by Robert Drewe
I saw the Eureka Youth League as a more serious version of the Charlie Chuckles Club. It made me feel responsible and mature. I would be pleased to bring an end to hanging and whipping and atom bombs and unfairness. I wanted to be a friend to all peoples. I would be a Chuckler for Socialism. I signed up.
A week later my father spotted the membership acceptance letter from my new idealistic friends at the League. They welcomed me ‘into the fold’ and urged me to attend a ‘special getting-to-know-you meeting’ at 75 Stirling Street, Perth. His reaction startled me. He snatched up the letter and began acting as if something truly appalling had occurred. He was withering and overbearing.
‘How did this happen?’ he raged. ‘This reflects on all of us.’ I knew he meant himself. He had no intention of allowing his son to join the youth wing of the Communist Party of Australia. Finally, he stopped pacing, took a deep breath and said grimly, ‘You’re still a minor, son. I’ll deal with this.’
He was on the phone immediately to John McCurry, his new detective friend. He went into the bedroom and closed the door and made the call from there. But his voice was loud and indignant and I heard him say, ‘I want his name taken off the books!’ I thought the CIB might have more important matters on its mind, but after about five minutes he came out looking grimly satisfied.
‘That’s spiked their guns,’ he said. ‘John’s a wake-up to their commo tricks.’
He was right. I heard nothing more from the Eureka Youth League. Soon after, John McCurry called around to our house one night in the middle of a patrol. From his manner I gathered the police hadn’t made much progress on either the Berkman or the Brewer murder. He couldn’t stop for more than one beer but he went away with two Ladies’ Maxply tennis racquets.
A few weeks later, in proud possession of my new driver’s licence and in a hurry to get to the beach, I reversed my mother’s Renault too fast down the Watsons’ driveway and knocked over their brick letterbox where it joined the front fence. Simon’s father wasn’t happy. His anger at the letterbox demolition took the heat off my questions to Simon on the murder weapon. I was under a cloud. In these leafy suburbs, destruction of property was a serious matter. It was certainly more comprehensible than wilful slaughter.
ON THE BEACH
My father asked me one Saturday evening if I wanted to go and see On the Beach. This was quite a surprise but I had nothing doing so I said yes. I’d just turned seventeen, I was his eldest child and I’d never been on an outing alone with him before. Not to the pictures or the football or the beach, not even to the park to throw a ball around. It was such a novelty that in the car on the way I thought I should start some comradely banter.
‘What do you hear from the cops?’ I asked him.
He gave me a quizzical look as if I had crossed some forbidden boundary. ‘Nothing,’ he said eventually. Once, long before, I recalled, I’d been reading Dick Tracy in the back seat of the car when a question occurred to me. I called out cheerily, ‘Dad, what’s Skid Row?’ He didn’t answer. His eyes met mine in the rear-vision mirror. ‘Nothing at all,’ he said finally.
We drove the rest of the way in silence. It wasn’t an unfriendly silence. It wasn’t even a neutral silence like when he drove me to school. I was pleased he’d asked me to do something with him. I also had a rich enough store of self-pity to wonder why it took a film about the end of the world for this to happen.
He’d asked my mother first but she hadn’t wanted to go. She said she couldn’t cope with such a depressing story. But On the Beach fascinated him. He’d already read the novel by Nevil Shute. Not only was it about Australians (as well as Americans) awaiting the nuclear fallout which had already wiped out the northern hemisphere, but it was set in Melbourne, his home town.
With most other films I’d have approached the evening more warily, but in a film about the end of mankind I didn’t anticipate any embarrassment between us over love scenes. I’d also flipped through the book and couldn’t recall any particularly raunchy passages. And I would have.
Usually it was uncomfortable just watching TV with him. Any love scene, in fact any scene at all, even a commercial, featuring an attractive or flirtatious woman, caused a force-field of disapproval and embarrassment to rise from my father’s chair and fill the room. The story, the actors, the drama, all became lost and blurred. While I sat there stolidly in front of the television, my face set in an expressionless mask to show how unaffected I was by the woman before us, I was silently urging her to put something on, for God’s sake! Do up that button! Pull that sheet higher! Stop kissing that man!
I’d see by the grim set of his mouth and his frowning profile that he was willing the same thing. Of course I really wanted the woman to linger there, preferably with much less clothing on. I suspected he did, too. He never drove past a female pedestrian – as long as my mother wasn’t in the car, in which case it was definitely Eyes Front – without swivelling his head to check her out. It was just that neither of us was comfortable sharing the experience.
Still, some progress had been made. I’d grown older. He was still tearing bare-breasted black women from the National Geographic in case the younger children saw them, but at least he’d stopped pulling the TV plug on me. Until this year, whenever Miss Kitty had displayed some modest saloon-hostess cleavage on ‘Gunsmoke’, he’d simply got up from his chair grumbling his catchphrase, ‘This isn’t suitable for children,’ and turned off the TV. Nowadays when faced by titillating television he and I just gritted our teeth and sat it out.
I wasn’t surprised to find On the Beach moving. But I was surprised it was so sexy. If the end of the world was nigh, Ava Gardner wasn’t going to waste a minute on small talk. Whenever she appeared on screen my father cleared his throat. Ava was attractive, tipsy and shameless – three good reasons for throat-clearing. She was unstoppable. She had Gregory Peck in the sack before the nuking of his wife and children and the rest of the northern hemisphere had even sunk in.
You couldn’t blame Gregory for succumbing to Ava. Apart from it being the end of the world, he was a widower – if only very recently. But we were meant to agonise with his dilemma and my father did so. When heavy-lidded Ava drew Gregory into the bedroom, the throat-clearing turned into a coughing spasm nearly as bad as his early morning hawking extravaganzas.
When we left the theatre I felt chatty. Stanley Kramer, Ava Gardner and the Cold War had given me plenty to think about. ‘Whew!’ I said. ‘What did you think?’
His eyes were surprisingly pink and damp. ‘Very realistic,’ he said.
I had a few queries. When Gregory Peck took his submarine back to San Francisco to see if someone was left alive, and the sailor dived overboard and swam ashore, and you saw the city, it was totally empty. Wouldn’t there be bodies lying around?
‘Maybe you’re right,’ he said.
‘What are the physical effects of a radioactive cloud, anyway?’ I wondered.
He said he didn’t know.
I reckoned it was more believable in Melbourne at the end, with the newspaper blowing along the empty street and the camera picking up the religious sign ‘The End is Nigh’. It didn’t matter that we didn’t see any bodies because we’d got to know people living there. ‘That was cleverly done,’ I said.
He grunted. He didn’t want to talk. I remembered that he and my mother had done their own wooing on the same beach as Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner: Frankston, where my mother grew up. The carefree evidence was there in our photograph albums.
When we got home, my mother was making supper for us. She was trying to round off our evening together. ‘How was it?’ she asked.
‘Not too many laughs in it,’ my father said.
I couldn’t wait for her to set the cups in front of us so I could repeat the last line in the movie. She did eventually, and I said it. ‘ “Peter, I think I’ll have that cup of tea now.” ’
‘What do you mean?’ she said.
‘He’s being smart,’ my father sa
id.
I explained that the line had been spoken by Mary, the young wife, to her sensitive young husband, Peter. I couldn’t remember who played Mary but sensitive young Peter was Anthony Perkins. I told her how Mary and Peter had just quietly poisoned their baby off-screen and were about to drink poison themselves rather than die from nuclear fallout.
I’d thought it was pretty devastating at the time, but I said the cup-of-tea line again, enunciating like a thespian.
‘We heard you the first time,’ my father said.
My mother laughed nervously. ‘It sounds as if I was well out of it.’
‘You don’t actually see any Melburnians die,’ I told her. ‘But you get the feeling they’re dropping like flies.’
My father sipped his tea. ‘Fred Astaire was surprisingly good,’ he said.
‘Fred Astaire?’ she said.
‘It wasn’t one of his dancing efforts,’ my father said. ‘None of the old soft shoe.’
‘No, I suppose not,’ she said.
WINDOWS
Rottnest still had me in its power. A year and a half after my first visit, I went camping there for a week in the August school holidays. On my second day on the island I met a girl and we got on like a house on fire. By the time our final school term resumed two weeks later, Ruth Parnham and I were ‘going out’.
‘Going out’ was a particularly inaccurate way to describe our relationship. We weren’t able to see each other. A farmer’s daughter whose parents had split up, Ruth was back behind the walls of a Catholic boarding school, Santa Maria College, not to be released into the world until after our final examinations in November.
‘Going out’, but actually staying in, we ardently pursued our romance by smuggled letter and snatched telephone call. She was imprisoned on the opposite side of the river at Attadale. I could see the Santa Maria tower every morning as I ran my cross-country miles past Sunset and along the foreshore. I imagined her at those moments waking to insistent bells in a Spartan dormitory. She would wash her pale face in cold water from a chipped enamel bowl. Cryptic Virgins and doleful Jesuses, holding their heads at the passive, oblique angles they favoured, looked down on her. She brushed her fine blonde hair as she re-read my love-letters in the Catholic dawn.
Without Ruth and me present our romance progressed rapidly. It was ignited by the sudden firm opposition of the Santa Maria nuns, whose stool-pigeon network had quickly reported that Ruth Parnham was seeing – although, of course, not seeing – a non-Catholic boy.
We did, however, intend to see each other. Ruth was allowed one free weekend in the term. She’d timed it for the boys’ interschool track-and-field carnival on a Saturday in late October. That night she would come with me to an athletes’ party in South Perth.
This time I was running in the open mile race, the climactic event of the competition. With all the dawn training, my times had improved. But while I certainly liked the idea of her being present if I won, I didn’t fancy her being there if I ran last. One way or another, I was feeling anxious about the big day. Running a mile race in front of thousands of people, half of them female, wasn’t the least of it. What I was looking forward to was the party afterwards, to seeing her – especially after two months apart – at night-time. (In the best of possible worlds, of course, I would earlier in the day have lapped the field in the mile.)
But the Santa Maria intelligence network had been busy. The nuns abruptly cancelled Ruth’s free weekend. Disapproving of a non-Catholic boy’s existence was one thing. Enabling a Catholic girl to watch him in an athletic competition was another.
Ruth couldn’t fight it. The Leaving Certificate matriculation exams were looming. The nuns could prevent her from sitting for them. They could blight her future. On the telephone I railed about injustice. How could they do it? She took it surprisingly calmly. She said it was a cinch for teachers who’d removed the Human Reproduction section from their biology textbooks.
So there would be no Ruth at the race. I was relieved of the anxiety of her seeing me fail dismally. But perhaps I wasn’t quite so highly charged to succeed either. As a result I ran the race feeling loose and relaxed and did neither badly nor fabulously well: I came third again. Third place was fine by me. Honour was satisfied and Plan B could now swing into operation.
What Ruth and I had planned was for me to leave the party at ten-thirty, drive to Santa Maria and park in a tree-lined street at the back of the school. She would go over the wall and meet me in the car at eleven.
When I arrived at the party it was full of Wesley boys. Most of the boarders had been given weekend leave for the interschool sports day. After a dance or two I announced I was off to Santa Maria. John Sturkey asked if he could have a lift to Dianne Someone-or-other’s party. Sturkey was still sixteen, a year younger than the rest of us, and without a driver’s licence. He assured me the party was on the way. Absolutely, I said. I was feeling pleasantly relaxed after my race. Bring the bottle by all means.
We set off for Attadale, and we soon got lost looking for his party. It turned out he didn’t know the name of the street. Time flew past. The streets seemed to peter out into unsealed bush tracks. The street lights had ended a few blocks back. Whichever direction we drove we seemed to be blocked by the river. We drank beer while he looked for Dianne Someone’s party in the street directory. No street there rang a bell. We looked under Tourist Attractions, Nursing Homes and Places of Worship. Strangely, it wasn’t listed.
We were laughing by now, and it was hard to see the road with the interior light on. I was still laughing when I ran off the road. I only realised it after fifty yards when the treeline loomed up at me. I braked sharply and bogged the car.
There was one good thing about the Renault: it was so tinny it was light. Sturkey and I picked it up and lifted it sideways out of the mud. ‘No more farting about,’ I said as we bumped back onto the road. I was getting worried about Ruth. I was overdue at the Santa Maria wall. She’d be frantic. The mother superior, or whoever was in charge, would catch her. I envisioned grim watch-nuns patrolling the perimeter with torches and heavy crucifixes in their belts. I hadn’t time to find Dianne Someone’s party now. He’d have to come with me.
I said I’d take him where I had to go. Then he’d have to find his own way. ‘Fine. I know the way from there,’ he said. As I approached Santa Maria, I turned off the lights, stopped, and let him out.
‘Say hello to Dianne,’ I said.
‘Have one for me,’ Sturkey said.
I drove there with the lights off. I parked by the wall and waited. In a couple of minutes Ruth appeared. I’d expected to see her in some sort of convent sack-cloth but she was wearing a form-fitting skirt and sweater in smart autumnal tones. Her hair was crisply pulled back. She could have been a sophisticated twenty-five. She didn’t look religious or downtrodden. She looked cold and cross.
Her hands and the tip of her nose were icy, but in the car she soon warmed up. It was like being in our own little space capsule, although the Renault was smaller than any spacecraft I could imagine. With its steamed-up windows and the pitch darkness outside it was soon more like a midget submarine. A bathysphere. We could have been down five thousand fathoms.
After maybe an hour of cramped canoodling Ruth asked me the time. It was twelve-fifty. ‘I have to go!’ she cried. ‘I won’t be able to sneak back in after one o’clock!’ I was supposed to be home by one as well but I had no chance of making it. It would take me at least half an hour to drive across the river.
Just then a footstep crunched nearby. Nuns! I nervously rubbed the condensation off the windscreen and a male face loomed out of the dark and pressed close to the glass. ‘Yahh!’ growled the peeping tom.
Ruth yelped. I jumped up and knocked my head on the roof. Where was the crank handle when I needed it? I opened the car door and stumbled out into the cold night air.
It was Sturkey. ‘Sorry about that,’ he laughed. ‘Christ, I’m having trouble finding that bloody party.’
My mother was lying in bed awake in the dark. She’d turned out the light but she couldn’t go to sleep until I came home. My father was away again on his annual north-west boat trip, being a missionary for Dunlop, bringing rubber products to the back of beyond.
She lay there steeling herself to get up and walk to the window in the dark. She couldn’t turn on the light because she needed to see out there.
Finally she took a deep breath, got up and walked to the window. She opened a gap in the venetians and looked out into the garden. It must have been after one o’clock because the street lights were out, but when her eyes adjusted she could clearly see the expanse of the front lawn from the Stockwells’ fence on the left to the Dolans’ fence on the right, and up the short grassy slope to the road.
Dew had fallen and a faint moonlight shone on the damp grass. The dew transformed the lawn from a daytime patchwork of superfine couch, buffalo, ordinary couch and clover into a smooth silvery expanse. You couldn’t make out the sandy patch where the builders had mixed their quicklime and cement five years before and the grass had never grown properly since. It looked like a putting green.
She’d thought she had heard a noise but there was no one there.
Now she was up she thought she’d go to the lavatory. She walked back across the bedroom from the window to the door, and out into the hall. She went to the bathroom. As she came out, she heard Bill snoring and she looked in on the children. Seeing my empty bed reminded her that I was now late home, and she began to worry.
Something suddenly occurred to her. She’d left the back door unlocked for me. She thought she should lock it. When I got home she could let me in. She was so fully awake now there was no chance of her dropping off.