by David Malouf
He was a sad fellow. He had driven for a big trucking company after he left the factory but had done his back in – that’s how he had missed the war. After that he had a newspaper run, out Lidcombe way; then, when he retired, had put his money into the coffee shop. He had married late. There was just the one boy.
‘I’ve done pretty well, considering,’ he said, and you could see that it did not occur to him that the man he was speaking to had done so much better. They were very easy with one another. Vic felt that in talking to Felix, though the subject was not mentioned, he was relieving himself a little of what he could not say about Greg. The tie between them was always this difficult business of fathers and sons, though it had never come out in fact that he had one.
What Vic had against Brad was that he had none of his father’s fineness of feeling. In his empty-headed, egotistical way he took Vic’s acquaintance with his father as a feather in his own cap, referring to it sometimes in a way that was quite out of place and which Vic found offensive, though out of affection for the father he did not mention it.
He had very little use for a driver, preferring, except on special occasions, to take a smaller car. Most often it was Alex Brad drove for. Alex liked to work in the car, and Brad, who was very keen on appearances, felt it gave him too a kind of importance – it was like being in a film – to have someone back there making use of a dictaphone and taking calls; though Vic, of course, was the boss.
Vic was using Brad, and the big car, when he found himself one afternoon at the Cross. He had visitors to entertain, two Japanese with whom he had just signed a sizeable contract, and a Swede. They had eaten at a good Italian place in Darlinghurst, drunk well, and these visitors, especially one of the Japanese, having heard of the Cross, wanted to take a look at it – not, Vic warned them, that there would be much to see at three o’clock in the afternoon. He told Brad he could take a bit of a walk – say, half an hour – and, leaving the car in Kellett Street, they strolled in the sunshine to an outdoor café.
He disliked the Cross and never came here except on occasions like this. Its most recent incarnation, as a playground for American servicemen on R and R from Vietnam, was done with now, gone with the war, but the sleaziness and joyless opportunism of that time had set a standard and the Cross was still living up to it. An odour of tropical despair hung over the place, from battlefields that in those days had been just hours away. The boys coming in in their freshly-laundered Hawaiian shirts had still had the smell of battle fear on them.
The mugs were local now, boys in from the suburbs, football teams from interstate; or they were tourists like the Japs who wanted to see what it was the country produced other than wheat, wool, minerals and a few natural phenomena that were sacred sites to one part of the population and to the rest, if they thought of them at all, a kind of geological Disneyland.
The war was over but the Silver Dollar and the Texas Tavern were still there. So were the strip-joints, the skin-flick movie houses, the pinball arcades, the fast-food shops, the fortune tellers with their little velvet-covered tables and Tarot packs; and at every corner the loungers, the lookers, the dealers in this drug and that – and round behind, in an alley full of garbage, only some of it crammed into plastic bags, the bloody syringes and other evidence, with the bodies themselves on occasion. And on the streets here, in broad daylight, the walking wounded, girls in boots and tights, some of whom were no longer girls either, and some of them not quite girls, and in the park around the fountain, or in the bar at the Rex, the boys in T-shirts and parachute pants.
It was all more squalid than it used to be. The big men who lived off it were out of sight. They were, if the newspapers were right, some of Vic’s business acquaintances – they did not show up here. But their agents were about, moving their shoulders in the sun, and the whole place had a showy half-innocent, half-corrupt air, as if even the corruption might be a fraud, meant only to deceive and titillate, though that too was a deception.
There was corruption all right. Something of what had been in the heads of those boys who had been shipped down here to get free, for a few days, of terror and carnage, had seeped out and infected everything, so that the proximity of death could, if you had a nose for it, be felt more strongly here than in any other part of the city. It was cheap here, commonplace: and that too, whether they knew it or not, drew people.
The crowds came to stare for a bit at a freakshow, to put their hands, just for a moment or two, and at a price, on something forbidden or dangerous; to watch deals being done while pinballs bounced and set small lights flashing and numbers coming up; to listen to the hot-gospellers promising punishment or immediate cleansing and cure, and watch a lamb kebab turn in its own fat on a spit and boys with floury forearms, in dirty white caps behind steamy windows, knead pizza dough.
They settled at an outside table and ordered coffee. The visitors’ eyes were everywhere.
A little way down the street there was a commotion. A ragged looking young man with his head shaved up round the ears and peaks of feathery hair, in heavy boots and a T-shirt and braces and with a little black-and-white terrier at his heels, was clod-hopping about on the pavement playing a mouth-organ. The little dog danced round his heels and yipped. His girl, with her legs sprawled out in front of her on the dirty pavement, sat with her head against the wall.
Three young fellows in leather jackets were tormenting them. The little dog snapped at their heels and one after another they kicked at it. The fellow with the mouth-organ, who had fingerless mittens on his hands, was turning his head away like a child, on the principle that if he did not look at his tormentors they could not be there.
On the pavement was a cap with a few coins on it, and one of the louts leaned down now, took a handful of coins from the cap, stood turning them over in his hand, then distributed them, laughing, to his mates.
The girl swore at them, and when the young man with the mouth-organ did nothing, but kept playing, she began to pummel his legs with her fists. The youths, who had begun to walk off, stopped then and turned back to enjoy the scene, the mouth-organ player playing, the girl punching at him. They laughed. The little dog went after them, but stopped when they threatened, and stood there, barking.
The youth and the girl argued for a moment, then she rolled back against the wall again and he began to dance in his heavy boots, playing a jig now, very wild and shrill, and making little nodding and beckoning signs to the passers-by, who shied away. Finally he stopped playing altogether, leaned down, took up the cap, which he emptied into one hand and set anyhow on his head, and gave a call to the dog, which came running. The girl, scrabbling her legs about on the dirty pavement, got herself up and they moved up the street together to where Vic and the others were.
Vic saw then who it was.
He had not seen him for more than seven years. He looked battered. His hair was bleached, he had an earring. The braces and boots, but something too in the nervous set of his shoulders, made him look like a six-year-old who had suffered at the hands of a crazed or brutal adult. When he came up level with their table he stopped dead, and after a moment, grinned in an inane, rather mischievous way, and Vic saw that his front teeth had been knocked out. He came right up to them and thrust out his cap.
The hand in the fingerless mitten was filthy. The flesh of his forearm, which was bare, was like a fish’s belly, bluish-white. Behind him the girl weaved about with her head rolling and her eyes closed. The little black-and-white terrier pranced.
The visitors began to feel in their pockets for change. The Swede, who was very aristocratic and fastidious, was trying to ignore this manifestation of local squalor. He was disgusted, you could see that, and a little scared as well. He could not see what the rules were in this place where begging, he had thought, was unknown.
The Japanese were grinning. They were amused. One of them dropped a five-dollar note into the cap, and Greg raised a finger to his temple in scornful salute.
Vic had not
moved. He did not feel humiliated or ashamed before these men. They meant nothing to him. What he felt was a blazing anger, and most of all at the Swede. At the clean-fingered distaste with which he dropped a coin into the cap, as if it, and the arm behind it, had materialised out of nowhere, and what might lie beyond was beneath his notice.
The boy was unabashed. He appeared, with his absent-minded grin and the childish little jerking movements he kept making with his head, to accept no responsibility at all for what was happening, and to have no resistance to it either. The moment sat so lightly upon him that he seemed weightless, and Vic had again a vision of him dancing, clod-hopping about on the pavement like a puppet, but one that was not attached to anything.
‘But he is attached to me,’ he thought, and was struck suddenly with the impulse to stand up and say it aloud, to say it right out, just like that, with whatever dignity he could muster, but if there was none to be had, that would not matter either. To say quite openly, with a heart too bewildered any longer to take refuge in pride, what he was saying already to himself: ‘This is the thing I was in panic about, that I knew was on the way and knew I had no power to prevent. Now it is here.’
Bright sunlight played on the table-top and round the mouths of glasses, touched the corners of buildings, swam in windows, lit the highest leaves of the surrounding trees. It was three o’clock in the afternoon. It was not a dream.
He said nothing. Without looking up he began to take out his wallet, and the others watched uncomprehending as before he could open it, the beggar or busker or whatever he was reached out and with a silly little laugh plucked it from him: flipped it open, extracted two, three notes – twenties they might have been, no, fifties! – then, with another laugh, tossed it back.
There was a police station not fifty yards away. It was amazing.
Vic did not once look up. What he could not face, but could see clearly enough, was the look on the boy’s face. The boy – but he was past thirty. Defiant it would be, but in an indeterminate, rabbity way, as if he was himself being dared by a fellow inside there that he had to watch out for – the one who was high on whatever it was that made his eyes so icy-blue but inward-looking and put the smile at the corner of his mouth.
He stood a moment, looking pleased with himself and fingering the notes. Then, losing confidence, he turned, grabbed the girl, who was swaying about on the pavement, and dragged her off.
The others sat staring. They could not see what it meant, what embarrassing intimacy or bit of odd local behaviour had been revealed to them, and Vic did not bother to explain. He did not bother with them at all. Stumbling to his feet, he took the bill, paid it at the counter inside and they had to set off after him.
They found the car. The driver, with an ice-cream cone in his hand, was walking up and down the pavement keeping an eye on it. Up here he liked to keep a good lookout – he was smart that way.
He twigged immediately that something had gone wrong. When they had dropped the Swede off, then the two Japs, he glanced up enquiringly into the rear-vision mirror, past his own reflection this time. Old Trader Vic (as he called him when he was showing off to his mates) was slumped in the corner against the window. He looked like someone had king-hit him. Brad turned his head so that the old fellow would see something more than just the back of his neck. It was a form of question.
He came back to reality then and asked to be driven to a place Brad had never taken him before, way up beyond Ku-ring-gai Chase to the Hawkesbury, and some bit of a store on the river up there where he had to sit around kicking his heels for ages, and a crazy old girl with no hair practically had offered him a cup of tea, then in the middle of it, for no reason he ever discovered, did her block and started to perform and play rough with him.
16
THEY WERE THE years now of the real boom. What had come before was nothing compared to this. What had been measured in millions was to be measured now in hundreds of millions. No one had seen anything like it.
When Jenny saw Vic on the television these days she sat glum and silent.
It wasn’t him that worried her – she knew him. She didn’t know what he did, or any more about him than she ever had, but she had been in the same room with him, her own kitchen, and seen the way he sipped his tea with his eyes looking out over the rim of the cup, and ate a pikelet, and the way the skin wrinkled on the back of his hand. She knew the smell of him too. That wasn’t what worried her. What she could not fathom was what he was doing in the world of TV, the News and that. How had he got there? She knew how he had got to the Crossing. Through Digger. But the TV was different.
The moment his name came up and his face appeared in the lighted window there, smiling, assured, with his striped shirts and his brushed hair and the face so bronzed and lifelike, the whole thing lost its credibility for her. She couldn’t listen to what they were saying or believe any bit of it. The News! She would go glum and start counting in her head – one, two, three, four – till they took him off.
Vic had always played things close to his chest. All his success had come from his willingness to take responsibility for what he was doing, stay quiet, bear the risks, and keep his nerve. Ma had been his only real confidante. She was so still. He would tell her anything she wanted to know, she had only to ask. Alex he told as little as he could get away with.
He had chosen Alex because he was family, and because he had seen, in a hard-nosed way, that the qualities Alex possessed were the ones he lacked. They were qualities he had no time for in fact – they had all to do with caution, consultation, bookkeeping, accountability – but they were what the times, it seemed, demanded. He had chosen Alex as well because he thought, being family, he would have a kind of ascendency over him.
He had been wrong in this. Alex was stubborn. He held to the code he lived by with a fanaticism Vic found he could neither ignore nor negotiate.
Alex was a company man. Accountability was his gospel. When he spoke it was with all the facts at his fingertips and the approval, always, of a board with whom he had gone over every detail. He could not understand Vic. Or rather, he did understand but could not deal with him.
‘He’s a dinosaur,’ he complained to the few men he could trust not to bear tales. ‘It was fine in the old days. It was open slather then. This was Hicksville. He could be a one man show and get away with it. He was brilliant, I agree. But we’re in a new phase now. Everything’s more complicated. That’s what he won’t accept. I have to watch him like a goddamn hawk. You’ve got no idea the tricks he gets up to.’
‘So what are you griping about?’ Vic would argue when some scheme he had been engaged in was in the open at last and his hand revealed. ‘We made money on it, didn’t we? Have I ever got us into anything that was a loss? What about that Riverdale business? Who got us into that little pile of pooh?’
He knew Alex was watching him, that he was being humoured – patronised, in fact – and that Alex had a core of supporters, fellows full of his sort of ideas who were determined to restrain and thwart him and would one day ease him out. He watched them, and after a time he began to watch outside as well. He had a nose for that, for what was not quite right; a sixth sense that warned him when someone was on his tail. He had played that game himself and knew the signs. When he was sure of what was happening he took action but told no one, acting as he always had done, alone. If Alex was in it, he would be caught out and exposed. If he wasn’t, he would be delighted, wouldn’t he? – astonished too – that the thing had been seen and forestalled.
It was his big gamble. He needed it. He needed the excitement, and the chance it offered to show, once and for all, what he was worth. When all was ready, fixed and about to go, he would lay his hand down and watch their faces.
He had advisers of his own, of course; you needed them these days. But them too he kept in the dark. It would have been good, he thought, to go over it with Ma. He had no wish to deceive her. But Ma was nearly ninety; still clear-headed but racked with anx
ieties again that he was afraid to catch.
The one person he could be open with was Digger, he owed him that; and the advantage of Digger was that he offered no arguments. He might have done. There were times, certainly, when he looked doubtful enough. But Digger was out of his element. He did not understand the danger, the beauty of the thing.
So though he tried to stay away, he found himself, as the affair reached its crisis, going back and back to the Crossing, eager to have someone to listen while once again he went over the details of it. It was watertight. No doubt of that. He had considered every eventuality. But he needed to talk it into action, to keep it going where he could best control each movement of it: in his head.
Digger had caught on to one or two things that set him thinking. They had come up in passing, but in a way that caught his ear. One of them had to do with the market’s being ‘nervous’. He was struck by the word because it had already occurred to him in connection with Vic.
He talked a good deal about how cool he was. He prided himself on that. But what Digger saw was that he was overheated, and he could not judge, since he had never seen him till now under circumstances like these, whether it was normal or not, whether it was or was not to be expected as a by-product of what kept him cool. He would have liked to discuss this with someone, with Ellie for instance; she would know. But the secrecy Vic demanded held him back.
This secret side of things was an agony to him. He wondered how necessary it was outside of Vic’s need to impose it. Its effect was to bind them even closer now, as fellow conspirators, but in an area where only Vic knew the rules. He swallowed his doubts, afraid, when so much depended on confidence, and trust, that if he spoke them aloud he might bring about the very thing he wanted to prevent – the upsetting of some balance in Vic that would put him off.
‘What’s going on?’ Jenny wailed. ‘What’s ’e doin’, comin’ down here all the time? What does ’e want? And don’t tell me nothin’ again, cos I don’t believe it.’