The Shark Net

by Robert Drewe

  It seemed impossible to me that two such incredibly different people could have met, much less married and conceived four children. The church architect was dignified, polite, thin, introverted, remote, abstemious and frugal. The millinery assistant was big-boned, square-jawed, bossy, extroverted, shallow and snobbish – almost as far removed from the slender and curvaceous comic-strip Daisy Mae as she was from him.

  She was from a family of publicans and racehorse owners. She smoked cigarettes, drank sherry, played poker and ruled the roost. While William was upstairs in his room listening to the cricket, Daisy Mae was downstairs playing five-card stud with her Baptist children – when she wasn’t in the members’ stand at Flemington races, that is, drinking champagne with her lover, the detective-inspector.

  She was also Church of England. She thought, with some justification, that Baptists were boring and tight with their money. Being married to even a well-off Baptist was only marginally better than selling hats at Myer’s.

  But marrying a Catholic was beyond the pale. The detective’s mistress was shocked when my father announced he was marrying a Catholic, even one who herself came from a ‘mixed’ marriage. My mother, early in her marriage, decided it best not to speak of her mother-in-law at all. When I pressed her about this secret grandmother of mine, she said Daisy Mae had behaved ‘snobbishly’ towards her on the few times they’d spoken. ‘To hear her patronise me,’ my mother said crisply, ‘you’d think I was the one behind the hat counter.’

  The problem of their relationship solved itself. By the time I’d begun to inquire about these now unseen and hardly spoken-of grandparents, we were living in far-off Western Australia and Daisy Mae, after a particularly lively day at the Flemington races, had collapsed and died of an enlarged heart.

  But at least Daisy Mae had gone to her son’s wedding. When my parents were married during the war at the Kew Baptist Church, my mother’s mother, Mary, forbidden by her local Catholic priest to attend, had cried for a month before and after her only daughter’s wedding to the young Protestant RAAF pilot.

  The Catholics were still hard on Mary (née Mary Agnes Bray) over her own marriage to an Anglican bank manager, George Watson, known as Cres, from his second name, Creswick. Mary and Cres had seen plenty of sectarian conflict, usually on a Sunday night when she returned from Mass and he from the bowling club. After one particular bowling-club session he reasserted the influence of the Church of England with a warning shot from the State Savings Bank of Victoria’s security pistol. ‘Now,’ he shouted, fortunately hitting only the kitchen wall, ‘I’ll get rid of these Catholic kids once and for all.’

  To go by all the overheard afternoon-tea murmurings of my mother and her friends, every marriage in our family was a clash of religions and personality types. Weddings were noted for the flamboyant absence of the mother of the bride or groom, for tears with the confetti, for people not speaking for decades. Calm, sensitive non-drinkers married heavy-drinking extroverts. Intelligent, amusing people married boring, angry ones. Anglicans married Catholics whereas the family’s Catholics went out on the furthest limb and chose Baptists.

  Both sides of the family, however, had an extraordinary ability to keep conflict under wraps. Skeletons remained firmly in the cupboard. ‘Shoosh, small ears flapping!’ they’d say if a child suddenly hove into view. Not that we cared at all about far-flung relatives. If everyone hadn’t acted so mysteriously it would have gone right over our heads.

  They were experts at championing traditional behaviour while actually defying it. They didn’t realise when they went against the usual grain. My mother’s Irish Catholic grandfather and his brothers had been career officers in the British Army, two of them giving their lives in Britain’s wars and one of them winning the Military Cross. On my father’s side, once away from Wiltshire, its established church and declining woollen mills, the working-class Baptists had blossomed into creative capitalists, started companies and made fortunes – only to give them away to the church, or outsiders, on their deathbeds.

  In one generation the family contained members of five Christian religions. My parents’ solution to their own Baptist/Catholic dilemma was to have their three children christened Presbyterians. From then on, exhausted by it all, they regarded themselves as Presbyterians too.

  At the time of Billy Graham’s visit, my father had another religious bee in his bonnet. This was over a decision by St Lawrence’s, the local Anglican church, to tithe its parishioners. As we weren’t Church of England I couldn’t understand what he was getting steamed up about. He didn’t even go to church. But as most of their neighbours and friends at least called themselves Anglicans he’d decided to be affronted on their behalf.

  He liked to sound off on this church ‘blackmail’ when these friends dropped in for Sunday drinks. ‘Who can afford ten percent of their salary? I like their hide! If the commos did this we’d all be up in arms. I’ll say this for the Press-buttons – their pockets might be tighter than fishes’ rectums but they’d never dare try it on.’

  My mother didn’t attempt to change his mind on Billy Graham, not when trouble could erupt at any moment. Religion was both a neglected and a complicated subject in our house. Once our Sunday School years had passed it was ignored. But at some subterranean level to do with past unpleasantness it was always simmering away. If a ruling on Church of England parish tithes could set it off, anything could.

  ‘I think Billy Graham’s a Baptist himself,’ she murmured to me.

  ‘Really?’ I said. I couldn’t have cared less. Not surprisingly, I regarded myself as an agnostic. But I agreed to go with her. I was curious, but not for religious reasons. Billy Graham was an American celebrity and, it seemed to me, not too far removed from the entertainment world. We West Australians were starved of celebrities and we revered Americans. As visiting crews of the American fleet always discovered to their surprise and pleasure when they found themselves treated as a combination of film stars and war heroes, we thought of them as the same thing.

  It was also a chance for me to go out. I was allowed out only one night a week, either Friday or Saturday. I reasoned that even my parents weren’t so unfair as to count a religious evening with my mother as my night out.

  That crisp May evening fifty thousand West Australians thronged to the Showground to see and hear Dr Graham prove his claim. He’d promised us the Holy Spirit would travel ‘like a radio wave’ into his words and then into our ears and minds, to give each of our lives new meaning. Keen to experience this phenomenon, people jammed the admission gates, and when they’d filled all the seats they climbed onto the roofs of the cattle, horse and pig pavilions to watch him through binoculars.

  My mother and I were lucky to find a couple of seats beside the disabled section. She said, ‘I’ve never seen so many wheelchairs and crutches.’ Hundreds of invalids and cripples had been transported to the Showground and ushered to the front of the crowd, and next to them was another section for blind and deaf people and their interpreters. To the side of the stage was a choir of one thousand singers.

  It was the biggest, loudest public gathering I’d ever seen. Even the annual football grand final at Subiaco Oval couldn’t muster half this number. Crusade assistants moved briskly up and down the rows collecting donations in buckets. Rumours had spread that profits were going to pay for Dr Graham’s ‘Hour of Decision’ radio broadcasts in America, so the buckets were stamped: ‘For Local Expenses Only. All Money Stays in Australia.’

  Everyone important was there: Premier Dave Brand, the spotlight glinting on the Returned Services League badge that he never took off his lapel; Lord Mayor Harry Howard, in his Ye Olde Englande mayoral robes and chain; and the Anglican Archbishop of Perth, Dr Moline, in his shimmering purple and mauve vestments.

  The star’s ordinary grey single-breaster, dark tie and white shirt made the locals look stagey and pompous by comparison, like an amateur Gilbert and Sullivan society. At the same time, as my mother had anticipated, the
American was the tallest, blondest, youngest and most impressive-looking man on stage.

  ‘He doesn’t look very old,’ I said.

  ‘Only forty-one,’ she whispered.

  He began in a loud, clear, hectoring manner. What he said was at odds with how he looked and how he presented himself. ‘May the people see only Christ tonight and not the speaker.’ He was using the full force of his crowd-pleasing talents to ask us to forget these talents altogether.

  With that out of the way, his face became fierce. ‘We cannot shut our eyes to what is going on in the world,’ he thundered. His own eyes, as sharp and goggling as Bette Davis’s in The Virgin Queen, snapped around the Showground, instantly found mine, as I’d feared they would, and bored right into my evil teenage soul.

  ‘What diabolic force drives juveniles, in what should be life’s happiest years, to crime, lust and unbridled living?’ he shouted up into the gentle Perth heavens.

  This struck home. For a start, the scene of my own juvenile crime was no more than a hundred yards from where he was hectoring us. This was the asbestos shed which stored the comic books that were placed in thousands of souvenir show-bags before each spring’s Royal Agricultural Show.

  One day years before, a month before the Show opened, Nick Howell and I had tunnelled under the cyclone-wire fence behind Sideshow Alley, and into the Showground. As if by radar, we’d discovered and homed in on the comic-book storeroom.

  We got inside by crawling on our stomachs under the floor and prising apart some floorboards. The piles of comics were higher than our shoulders. Some reached the storeroom ceiling. For boys who loved to read we were suddenly in comic heaven, lounging on heaped mattresses of hundreds, maybe thousands, of copies of the Phantom and Archie and the Lone Avenger. At last we knew how Scrooge McDuck, the comic-strip character we envied above all others, must feel, diving and cavorting among the piles of cash in his vault.

  Like Uncle Scrooge, we appreciated our rare bounty and didn’t want to spoil it. We didn’t vandalise anything. All we wanted was to read comics. Apart from one frightening moment when a motorcycle cop slowly passed by (we held our breath and he rode on), we read comics until dark. Then we re-stacked the piles and replaced the floorboards. We took an armful each, kept the cache a secret, and returned every weekend for a month. By then we’d read them all, even the parent-and-teacher-sanctioned Classics series and the soppy English comics. The following year we went back to the Showground, climbed under the fence, came up through the storeroom floorboards, and read our way through a new batch.

  But although the Reverend Billy Graham, his shirtsleeved arms raised to heaven, was now standing at the scene of my crime against property and ranting at me, I could put this down to coincidence. What I found more alarming was that the world-famous Christian was also silhouetted against the backdrop of my unbridled lusts.

  Only a stone’s throw from the stage where Dr Graham stood surrounded by ecstatic cripples, self-conscious bigwigs and angelic singing children was the scene of my crimes against sexual morality: the pavilion and playing field of the Claremont Football Club.

  The club abutted the Showground. In the club pavilion – its sloping roof this very moment outlined in front of me – and sometimes also on the cool, dewy but favourably dark surface of the football field itself, adolescent passions simmered every Friday night. To the muted brass, sultry woodwinds and throbbing double-bass of the Riverside Jazz Group, my friends and I pressed our bodies against girls in the almost motionless dance called the Creep. Secure in their armoured underwear, they pressed right back.

  The Claremont dance defied the popular music of the era. Rock ’n’ roll was daytime, teenage music; it meant high spirits and high school and daylight. Jazz was nightclubs, close dancing, and sexual aplomb. Rock ’n’ roll made us feel like the teenagers we were. The Riversiders’ slow Dixieland made us feel like tuxedoed twenty-five-year-olds. Rock ’n’ roll lyrics suggested milkshakes and hamburgers. Jazz made us feel like Hugh Hefner.

  The Hefner feeling was enhanced by consuming male hormones. These were generously provided on two consecutive Fridays by Dave Beetles, whose mother was a doctor. We passed them around. The illicit hormones, with their distinctive salty, floury taste and convenient bite-size stick form, drove several of the more susceptible boys – Craig Vimpani especially – into dance-floor and football-field displays of reckless machismo. Craig’s lusty antics only waned on the third Friday with Dave’s revelation that the hormones were actually a new snack-food on the market called Slim Jane Pretzels.

  The dance was its own aphrodisiac. In the dimmed lights of the pavilion (‘Home of the Mighty Tigers’), shuffling my way into the middle of the crowded floor to ‘La Vie En Rose’ (Don Thompson on trombone, Phil Batty on trumpet) or ‘Sentimental Journey’ (Brett Lockyer on clarinet), I’d shut out the black-and-yellow Tigers memorabilia, with their unglamorous association with Dunlop’s colours, and imagine I was dancing in the Stork Club or the Copacabana or the Blue Angel.

  It was dizzying enough to Creep up against the bolstered breasts and pantie-girdled pelvis of a fifteen-year-old normally spotted at the bus stop in a tartan uniform. To tightly clasp a sixteen-year-old stranger, a sweatered stenographer or shop assistant, a girl who worked, was a thrill we knew we didn’t deserve. When these worldly, pliant girls, moved by Lockyer’s lilting reed and Johnny Van Oyen’s sultry piano chords to get better acquainted, asked on their way outside to the football field, ‘What do you do for a crust?’ and ‘What sort of car do you drive?’ my half-hearted claim, muffled, I hoped, by Bob Dixon’s drum solo or John Bartlett’s double-bass, to be a university student (medicine perhaps, maybe architecture) whose MG, sadly, was out of action (anything but an unlicensed sixteen-year-old schoolboy), fell on shrewd ears. They knew the truth.

  Even as I sat uncomfortably with my mother at this Christian crusade, drilled by Billy Graham’s goshawk eyes and stunned by the proximity of the dance pavilion and the moist shadows of the football field, I remembered with a jolt of pleasure that tomorrow was Friday night. The Claremont dance. Girls. Thompson on trombone. Batty on muted trumpet. Lockyer’s sensuous clarinet. ‘La Vie En Rose’. Billy Graham versus the Creep. No contest.

  I wasn’t listening so intently any more. But while his sermon was beginning to pass over me I was still soaking up the atmosphere. You couldn’t help it. It wasn’t the celebrity with the hectoring voice and the golden mane and the Bette Davis glare making my spine tingle. It was the needy Christian faces, the adoring spastics and nodding blind people, the sweet singing voices. All those Christians who wouldn’t be dancing the Creep tomorrow night, or endeavouring to lie on damp grass with stenographers. They’d be back home preserving fruit or making stuffed toys or doing their homework in rural shacks by kerosene lamplight. The armless ones would be painting snowy winter landscapes with their mouths and toes. My mother religiously bought the foot-and-mouth painters’ Christmas cards every year and it looked like very hard work.

  My heart went out to them. I thought of my Friday-night behaviour and I felt abject and guilty. As low as a snake’s derriere, as my father would say. For the first time I remembered beforehand that most Friday nights actually ended for me in a state of guilty anxiety.

  If past Friday nights were any guide, I could anticipate parting from my friends and hurrying home alone after the dance, via Cookie’s hamburger bar on Stirling Highway, just in time to make my midnight curfew. I could see myself breaking into a jog and tearing handfuls of leaves from the council peppermint trees along the way and chewing them to mask the cigarette and mouthful of rum or port on my breath.

  I saw myself vigorously rubbing my mouth and cheeks on my sleeve (a handkerchief too easily showed powder and lipstick traces), checking my clothes for grass clippings, sniff-testing my jumper for girl smells, for traces of Gerri’s or Trisha’s or Someone Unnamed’s perfume, and already anticipating hiding the jumper, with its eternally lingering female scents, from my ever-vigilant mothe
r beneath my socks and underwear in my bedroom cupboard.

  Most of all, I saw myself one startling and unique night striding down the Vincent Street hill, now and then sniffing my right hand with mixed awe and pride – and fear. Surely (I could hardly bear to think it), forcing herself to stay awake until I came home, my mother would smell the finger.

  She would catch the first marine whiff the moment the finger rounded the corner of Adelma Road and turned into Circe Circle, the smell rising higher and stronger as the finger journeyed down the hill, crossed Curlew Road, traversed the lawn and went up the front steps, through the front door and across the hallway (although thrust deep in my pocket as I passed my parents’ room and murmured good night), emerging in full intimate bloom as I entered the bathroom, locked the door, gave it a last proud and regretful sniff, then soaped it up and plunged it under the tap.

  At the crusade my mother’s profile was totally still beside me. She was still hanging on Billy Graham’s words. Now he was really in his stride. ‘What power is it that breaks up homes,’ he cried, ‘and causes a man to leave his wife and lovely children for another woman?’ His words were like explosions. ‘What is it that causes a man to pour his future out of a bottle, and become a partial suicide – to gladly trade all that others hold dear for a few sparkling drops from the vine?’

  I sneaked a glance at her. She was looking straight ahead, in direct profile, not moving a muscle. The angle of her nose and chin reminded me of someone. It was remarkable. She looked like the Queen’s face on a penny.

  Now Billy Graham loosened his tie like Frank Sinatra or Sammy Davis Jr performing at the Desert Inn. ‘Is life on this planet an insoluble dilemma,’ he boomed, ‘and is man destined, like the fateful lemmings, to march to his doom into the sea of oblivion?’