True Stories

by Helen Garner

  ‘Nerve-rackin’, innit,’ says the barman to me, out of the corner of his mouth. I haven’t got time to finish my drink: if I drink all of it I’ll fall asleep on the way home and that would never do. I spank back to the station.

  A woman is taking her two small children home to Melbourne. They are colouring in with self-conscious goodness, waiting for the train to start. The boy, who looks about six, is flushed with concentration. He shakes his head. ‘Boy, I gotta lotta work to do here!’ He sets about it with a will. Without stopping the back and forth movements of his pencil, he launches himself into this conversation with his four-year-old sister, who is also hard at work.

  ‘Did you know there was wee and poo on the railway tracks?’

  ‘Yes,’ says the girl.

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Uncle Bill told me.’

  ‘Well, do you know how they get there?’

  ‘No. How.’

  ‘Guess.’

  Long pause. Colour colour colour.

  ‘I know. Somebody did wee and poo on the railway track.’

  ‘No,’ says the boy in triumph, but not raising his eyes from his work, ‘because somebody’d see the person.’

  She does not ask for enlightenment, nor does he offer it. Their mother takes out a Mills and Boon novel called Tangle in Sunshine and begins to read.

  ‘I’m trying to do my best colouring,’ says the boy, ‘but I keep going over the lines.’

  An old man with sun scabs on the gristle of his ears taps the arm of another old chap across the aisle. They are both wearing hats.

  ‘Do you play lawn bowls?’ says the first one.

  ‘Beppardon?’

  ‘I say, do you play lawn bowls?’

  ‘No. No, I don’t.’

  ‘You should. Look at this.’ He passes over an article he has just torn carefully out of tonight’s Herald. The photograph shows women of his age in white bowling hats, wiping sweat out of their eyes. ‘THE HEAT BOWLS ’EM OVER. Ha ha ha. Once it gets over ninety degrees, it’s too hot. Too hot.’

  The temperature in the refreshment car must be well over ninety. The blinds are down tight as a drum, people are stumbling in and out of the hot dimness. I am sitting beside an earbasher from Hobart. She could talk the leg off an iron pot. ‘There are hardly any shops in Sale! You just look along one block and that’s it! They haven’t even got a theatre! They haven’t got a Myers or a Fitzgeralds! You should see the size of their Coles! Pfff! What time do the shops close in Melbourne, do you know?’

  The mother of the wee and poo expert is saying, at that moment, to her neighbour, ‘I like to get in the car and in two minutes be up at the shopping centre. I don’t like all this barren land.’

  The earbasher has talked herself to sleep. I look out at the land, which is not at all barren.

  I get home in time for tea. There has been a weak cool change.

  SPENCER STREET STATION, THURSDAY 8.45 A.M. TO BENDIGO.

  The train leaves on time. Wind moves steadily over the dry grassy paddocks. The grass swarms, like the backs of living creatures.

  Next door a man is talking in Greek to his son, who must be about nine. The father, who sounds like a gentle, quiet man, speaks to the boy in a normal tone. The child responds by screaming. ‘Shut up, cunt! Shut up! Shut up! Anyway, I can’t even drink my bloody fucking coffee!’ The murmur of the father’s voice is almost drowned by the boy’s manic chanting. ‘I don’t care! I don’t care! I don’t care!’ He sings it on three notes, G, E, C, over and over again, like a mantra. When he passes the door of my compartment I look up quickly, expecting to see a horned monster with a distorted, grinning face, but he is just an ordinary boy with black hair and slightly over-bright eyes, in shorts and T-shirt.

  My ticket to Bendigo includes a visit to Sandhurst Town, a privately owned goldfields reconstruction for tourists—what the bus driver calls a ‘historical whatever’, as he drives me there in my solitary glory. Thank God several families turn up in their own cars at the ‘whatever’. The temperature is hitting forty degrees at 11 a.m. If Sovereign Hill at Ballarat is the sanitised version of the past, Sandhurst Town administers a stiff dose of realism. A rickety train with open-sided carriages trundles the families and me through the bush to ‘the diggings’, a huddle of miserable tents, brown with dirt and absolutely still in the brutal heat of midday. The sun thunders down out of an empty sky.

  The driver and conductor of the little train, dressed up, soldier on. They present an extremely enjoyable historical pageant involving mining licences, guns, sawbone doctors, death in mine shafts, bribery of officials, gold-panning, flogging and the like. The adults laugh shakily, the children stand stupefied in their thongs. One little boy leaps into his father’s arms and sobs: ‘I wanna go home!’ A more stoical lad takes a can of Aerogard out of his mother’s bag and sprays himself from head to toe.

  After the diggings there is an official visit to a eucalyptus works, from which I sneak away in order to buy some acid drops in one of a row of shops with wooden verandahs, and lace and plough arts in the windows. But it’s a ghost town. Everything is open but there’s not a living soul around. I call ‘Oohoo!’ in vain.

  Then, in the last shop, I find two little boys of ten and eight or so skulking behind the counter. The younger one volunteers to serve me. The acid drops are three cents each and I ask for twelve. He puts them in a bag and I am about to say ‘That’ll be thirty-six cents’ when it occurs to me that he might like playing shops and working it out for himself. It takes him about five minutes. His eyes take on a distant look, his lips move.

  I say, trying to be helpful: ‘You just go twelve threes. Tables. Do you learn tables at school?’ I should shut up. An ego is at stake here. The little boy gives up on mental, picks up a pencil and begins to work out the sum on a paper bag. He keeps his arm round his work, but I can see that he is drawing twelve groups of three strokes, putting a circle round each group of three, and then counting all the strokes.

  He looks up at last. ‘Thirty-six cents?’

  ‘Right, thirty-six cents.’ I open my purse. Horrors. Only twenty-cent coins. If I give him forty cents he’ll have to do subtraction. But I haven’t got anything smaller. I hand over the coins. His face goes blank.

  ‘Now you give me four cents change,’ I say in a casual tone. Off the hook. He gives me the four cents and beams with pride at a long ordeal brought to a satisfactory end.

  Away I go with my bag of acid drops, past two rhesus monkeys sprawled in a cage with their tongues hanging out.

  The bus driver is waiting for me in a huge room with a straw ceiling and brick floor. He drives me back to Bendigo and all over town, pointing out the sights, including a huge weatherboard Catholic church. We pause to admire it through the windscreen of the cooled bus.

  ‘You Catholic?’ he says.

  ‘No. Are you?’

  ‘Nope.’ He laughs and we drive away. I sleep all the way home in an empty compartment.

  SPENCER STREET STATION, FRIDAY 9 A.M. TO ALBURY.

  You could get excited about going on the Intercapital Daylight, even if you were only getting off at Albury. People cry outside the windows. Luggage is being trundled about and loaded. The carriage I’m in is like a living room. It belongs to the government of New South Wales, and it has framed artworks on its walls. They remind me of Soviet art of the 1950s. One picture is entitled The State by Emerson Curtis. It has ‘NSW’ in curly letters at the top, and railway lines fanning out from colonnades which presumably represent Sydney’s Central Station. Then it has stylised sheep, wheat stalks, timber, a rodeo, fruit trees, heavy industry, and across the picture from left to right a symbolic railway track like a zipper on a dress, holding it all together.

  I go straight to the buffet car, in which I’ve spent many an idle hour at crucial times of my life. It is nearly empty. I sit at the counter and feel, for the first time this week, the dizzying power of anonymity which is the reward of the solitary traveller. I order bac
on and eggs. The service is quick and courteous, the food good.

  A woman with an East London accent leans over my plate and stabs a finger at it. ‘Which is that?’

  ‘Bacon and eggs.’

  ‘How much? Four dollars twenty-five.’ She calculates. ‘That’s cheap! In England you’d pay twice, three times as much and get half that amount.’

  Just as I finish mopping up the yolk, a waitress comes out of the kitchen and sticks up three hand-printed signs: SCONES RASPBERRY JAM TEA OR COFFEE $1.75.

  An American man is in the seat in front of mine. I hear a sharp click. He has taken a photograph. What of? Does anything distinguish this stretch of country from any other we’ve passed through? It’s as flat as a table. Blond grass. Trees. Blue sky with dabs of cloud. Sheep in the shade look like the trees’ soiled skirts. Not a human being in sight, nor a truck, nor a car. Click. Oh, a dam. In the air-conditioned carriage you can’t tell if it’s hot or cold outside.

  The hostess comes up to the woman sitting behind me and inserts a slot-in tray across her knees. ‘I’m bringing you a nice cup of tea,’ she says, as if to a patient.

  ‘I didn’t want this, you know,’ says the passenger in a querulous tone. ‘I was going to have some lunch after Albury.’

  ‘All right,’ says the hostess. ‘One o’clock, then. I’ll tell the cook.’

  Tell the cook! Is this a train or an English country house?

  In the entrance hall of the Albury station there is a pretty ceiling rose, about a mile high, with green ferns and yellow lilies.

  It is very, very hot. I have to find something to do, in a cool place, for four hours. I am not interested in gambling, though we are in NSW where it’s legal. I walk down the main street. All the shops are air-conditioned. So is the library. I sit at a table and look up ‘travel’ in a dictionary of quotations. ‘How much a dunce that has been sent to roam/Excells a dunce that has been left at home.’ Cowper, ‘The Progress of Error’.

  I go walking round, staring at people. I cross the street outside the post office and find a ten dollar bill all dry and crackly from lying out in the sun in the middle of the road. The woman who sits behind the desk in the art gallery is of the opinion that there is a cool change every day, in Melbourne. I can’t actually remember if there is or not.

  On my way back to the station I walk alongside a bloke of sixty or so who is heading for a pub. A wedding car with white ribbons goes past.

  ‘Look at that,’ he says with a naughty grimace. ‘Some poor bloke just tied the knot.’

  ‘Some poor woman, too,’ I snap.

  He mimes a jump of fright. ‘All right! All right! I’m just going in here to have a drink!’ The pub door flops shut behind him.

  Round the corner I run into the two conductors from the train coming out of the Kentucky Fried with parcels in their arms.

  ‘What do you do for four hours?’ I ask.

  ‘Oh…hang round. Play the pokies.’

  ‘Did you win?’

  ‘Come out ten dollars down, I did,’ says the younger one, putting on his tie as we approach the station door.

  ‘I seen an old lady who put in one coin and got the jackpot straight away,’ says the older man in his grasshopper green jacket.

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Two hundred bucks.’

  ‘I’ve never even seen one of those machines,’ I say.

  ‘What? Haven’t you?’

  ‘No. But I found ten bucks on the street.’

  ‘That was mine,’ says the young conductor suavely, not missing a beat.

  A station attendant hurries along the platform carrying in his bare hands a dripping lump of ice the size of a shoe-box. We slide away to the south. The sky is covered by clouds the colour and texture of a Carr’s table water biscuit. So alienated from the world does one become on a train, as afternoon draws into evening, that one is not entirely sure through which window to look for the sunset.

  ‘Mum, are all the trains getting old now?’

  ‘I don’t know, dear.’

  ‘Mum, when trains get too old to go, what do they do with them?’

  ‘Shhh. Shhh. Sit down. Shhh.’

  1982

  Beggars in New York

  IN 1993, WHEN I worked for a semester at New York University, I was standing one morning at the corner of Seventh and Christopher waiting for the lights, holding in my hand a plastic bag containing a sweater I had just bought. I was dreaming about the word merino, how it sounds Spanish but always makes me think happily of the bleached grasslands of Western Victoria. So, when a man’s voice murmured something in my ear, I was not prepared.

  I jumped and looked around. It was a young black man. He looked me right in the eyes and said again, huskily: ‘Can you give me some money so I can buy something to eat?’ Before I could even think, I felt my face snap shut and my eyes go blank. I didn’t speak. I turned and walked quickly away.

  Halfway across the avenue, shame struck. It had a hollowing effect. What had, a moment ago, been me was now an arrangement of warm, newish clothes encasing a me-shaped moral vacuum, just a volume of air in the centre of which floated a shrivelled heart, hard as a nut.

  You’d think that the entire housed, fed and employed population of New York would be walking around hollow like this, a host of echoing voids wrapped in impervious skins. But the relationship between the housed and the homeless of the city is much more complex than this. It’s a subtle dance of surprise, challenge, demand, seduction; and its fluidity springs from the imaginations and personalities of the beggars, from their various styles of appeal, as well as from the constant fluctuations of guilt in the begged-from.

  Mood is everything. Each encounter takes place in a rich context which neither partner can control or predict. Timing, facial expression, tone of voice all matter—also how deep your purse is stowed in your bag, and whether you can be bothered, at that precise moment, dragging it up to the surface.

  For example. One lunchtime, I bought a cheese roll at a deli and went for a walk. When I opened the bag, I found that the roll was stuffed with half a dozen slices of cheddar, a week’s ration—no way could I gulp down such a quantity. I culled it and ate one piece in the roll. This left me with five slices of perfectly good cheddar in a paper bag. What to do?

  Along Sixth Avenue I trotted, carrying my little burden. The fact of having something to give away, something I wanted to give away, paralysed me with shame and awkwardness. What if I misread somebody’s signals? What if I copped a scornful knock-back? What if a black person laughed at me?

  As it happened, the first beggar I came to was white. He was a young man with long, tangled hair, sitting in lotus position against a building with his hands resting lightly on his knees, and he was chanting, with his head thrown back in histrionic ecstasy, ‘Jee-sus! Jee-sus! Jee-sus!’ In front of him, he had propped a cardboard sign that said, ‘I’m hungry.’ I stopped. He kept on chanting. I waited. After a few moments, he became aware of my presence and opened his eyes. I held out my paper bag to him and said, ‘Would you like this?’

  An irritable look crossed his face. He clicked his tongue, reached out one hand for the bag, and peered into it with his neck on the aggrieved angle of a child expecting a boring birthday present. He dropped the bag on to the pavement beside him and, without another glance at me, resumed his posture and his chant.

  I slunk away in a ferment. Had I expected gratitude? How grotesque. But still, I felt cheated of something. The encounter was unresolved.

  One night, as I was travelling uptown to a concert, a black man in bedraggled clothes and broken shoes worked my subway car. People heard him coming, and became intensely interested in the patch of floor between their feet. The woman beside me addressed a very intellectual question to her companion, and he answered with gusto: this manoeuvre gave them somewhere to look other than at the beggar, who came sidling along the carriage, pouring out his accusing monologue: ‘Can’t anybody gimme some money? I ain’t eaten.’
/>   No response.

  ‘How can I get a job and become a member of society if I ain’t got no money to eat?’

  Good question but no one moved.

  ‘Well,’ he said with a heavy sigh. ‘I guess this must be my day to die.’

  ‘Jesus,’ muttered the woman next to me. ‘This is a bit over the top.’

  It had worked on somebody, though: I heard a jingle of coin. A ripple of relief ran through the carriage. No one looked up to see who had cracked. Our feelings towards that person would have been too complicated to express in one glance: thankfulness, for having been let off the hook, but also a tinge of contempt. Soft touch. Mug. This is ethically appalling but psychologically fascinating. The beggar’s style was wrong. All he provoked was irritation and boredom. He could not make us like him. Something about him soured what little selflessness we still had. The very sound of his voice filled people with resentful aggression.

  When I came out of the concert, it was raining. I walked down Lexington to the subway. On the concrete steps to the station, a black woman was sitting, without an umbrella, on a folded sheet of cardboard, fully exposed to the drizzle. She heard me coming and held up a cupped hand to me, with a smile of quiet, charming sweetness, and murmured a plea. Perhaps it was her manner, or the music I had just heard, or the rain: without a thought, I pulled out a note and pushed it into her cup.

  I jumped on to the first carriage whose door opened and sat down. My Gahd! It was like a party. The car was full of people talking loudly in different languages. Everybody seemed to have been drinking. A white man who hadn’t shaved for days borrowed my pencil to write down his phone number for someone. A moment later, he plonked down beside me, reeking of beer. ‘Don’t be scared,’ he said. ‘Who’s the ex-cop on the subway?—the guy sitting next to you! I’m a member of the Merchant Marines. I’m a devout Catholic! So don’t be scared.’

  The door at the end of the carriage flew open and a beggar strode in. He was black, with dreadlocks and in rags, but his face was shining. Talk stopped. Instead of hiding their eyes, though, people looked up at him. He struck a pose, beamed round the carriage and began to sing. Close to his waist he was holding not a dirty paper cup, the traditional New York begging receptacle, but a little, brown, round, woven, African-looking basket: the shape of it gave you an urge to put something into it.