True Stories

by Helen Garner

  Lone Ray strolls past. ‘I like these blokes on the ship,’ says Bev when he’s out of earshot. ‘But last night one was tryin’ to kiss me—they were all around me, pushin’ and shovin’—I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it at all. I said to the one with the walking stick, I said, “I like them, but they’re goin’ about it the wrong way. They make me feel like I’m a bitch on heat.” ’

  ‘And what did he say?’

  She shrugs. ‘He agreed.’

  At lunch a rumour whizzes round that last night’s fish was off. Everyone declined to eat it, even the Russian DJ, who was seen out at the Lido Bar scoffing bought pies. Several people have suffered from both vomiting and diarrhoea. By dinner time there are rumbles of protest about the Russian waitresses’ surly manners and the gross food. One passenger, sick of waiting for insulting service, gets up, barges to the sideboard, and fills a plate with her own choices. Two waitresses hurry over and blast her with ferocious looks, but she stands her ground and returns their stares, wordlessly, with knobs on: she is a tall, well-built Australian girl and her face is flushed with rage.

  I order minestrone and the waitress slaps down a bowl of watery chicken consomme. ‘Excuse me,’ I say. ‘I ordered minestrone.’ She shrugs, picks up the dish and strolls away. Minutes later she returns and places the same thing in front of me. I hear my voice trembling dangerously as I say, ‘This is not minestrone.’

  ‘Min’stron,’ she insists.

  I bang the table and yell, ‘This is NOT MINESTRONE. Minestrone has beans.’

  Impassively she removes the plate and replaces it with a bowl of darker, thicker fluid. Our table is frozen in terrible silence. Lorraine is staring at me as if I had used a four-letter word. Flustered, I plunge my spoon into the soup and fish out two dark, kidney-shaped objects. I hold them up. ‘See? Beans.’ Gwen lets out a yelp, and stifles it.

  The waitress comes back with a tilting salad platter. Professionally handling spoon and fork, she slings on to Lorraine’s plate one brown stalk off an iceberg lettuce, one quarter of a tomato, and one angled, shrivelling slice of cucumber. She slouches away. For three beats Lorraine looks down at her plate. Then she turns her face up to us, takes a deep breath, and says in a loud, disgusted, incredulous voice, ‘Isn’t that bloody miserable?’

  The four of us crack up. Lorraine’s face goes dark red with the strain. She mops her eyes with a screwed-up paper napkin. ‘I think I’ve been drinkin’ too much?’ she gasps. ‘I’m gettin’ emotional?’ At this we throw down our cutlery and shriek. Our heads are bowed among the plates. People at other tables start to crane their necks. Lorraine is possessed by hopeless paroxysms. The napkin is almost stuffed into her mouth. Shirley, flushed and quivering, has to take off her glasses and wipe away tears. ‘At last, Lorraine,’ chokes Gwen through her clean cotton hanky, ‘at last we’ve got you to complain about something.’

  When we have composed ourselves, we sit looking right into each other’s faces for the first time, without defences. ‘I’ve been thinking?’ says Lorraine earnestly. ‘It must be because youse have all been travelling before but I haven’t? So I’ve got no idea what it’s right for me to expect?’

  ‘Travelling?’ says Gwen in her soft voice. ‘I’ve never even been up in a plane.’

  In the pause that follows, we hear the huge fat father of a huge fat family, two tables away, heave a contented sigh as he lays down his knife and fork. ‘Aaaah,’ he says. ‘I still reckon Australian food’s the best in the world—don’t you?’ The other members of his family nod happily and go on chewing and swallowing.

  ‘Helen,’ says Shirley. ‘Can you write about this, in that newspaper you work for?’

  ‘I can,’ I reply, ‘and I will.’

  Lorraine leans forward and lowers her voice. ‘Do you think I should ask Stefan to take me out to dinner when the ship docks? ’Cause I’d only be able to see him in Sydney. He keeps saying to me, “Why can’t I visit you? You’re free, aren’t you?” But he couldn’t come to where I live. It’d be too…complicated.’

  ‘Get rid of your boyfriend,’ says Gwen bluntly. ‘Then you will be free. Because you’re divorced.’

  Lorraine writhes. ‘Yeah but there’s something in me that won’t let me do that. Anyway, I didn’t come on this cruise looking for a shipboard romance. Two days ago I didn’t even know him.’ She sits up straight, as if with fresh resolve. But Stefan, on his way to the door, stops five paces from our table and stands there looking at Lorraine. Beaming, she jumps up and dashes over to him.

  Gwen, Shirley and I exchange significant glances as they walk out together. We feel protective of Lorraine, with her manoeuvres and her vague fantasies. ‘He looks a bit of a tough customer,’ says Gwen. ‘Don’t you think?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘Dark. But kind of…interesting.’

  ‘What that girl needs,’ says Shirley, pushing back her chair, ‘is a property settlement. So she can shake off her no-hoper ex. And her boyfriend.’

  That evening I make a valiant effort to sit through an Australian cabaret in the saloon. Two scrawny sisters in strapless lamé mini dresses squall a Beatles song, then the MC drags out on to the dance floor a shy man who has proposed, during the cruise, to his much younger Chinese girlfriend, and been accepted. He is ecstatic, she demure. A pav with sparklers is produced and we all sing ‘For They Are Jolly Good Fellows’. Some of the Australian women in the saloon cast narrow looks at the new fiancée.

  Passing through the casino on my way to bed, I spot Shirley pumping coins into a fruit machine. I stand next to her for five minutes, completely unable to grasp the principles of the game. She is so phlegmatic that I can’t tell whether she’s winning or losing. Coins start to rattle and slide wildly inside the machine. ‘Are you winning, or is it?’

  ‘It’s the boat starting to roll,’ she says without looking up.

  I go to my bunk and read Moby Dick. The tannoy in my cabin is leaking an irritating thread of music. I turn the volume down as far as it will go but still the song oozes out. When I look out my porthole in the small hours, the horizon is tilting at a forty-five-degree angle.

  It’s still dark on Monday morning when Mikhail Sholokhov enters Sydney Heads. I hang over the rail, amateurishly angling my camera, and watch the drama of the pilot battling through big seas to reach us. Presently the decks are lined with passengers in raincoats, silently watching the sky turn a murky yellow. We slide past Rose Bay, Double Bay, Rushcutters. The city is going to work all around us; we too are on our way to work.

  At breakfast Lorraine agonises about the Stefan problem. ‘I can’t give him my home phone number, ’cause my ex-husband will be rude to him if he calls.’

  At last we dare to give advice. ‘Get rid of that creep, Lorraine! Turf him out! You’re worth better than that! Get a settlement—get your life together!’

  But Lorraine is not listening. ‘Anyway,’ she murmurs, thinking out loud, ‘how could I cook Polish food?’

  Stefan strides towards the dining room door, pauses by our table, bends over Lorraine and gives her a kiss on each cheek. ‘Goodbye!’ they say. He walks away. She turns back to us. Her face is shining.

  In the fuss of disembarkation I lose contact with my companions. Passengers shuffle off the ship without ceremony. No one seems to bother with farewells. There is a strange sparseness in the huge empty terminal. People wander away with their bags, looking as lost and shy as they did three days ago when we first came on board. I can’t see a single person I know.

  I pick up my duffel bag and walk out of the terminal on to Circular Quay. It’s a fresh and lovely morning. Fifty metres ahead of me, I see a familiar chunky little figure in sandals with heels, lugging a large bag. She’s having trouble with it, she stops and rests it on the sea wall. I run to catch up. ‘Lorraine!’

  ‘Hoi! My bag strap’s broken? I dunno what’s wrong with it?’ We cobble it together and she shoulders it.

  ‘Where are you going now?’ I ask. I’d like to invite her for a c
offee, but somehow, on land again, our intimacy has evaporated: I’m afraid she’ll say no.

  ‘I might as well just take the train home,’ she says. ‘I could hang around Sydney but what’s the point? I was so besotted with Stefan and I…’ She looks up at me with her broad, anxious, endearing smile.

  I say, ‘I’ve got to go to work. It’s been great getting to know you.’ I lean forward—she’s a good three inches shorter than I am—and we kiss each other and clumsily hug. ‘Goodbye! Goodbye!’

  Away she staggers with her bag. I want to say goodbye to Carola, to Bev, to Gwen and Shirley. But they have all dematerialised. Did I dream them? Were they figments of the anti-seasick drug? The earth is swaying. I can hardly get my footing.

  1995

  Aqua Profonda

  BILL DECIS IS mad about water. He’s got nearly two million litres of it in his care. Every day he filters it, adds chemicals to it, pumps it this way and that through great pipes, takes morning and evening samples of it, and picks small imperfections off its surface with a strainer on a long metal pole. Teaching people how to move through water is the passion of his life.

  His baby is Melbourne’s Fitzroy baths. He has worked there for eleven years. Thousands of motorists pass the pool every day on their way along Alexandra Parade off the F19 freeway, ignorant of the treasure which lies modestly concealed, rippling faintly in the early morning air, behind an anonymous cream brick wall just east of the Brunswick Street intersection.

  The locals know where it is, though. Every summer fifty thousand swimmers and layabouts click through its turnstiles. Bill Decis knows, as do the parents of the area, that the neighbourhood pool is the biggest and cheapest child-minding centre ever invented. Bill’s been in the water game so long now that even when he’s on holidays or at the beach his eyes can’t stop their constant patrolling.

  The blokes at the Royal Derby in Fitzroy call him ‘Johnny Weismuller’. He’s fifty-eight and has the powerful shoulders and tapering torso of the lifelong swimmer and water polo player. He’s a moulder by training, and did his apprenticeship at the foundry of H.V. McKay Massey Harris where the basic wage, he says, was created; but he’s a swimming coach, a teacher, by inclination and experience. He’s lost count years ago of the kids he’s taught to swim, of the champions he’s coached to victory, though he has a couple of suitcases bulging with memorabilia.

  He is as brown as leather; his white shorts are pristine. The wraparound sunglasses he wears when he’s on duty have been in and out of fashion several times. He strolls round his pool with hands crossed behind his back, and his manner with those he considers miscreants is direct to the point of giving offence. He doesn’t care. He runs a very trim ship.

  His is the disembodied voice which barks orders over the PA. ‘All right, you fellers, stop your running around. That boy who bombed, report to the manager’s office. I saw you. That little lass in the spotted bikini. You can’t swim. Go back to the shallow end till such time as you learn. Do that once more, that lad in the red togs, and I’ll have you out of the water, I’ll dress you, I’ll send you home.’ After each announcement a light hush descends on the mob; then hilarity reasserts itself. Hilarity is OK with Decis, as long as it’s disciplined hilarity. No one drowns at his pool, and no one gets hurt. If he has to be a child-minder, he’ll do the job properly. ‘I use the mike as a weapon,’ he says, ‘I believe we’re here to educate people.’

  Bill Decis works at Fitzroy but he lives and coaches professionally at Footscray, where he was born, and he still calls Fitzroy ‘out here’. When he was a lad, the western suburbs were cut off from the city by the Maribyrnong, at the time spanned by only four bridges. The river was so clear, in those days between the wars, that from the top of a bridge you could see your mate underwater. Young Billy and his gang used to take particular delight in bombing violently beside the cabin cruisers which bore the leisured classes up and down the river on Cup days. ‘They used to have pianos going, parasols, the lot—us snotty-nosed kids would be waiting on the bridge, and as they came under we’d do a big honey-pot from forty foot up and drown ’em. Old Commodore Harding used to threaten to kill us.’

  The Footscray baths opened in 1929. ‘Boys swam naked back then,’ says Decis. ‘Course, it was segregated. When we got togs we thought we were lucky. They were cotton Speedos, two and six a pair at Forges, and they had to last four years. Our mums were always mending them, sewing cloth badges over the patched parts. They were our pride and joy.

  ‘I taught my first pupils when I was twelve, and I’ve been in the game ever since. Of course, sport was different back then. It was our social lives, as well as keeping us fit. We went swimming to get better, not just to muck around. I’ve seen forty furniture vans lined up outside the old Beaurepaire pool near the Yarra there, each one decked out with the banners of a different amateur swimming club, for our annual joint picnic to Mornington. Those things went out, eventually, as sport became more individualistic.

  ‘Another thing that went out was all the illegal things we had to do to raise money to get our athletes out of the country—we sold sly grog, we had raffles, we ran crown-and-anchor games—everything illegal. It was the Australian way of life!

  ‘I got my merit certificate before I was fourteen, so for the last year of school my job was to keep the pool clean, with a mate. Back then there was no chlorine. The pools used to have to be emptied twice a week and scrubbed out with sand soap and ordinary scrubbing brushes. We didn’t have heated pools, either. We had to take the temperatures as they were and get used to it. People have changed. Parents send letters to the teachers now, saying the water’s too cold for the kids. The Education Department has set a limit of sixty-eight degrees—any colder than that and the kids don’t have to go in.’

  On his office wall Decis has a wonderful photo of the opening ceremony of the Fitzroy baths in 1908. At the western end, where the brick wall now bears the misspelt sign AQUA PROFONDA, a throng of bewhiskered gentlemen and gracious ladies draw back their spats and skirts from the edge of the pool, upon which float two formally dressed persons in a rowing boat.

  ‘The Fitzroy Council don’t realise what an asset they’ve got in this pool,’ he says. ‘It’s the antique pool of Australia. It’s the only full-size open-air pool of Olympic standard within a two-mile radius of the GPO. Carlton? Small. Collingwood? Small. With a little bit of updating, this could be the best pool in the metropolitan area. We need to be able to heat the pool up to about seventy-five degrees in March and April, when there’s still plenty of sunshine. Many’s the Easter we’ve been closed during beautiful weather. We could extend the season by two months.’

  Decis was on the barricades in 1977 with Fitzroy residents who tried to stop the F19 freeway from going through along Alexandra Parade. The freeway was forced through, and now Decis and his team have their work cut out to keep the pool in tip-top condition, for it lies east–west, parallel with the polluting roadway, ‘in the right position to cop all the rubbish that comes over the wall. We have to hose the decking twice a day.’

  But the Fitzroy filter system, installed in 1948, is more than equal to its job. ‘It’s a beautiful unit—the Rolls Royce of filtration,’ says Decis with emotion. ‘With proper maintenance it should last a hundred years.’ Two-hundred-and-forty-six thousand litres an hour pass through its six sand filter cells. Once a month a sample of the pool water is sent up to the Microbiology Diagnostic Unit at Melbourne University. Proudly Decis shows sheaves of test results: ‘I love to see that water flow clear and clean.’

  He throws the filter system on a backwash and goes outside to the testing point among the big cream-painted tanks in their wire enclosure. With alarming force the water from the system rushes to the outflow pipe a metre below where he is standing. ‘Young lad got sucked out through a pipe like that once,’ he remarks casually, yanking a few weeds out of a crack in the pavement as he waits for the moment to test. ‘Ended up in the Yarra. He was extruded into the Yarra. By the time
he got there he was sausage meat. Not a bone left in his body.

  ‘Some more modern filtration systems have a porthole in the side so you can watch what’s going on, but we don’t need a porthole. We’ve got the visuals.’ He lowers a milk bottle on a string into the turbulence at the pipe entrance, then pulls it out full, holds it up and examines it against the sky. It is slightly greenish and murky with sediment. ‘See that? That’s all the muck the system’s taken out. If you took a bottleful out of the pool itself, I guarantee it’d be as blue and clear as that sky.’

  In 1980 the eastern wall near the babies’ pool was knocked out and replaced by a cyclone wire fence, thus opening up one end of the baths to the outside world. A small, sunken grassed area was created along this fence, the first concession to comfort and conventional aesthetics in what had always been a Spartan institution with its expanses of bare cement and brisk fir trees.

  But surprisingly few regulars lie about on the grass. Most are faithful to the high concrete stands, closer to the water and open to breezes. The tireless kids who swim, cark and swim again until it’s time to go home for tea despise the grass over there behind the bubs’ pool.

  The grass needs no patrolling, for here the intellectuals congregate. A quick survey of poolside reading matter last weekend revealed a high concentration of serious material on the grassy area: Christina Stead, Barry Hill, William Thackeray, Katherine Mansfield, Marge Piercy, Doris Lessing, Charles Perkins, John Fowles, two volumes of an encyclopaedia on UFOs, an advanced French grammar and the RMIT Radiography Clinical Studies guide, while the other eighty-five percent of the pool turned up only one Spanish newspaper, one Age, one Women’s Weekly, one Time and one Dolly.