never saw him do anything he didn't want to.

  And I never saw you not do something you wanted to do. Go. Take the car. Why do you never use my car? Does it smell or something?

  I could have told Kelvin I had panic attacks on the bridge, but instead I changed the subject to something more congenial - my fantasy that Alison and I would sell the apartment in New York and come back home to live.

  So I couldn't drive across the bridge. All I wanted was to bring our kids to Bondi Beach, to have a dog, to eat oysters at Hugo's over on Campbell Parade.
I wanted us all to feel what it is like to live in a city with diminished population pressure.

  What you actually want, says Kelvinator, is something two or three streets back.

  There was a pleasant nor'-easter ruffling our shirts, a silky seductive wind, not strong but sufficient to disperse that dream of the knotted power and corruption of the Central Business District.

  Could I get a house and garage and a pool and four bedrooms?

  The Aussie dollar's worth fifty-six cents.

  With US dollars, you'd piss it in said Lester.

  In New York we cram a family of four into two small bedrooms. Alison and I work in offices the size of telephone booths. On Bondi I feel the space everywhere, not just in the luxury of beach and light but in that imagined house two streets back where I will not have to throw a book away to make room for each new one that comes in the door.

  We are now following Kelvinator's sniffing pissing licky brown kelpie up the steps to the road that passes the Bondi Returned Services League, a typically Bondi institution of the old school. Barracks architecture, no airs, no charm, but a fabulous view right out across the glassy Pacific Ocean. This has been the mark of Bondi always, the combination of immense natural beauty and an unaesthetic but democratic spirit. The rich stayed huddled inside the harbour or drove up the coast to Palm Beach, but here on Bondi you mix it with the hoi polloi. Or did.

  If you're thinking about buying, said Kelvinator, dragging his ridiculously excited dog back off the road, you better do it now. See that building there, Packer paid two mill for one of those apartments.

  They reckon Packer is trying to buy the rissole, says Lester. A rissole, in case you are from across the sea, is a kind of hamburger patty, but it is also an arsehole and also an RSL.

  If he wants it, says Lester, he'll get it.

  We three pause to look down on to the ocean pool beneath the RSL. The pool, while having nothing but a geographical connection with the RSL, is of the same spirit. It is a public pool, a democratic pool, rough at the edges, frequented by all sorts of people, amongst them leather-skinned sixty year olds in Speedo trunks and faces like last winter's potatoes. Even the dog stops licking to watch the waves crash over the wall, cascade off the edge, foaming and spilling on the rocks beneath. The force of the ocean gives it an exciting, vaguely dangerous air. The impression is not exactly false. Can you see that enormous rock just off Ben Buckler, the northern headland of Bondi Beach? It was not there on July 14 1912. Next day it was delivered to the beach like a piece of flotsam. It weighs 235 tons.