by David Malouf
The man caught my father in a bearhug. He seemed about to burst into tears.
I saw then that he was quite drunk, that his clothes, though well brushed, were worn and shabby, and that his stately progress along the pavement had been not so much swagger as instability. He had a Digger’s badge in his lapel, a wet quivering lip, and the same sly, ingratiating look and smell of seediness and booze as all the rest. I was afraid for a moment that my father would produce the shilling. I thought the man might take it, and it was something I did not want to see.
‘Poor chappie, he’s in a bad way,’ my father muttered as we moved off. ‘Did you see that, Phil? You’d better not mention we met him – or not to your grandma anyway, she wouldn’t like it. And not to Aunt Ollie either. She used to be rather fond of him. He’s not such a bad fellow as they make out, but he got into trouble, and you know – people are –’
He shook his head and I waited, but the word did not come. I wondered for a long time what it might be, how it was that he saw people. But either he could find no word, no single word, that was the right one or he was ashamed to utter it. Or perhaps he thought I was too young to hear the truth.
In all ways magnanimous, he had the style, I used to think later, of the born patron, that spirit of generosity that asks nothing for itself, feels no threat in the presence of greatness, takes joy in every form of excellence or superior art or skill, and cares only that what has come into the world as a large possibility should not for the world’s sake go unfulfilled. In another place and time he might have endowed a college or commissioned altars or become an entrepreneur of all that was bizarre and marvellous. His restriction, so far as everyday employment went, to the mundane world of fruit and vegetables left his real gifts undeclared, and one caught a glimpse of what they might be only when the fruit-growers and distributors, each year in August, mounted their display stands at the Brisbane Show. Then at last he could show his hand. Those ordinary objects, Granny Smiths and Jonathans polished to a waxy brightness, William pears, Valencias, pawpaws, mangoes, bananas, were freed into a new dimension. Transcending their edible selves, and leaving behind the world of orchards at Stanthorpe or plantations at Bowen, and the suburban dining tables for which they were intended, they became the merest abstract shapes and colours to be deployed as imagination decreed: in maps of the seven states of the Commonwealth; as the kangaroo, emu and shield in the national emblem; as a starburst of ten-foot poinsettias; in diamond shapes, lozenges and zigzags like the markings on a serpent, or as letters that spelled out the name of the firm in an elaborate scroll flanked by cornucopias spilling giant apples and pears, that when looked at closer were made up of dozens of real-life apples and pears that when the Show was over would be distributed to charities.
These displays were a prodigy of invention. Each year my father was photographed beside his exhibit, along with my grandmother (his partner in the business) and the girls from the office. Beautifully inscribed in copperplate and insipidly tinted, these photographs covered a whole wall of his noisy cubbyhole above the open hall of the markets, where trucks loaded and unloaded at concrete bays and men in shorts and leather aprons hauled sacks about, tossed fruit cases, shouldered great hands of bananas, and the floor was littered with cabbage leaves and a mash of pumpkins and tomatoes.
He had an eye, my father, for the way nature might outdo itself – and not only in the matter of apples and pears. He liked to believe that the world was blessed with men, rare though they might be, of outrageous ambition and uncanny gifts. People knew his weakness and brought him news of wonders. Or as my grandmother put it, pestered him on behalf of every sort of no-hoper and lame duck.
So for several weeks that year we went each Friday to see a boxer train, a young half-caste, the son of a thin, impossible man, himself a former boxer, who had approached my father in a pub. Punchdrunk, and with one puffy ear, he was convinced that with a little encouragement – good training, that is, and a few pounds to back it up – his boy could be a champion welterweight.
The boy was seventeen: tough, darkly resentful, but good. He trained with a punching bag under their house and we sat on packing cases under a naked globe and watched him hiss and dance barefoot in the dirt, aiming swift, hard punches at the bag as if it had done him a deep hurt, while the father, in shorts and dirty singlet, put his shoulder to it and took the blows, cursing, crowing, spitting fierce directives.
They were an odd pair. There was something abject in the man’s eagerness to win my father’s approval, and a kind of desperation in the way he displayed the boy, pinching his muscles, punching him hard to show his toughness, singing lyrics, all filled out with set phrases from the sports columns, to his ‘potentials’.
For him, after so many defeats, it must have been a last chance at glory and a grab at the big money. The boy was his insurance policy. He talked and talked out of the corner of his mouth, where spit flowed, and sang his wheedling song. The boy said nothing. He just stood, panting, glowing with sweat, his gloved fists loose at his side. He glared, said nothing, and his intensity, now that it was no longer directed at the bag, a slack square shadow beside our finer ones, seemed all the more powerful for being unspent. For him this was a way – perhaps the only one – of saving himself for a time from the inevitable round of drink, then gaol, then more drink; of keeping off, while he was still strong-winded and fast on his feet, the shadow and sour stink, and angry sick despair, of fellows three or four years older than himself whom he remembered from school as clean-cut youths with a future and whose mouths were clamped now on a metho bottle. He danced a little, and his father crowed and called him a killer. He looked like one. I thought it was his father – that nearest of all white men – he might decide to kill.
The place, their dusty under-the-house, with its cage of enclosing lattice, its twelve-foot stumps, its stacks of half-broken chairs and bedframes and empty oil-drums, disturbed me. It evoked so many darker potentialities than the ones we had come to judge.
‘Well then,’ the man urged, breathlessly running on the spot. ‘Waddya reckon? Will ya help us git up?’
It was only one of the places my father took me. There was also an old man, retired and half-blind with cataracts, who ‘invented things’. He too was eager to have his chance at the big money that was about. He showed us a device for picking up leaves that could be made out of the frames of old umbrellas, and an unwieldy contraption, iron-jawed and sprung, for cracking Queensland nuts.
‘You see,’ my father explained, ‘things are beginning to pick up again, now that the war’s over. That man must be eighty, but he wants to be in it along with the rest. Things will get going again. It will be big.’
Another fellow, a barman, had a whole house full of bottles of every imaginable size, shape and colour – earthenware ginger-beer bottles with pebble stoppers, blue, green and gold medicine bottles, beer bottles, bottles for linseed oil, olive oil, calamine lotion, lye. Whole rooms were stacked with them, on shelves that went from floor to ceiling making wonderful lights. He assured us they would be worth a fortune one day and wanted my father to buy the collection or lend him money on it, I forgot which, or talk some Minister into making a museum.
‘You see, everyone suddenly is full of ideas,’ my father exulted. ‘This country’ – he drew a big breath and sucked in deeply the spirit of the new era – ‘is on the brink of being discovered. For the second time. It’s all there, three million square miles of it, just waiting to be grasped and hauled up by its bootstraps into –’
But as usual, the word he wanted that would have fixed its destination was not there. He lost sight of it. It was too blinding or too far off.
It was at this time and in this spirit that he met Frank Harland, another pub acquaintance; or heard from a fellow drinker that some sort of weird artist bloke had set himself up in the Pier Pictures, and had gone along, in eternal hope of the extraordinary, to introduce himself and take a look.
The time I went with him was not his first visit. By then he and the artist bloke were in their own way friends.
It was a windy afternoon in late August and we were going to invite Harland to Sunday lunch. Rain was pitting the grey of the Broadwater, flicking up light like shrapnel; it would ease off, swing out to sea, then blow back again in violent gusts that threw salt into the municipal beds, where cannas grew among clumps of blood-red salvia. The few people who were about struggled with umbrellas that threatened to whip inside out, or went barefoot in capes. The Pier Pictures, out in the wash of dirty water, looked like the hulk of a stranded coral-barge or dredger that might at any moment break up and founder, saving the civic authorities, since it had been condemned for several months now and boarded up for even longer, a fortune in wrecker’s fees.
I had known the place for as long as I could remember. A vast wooden structure with a mansard roof and pepper-pot towers, it stood at the end of the pier about sixty yards out in the waters of the bay and was approached by a latticed gallery that extended all along the southern end of it like a closed verandah – a great convenience on days of summer drizzle, and on afternoons when, just as the matinée was out, great stormclouds came rolling in off the Pacific and all hell let loose, or on wintry occasions like the present when the westerly blew and spray dashed at the lattice, puddling all one side of the gallery with standing water.
Set apart from the rest of the town in the shallow waters of the bay, and dedicated to familiar mysteries, the Pier Pictures was an ambiguous area like my verandah sleepout, neither inside nor out. Daylight flowed in through latticed openings high up under the auditorium roof. On hot afternoons around Christmas a line of doors could be opened into the gallery and a warm breeze would puff in under the heavy drapes, in which the smell of the sea, sharp and salty at low tide, would be mixed with the mustiness of velvet and dust. It is a smell I have encountered nowhere else. It evokes for me the peculiar sensuousness and sticky charm of those long Saturday afternoons of late childhood and adolescence, and goes with wet heat, fingers tacky from Have-a-Hearts or Jaffas sucked in the dark, and a kaleidescope of images, in lurid colour or in sharp black and white, that are not only episodes in some external drama of Tarzan or cattle-ranchers or comic chases through trains, but belong as well to the private drama that was unfolding, simultaneously with the other, in whatever part of us – mind or body – is the seat of our first strong apprehension of the world, of that point in it where we and the multiplicity of things are in touch; an apprehension for which the artificial darkness of three o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, our awareness of the close presence of others in a still but not quite passive crowd, and the excited unreality of the events unfolding before us – sensual, violent, apocalyptic – may be the necessary conditions.
The sea, invisibly out of sight, still touched the air with salt. If a storm had blown up while some encounter in the endless war between cowboys and Indians was being decided, there might be added to our presence in the Nevada desert a sensation, obscurely felt, of our being also at sea, of real waves lashing at the seaweed-hung and barnacle-encrusted piles on which the old structure rested, and of spray, all heady ozone, about to come hissing up between us and the heat-haze of the screen.
It was a magic box, the old Pier Pictures. But it was also close to nature. Too close. It had in the end to be condemned, and even on its better days there were kids who couldn’t face it because they got seasick.
It was here, braving all threat of being stranded or washed out to sea, that Frank Harland had set up his makeshift studio. Not in the open auditorium, which had been stripped of its seats and of all its lamps and decorations, but in the sanctum itself. Up where the screen had once floated and a transparent but convincingly solid Tarzan had swung from trees, where Ann Miller had tapped on air and Boris Karloff’s iron boot had had just weight enough to crush a skull, Frank Harland had suspended three hurricane lamps from a length of rope, pinned his bits of paper and cardboard to the remains of a hemp curtain, and was at work when we entered on his own view of the world.
‘G’day Frank,’ my father called from the back of the open theatre.
The man left the table where he was working and came, brush in hand, to the edge of the stage. He stood there in the box-like space with his canvases about him and called back: ‘Who is it?’
I had the weirdest feeling. As if, in a sudden reversal of things, someone up there on the screen had stolen the initiative and it was we, at the other end, who were the shadows here.
My father named himself. I think he also named me, but I don’t remember the painter paying me any attention. He seemed distant, preoccupied, eager perhaps to get back to his work.
He was very thin, with a drooping moustache and watery, slate-blue eyes. When he moved, as he did very often in a jerky, loose-limbed way, his feet shuffled, and I thought of him at first as being old. In fact he was younger than my father, and sometimes, when I’d watch him later in my Aunt Ollie’s kitchen, his manner was even younger than that. With his thin shoulders and lost, blue look, he could seem slight and boyish.
He puzzled me. His clothes, an old army shirt and sweater and boots without socks, were those of a tramp; but he wore them with a natural elegance, as if he had some notion, like my father, of what it was to be a dandy, and for all the mess with which he was surrounded he was himself very contained and formal – almost, I thought, soldierly. His gaze was indirect and kept drifting back to the picture he was at work on, which was spread out on a low, rickety table knocked up out of fruit cases. He couldn’t keep away from it. He kept dancing back to take a quick, shy look as if it were a child he was minding. There was a kitchen chair in front of the table that had once been green, and a little wheeled trolley with a shelf where he mixed his colours in a messy arc and where brushes of all sizes stood in peanut-paste bottles. Away to the left a camp-bed with a heap of grey army blankets, a primus stove and some blackened pots.
It felt strange to be high up on the lighted stage, with the empty theatre out front and the rain dripping into it from three or four holes in the roof, making lakes where only a year ago we had slumped in our canvas chairs and been transported to strange places. I was more impressed at that moment, I think, by what had happened to the Pier Pictures than by the spare, shy figure with the lines in his cheeks – and if by him, by the way his boots flopped because he had no socks and the army boots no laces.
He and my father, after a good deal of embarrassed shifting about and shuffling from foot to foot, had come to the table where the painter’s work was spread. There seemed nothing to do but look at it. My father looked and hummed, and I came up under his arm and looked as well. Frank Harland hugged himself, moaned, shook his head, darted off to the left and right, but always came back to face it.
It was a big picture, mostly red, but splashed all over with feathery blue. There were figures in it, two of them, and they appeared to be dancing or swimming or supporting one another against a fall – there was no clear indication and they were hard to disentangle, you couldn’t tell where one figure ended and the other picked up. Leaving my father and Harland to scratch their heads over it, each in his own way, and to mumble the formulas of men who cannot find words for what they might have to say to one another, I went off to explore.
The wings of the theatre were shallow and uninteresting, their whitewashed walls all patched with grey where the switchboards had been pulled out. There were no relics. The entire mystery of the Pier Pictures had been in those illusions on the screen and in whatever excitement we ourselves had created in the dark of the stalls. I pocketed a coil of rusty fuse-wire as a kind of souvenir – there was nothing else – and was drawn back to the stage.
The artist bloke, Frank Harland, was in a state of extreme agitation. He was ripping sketches and smaller paintings from the curtain they were pinned to and tossing them in a pile on the floor. My father, who was deeply embarrassed by every
form of emotion, was simply standing there, helpless and appalled.
Harland had dealt with most of the sketches, calling them a dead loss, all botched work, and was dancing in his army boots on the fragments, when my father decided to intervene. He caught up one of the pictures (it was a landscape) and said how much he liked it.
Harland’s hand was arrested. He took the picture, looked at it, looked again, and suddenly made a crowing sound, at the same time slapping his brow with an open hand.
‘By golly, you know, you’re right!’
He scrabbled on the floor and snatched up two or three of the dismembered sketches, holding the pieces together, and considered, then shook his head. ‘No, this is the one. I’m staggered. You realised it straight off. I don’t know what got into me.’ He stood holding the scrap of paper before him as if he were seeing it for the first time.
He passed it back to my father, who cleared his throat now and offered in a low voice to buy the painting. If Harland would name his price.
Later, when the little picture had come to have a particular meaning for me, I would spend long hours trying to solve its mysteries; and later again, when Harland was famous, I would understand that it was a minor masterpiece. But at the moment of first laying eyes on it, it said nothing to me. I was used to seeing pictures in a frame. Seen as my father now held it, slightly buckled and with raw edges that the paint did not always cover, it had no more weight than the painter himself, who was too close to being a tramp for me to see him as an artist.