But hell. A legion of men across the city clock-watched to make ends meet and followed well-worn footpaths to their favoured public bar before tumbling home late to a plate of chops and peas kept warm with resentment. Ken’s life, past forty, now, was different from other men’s – look how active and fulfilling it was – but his life had the same feeling as any clock-watcher’s, ordinariness in the day to day, and he thought if he did not give routine a kick up the arse he was nothing. He never dreamed that doing it the capitalist way was a solution, but he was relieved, and grateful, and just a bit angrily curbed that he was driven by change and it was in the money-making direction.
Harold Wells nodded as Ken talked about the machines, their demise – ‘Yeah, yeah, too bad, Kenny, but that’s all over, good riddance?’ – and did not let on that he’d been one of the ones who had given Judy the thumbs-down. He paid Ken cash for a Kodak Carousel, near brand-new from the lot lying in an unused pile in a Rozelle back room, so the twins could look at slides of themselves as babies and family holidays stretched ten feet high on a whitewashed wall.
Ken’s library was his I Ching at a crossroads. His shelves ran up to the ceiling with a few gaps for the books on Rattler. Marx, Lenin, Watson and Crick, Paulo Freire, and a good many rollicking storytellers headed by Hemingway and Jack London, seadogs and socialists both, or as near as damned if London was not actually a maniac encapsulated seagoing communist. Ken always planned to name a boat after him: the Jack London.
‘Failure then and failure,’ Ken read, in one of his books, the words floating in memories of lost opportunity, inadequacy to a career path shaped by a lack of binocular vision. ‘No easy fine, no mere apology or formal expiation would ever satisfy the world’s demands.’ ‘Every pound of flesh exacted was soaked with all its blood,’ etc. And then, oh yes: ‘The subtlest forms of suffering known to man are connected with the poisonous humiliations incidental to these results.’ That was William James. Or was it Stevenson. Or was it Lenin. A book fell on Ken’s head, knuckling him, falling open at the words, ‘We are not intended to succeed, failure is the fate allotted.’
He could see the day coming soon when, like that interesting little scrapper Judy Compton, he would give the Department the flick. He cringed, though, wondering how he would tell his elderly parents. They lived in a two-bedroom semi-detached in a Rose Bay back street. They were not driven by change; they resisted it. They were admiring, humble, and worried about Ken as their only child, fearing for his wrangles with higher-ups in the Department that had made him what he was. They were Depression-era survivors with a trust in government jobs. His mother did ironing and mending for the Windrushes, the Pates, the Arthur Masons and the Terry and Buster MacNultys of Vaucluse. Class condescension made Ken the MacNultys’ equal via aggression from an early age. It was little pink Pamela MacNulty who’d stabbed him in the eye with a cake fork at a children’s party when he was seven and bolshie and in love with her. Ken went to Sydney Boys High. After school and at weekends he’d sailed VJ dinghies with Terry and Buster, who went to Scots. Their lazy, privileged assumptions honed Ken’s nascent socialism. They’d bought their boats expensively, while Ken and his father only spent ten quid, the sails cut, with difficulty and much anguish, by his mother. Ken’s oldies had never been told too much about what was going on with Ken. They knew about awards and prizes, appointments and promotions. Their shame could only be imagined when they heard of his humiliations.
Ken started at the bank by blustering. ‘I’ve been let down by people, by time-servers rejecting my initiatives.’
His jungle-green Austin Healy had been sold, his Balmain terrace might soon have to be sold, he caught buses and ferries. Look, he’d even grown a beard to save razor blades. Like Hemingway, he grinned warily, sugaring the diatribe with braggadocio. Next step was a humble experiment, the chemistry of outdoor weather protection treatments on woven synthetics. Would it work?
Gerry Tubman, the bank manager, was encouraging, considering that not just a good sailmaker was involved, with Olympic level dinghy-sail contracts, but also Whisker Martin, who before he went into his shop on Castlereagh Street was an army disposals success story and a legend for his profit margins.
Tubman had rarely had anyone like Ken in to see him, a man who sighed, grumbled and scorned what he wanted, money.
‘You’re a science master.’ He ticked the salary box.
‘Acting inspector, till I’m put back in my place.’
‘I’ve always wanted to understand the atom.’
‘The smallest piece of matter,’ said Ken, rubbing his hands together, warming up a few molecules.
‘But if you can’t see an atom, or touch one, Ken, or even know if it’s like what they say it is, how did they get round to smashing it, splitting it, making a bomb from practically thin air?’
‘Panic to be first,’ said Ken, ‘driving an effort. Money, intellect, genius, great men roped in to solve a problem. But of course, the whole aim, when it came to the crunch, was forget Hitler, it was to smash the Soviets.’
Ken leaned forward over Tubman’s desk and in a few moments, with the flair of a showman, a magician, had pencils, rubber bands and paper clips orbiting each other till, if you looked out the window, what you saw outside, a brick wall and a patch of sky, was just a part of Ken’s demonstration of the small in the large, the invisible in the rational worldwide. Ken was a teacher. You could feel it. He should be in front of a class.
‘A machine could never do what you do, Ken.’
‘Thank you. It could be that I’ve proved that with my invention. Some say I have. But let me disagree. Not ultimately in time. There is no flesh-and-blood teacher intruding judgement with the machine idea. No humiliating of the wary kid. Machines are hopeful. Science itself is hope. Imperfect as they are, as clunky, if I can use that word, because people have said it about them, my teaching machines at least pointed a way. Watson and Crick discovered the double helix with wooden models knocked up in a carpentry workshop.’
‘And won the Nobel prize,’ said Tubman.
‘You’ve got it,’ said Ken. He laughed, held Tubman’s eye, gathered his beard up in a fist and gave it an emphatic tug. What the hell. He pulled out the original leaflet showing the Mark II hovering over a blue planet. It was a crumpled memento. Don’t get him started. It was five o’clock. ‘Shout you one?’
‘I’d like that,’ said Tubman.
At the public bar Tubman loosened his tie, draped his suitcoat over his arm. Ken might have guessed why the bloke was likeable. He sailed, owning Gividago, he told Ken, a twenty-two-foot Australian Bonito variant of the New Zealand trailer-sailer Aquarius, on a trailer parked in his Haberfield driveway. Another reason was that he cared about education as a personal kink, and said meeting Ken was a privilege. With an economics degree, he had dreamed of becoming a teacher but had chosen the bank. He was sorry.
‘Teaching,’ said Ken bitterly. ‘Don’t be sorry.’
‘But it’s your life,’ said Tubman, foam up to his nose as he savoured the head on a schooner and Ken lined up a second one.
Ken told Tubman that he had reached his highest promotion level, was past forty and knew he would never make permanent inspector, let alone regional director with its better money and panjandrum pull of power. Political prejudice was the block. The best he could say about that little matter was that a good teacher had limits administering needs, leaving the field of inspector and above open to hacks.
‘Is it the same in banks?’
‘A lot of it is bookkeeping, Ken, getting the sums right, the balance sheets.’
‘Bookkeeping.’ Ken rolled his eyes. ‘I’m pursued by that little failure in myself. Can’t stand the routine.’
‘Science is the same, surely, and no fudging either,’ suggested Tubman.
‘At the end of it all you have a theory, something to work by that isn’t guesswork,’ said Ken. He almost dared say Marx had one, when it came to money and banks, but didn’t, not wanting t
o scare Tubman off.
‘I can tell you exactly where I’ll be in five years’ time,’ said Tubman. ‘Sitting in Head Office in the property section or in personnel, then after that I’ll be an inspector myself, belting around the sticks.’
Ken felt swirls of alcohol mellowed in hops and malted barley clarifying his feelings, if not his logic. ‘You want something better? Teach.’
It was then that with Tubman Ken found himself back where his heart was, extolling where he wished he’d stayed, in the lab of one of his inner-city schools, Clevo for example, encouraging the more promising with their slide rules and graph books, at their Bunsen burners and pyrex flasks experimenting. His true place was where the match struck.
Ken called for one for the road, ideas exploding in an energy sequence. Friends on the left, better-placed and cunning, had helped get him promoted as far as he’d got, he admitted. There was inverse pride in knowing he would soon get knocked down again. It reminded him of who he authentically was. For the first time since his own school-days, when he was inspired by a few good teachers and had foregone the research PhD path by remembering gold moments of being taught, and emulating them, Ken said he contemplated getting out of the teaching game altogether.
‘You won’t, you can’t, I won’t let you,’ said Tubman, recklessly affectionate as they staggered out onto the footpath.
‘What’s the name of your boat again?’ Ken said, as they said their good-nights.
‘Gividago,’ said Tubman.
‘Latin?’ said Ken, scratching his brains for a verb form.
‘Gividago as in, “Give it a go, mate”,’ said Tubman, and they lurched off sozzled in their separate directions, not all that separate, a thought confirmed one morning when Tubman phoned to say Ken’s stake was lined up, not as much as he’d hoped, but his enabling bid all the same.
Ken signed what Linton Simmons put in front of him, and dreamed up a last-hurrah cruise on Rattler. Spring was in the air, summer around the corner. They would sail to Queensland and get their sea legs. Ken rang the number he had as a contact for Wes and Judy, and a day later Wes got back to him.
‘I’ve tried, mate. God knows I’ve tried,’ said Ken, ‘but there’s no way at present I can cover you for what I owe you, but I will, somehow I will. I’ve been to the bank sorting things out, a little concern is under way with mates. I want you to know that.’
‘It’s not me that says you owe me,’ said Wes. ‘It’s other people that say you owe me.’
‘Other people are right,’ said Ken.
Separate from Ken and Dijana, Margaret and Harold, Judy and Wes had developed routines over the year, creating a shared life outside the estrangement. They were a couple who went to the movies and bands, a couple liking the plural pronoun of their sailing, sailing a lot, and working. Come midweek and bone tired, companionable, they read books in the attic flat aloud to each other, going back to Judy’s childhood favourites, the ones adults could read indulging the grown kid, Judy’s choice always being Grace Rathbone’s Carson Wand trilogy. A girl, Sister, a tomboy with shining brown eyes and a dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose is ‘at last beautiful’ and makes the passage to love life as the sidekick of the almost unbelievably handsome and brilliant, wisecracking, gangly legged Matey, fated to die of TB and become a legend among the fishermen and smudge-faced cane cutters of the New South Wales north-coast river flats.
As for the sailmaker, it was Margaret Wells who beguiled Graeme Sawtell into signing the agreements. Sawtell told Whisker Martin he’d never come across anyone getting the hang of canvas work and sail-making requirements as fast as Margaret did. It was as if she’d been born to it, a lot to learn all the same, and he wanted her on his floor doing sails with him. He’d dared bid for the Olympic dinghy sails’ contract while Margaret’s boofy husband handled the backpacks, tool pouches and igloo tents for a better, hopefully bigger, cash flow via profit margin. The former delinquent articled clerk Linton Simmons guided their fountain pens and got them initialling every tiny paragraph till he was satisfied.
Judy’s war of opposition against Ken and his circle was a fist in her heart tensing because nobody told her what was going on till Linton did.
In a weekend race Linton, who was getting fatter, sat abaft the traveller, handling the mainsheet like a nautical Buddha, making adjustments to the curve between genoa and mainsail, known as the slot, streaming the wools and telltales back like snapping prayer flags. Herding the signatories was not so different, said Linton, from finding that famous slot so blathered about at the yacht club bar.
‘What, who, what’s signed?’ said Judy.
‘Don’t you know?’ taunted Linton.
So the law worked in a slot too, between crime and money, the gutter and the highway, love and destruction, between Judy and the rest of them. Nothing, to Linton, not freedom of action nor unfettered free speech escaped a definition born in Surry Hills streets leading into the law courts via delinquency’s ‘footpath’, ‘roadway’ and ‘highway’, merci à vous, Ken Redlynch.
As Linton told Judy about the company that was formed she turned away hiding tears. She could at least have come in and sorted the account books, she choked.
Ken, she knew, liked Linton without loving him the way he loved Wes. Linton never hesitated billing Ken, who’d been Linton’s teacher at a crux, when it was either reform school or university, take your pick you clever little prick, he’d amiably threatened him. Linton billed Ken at a discount of course but made sure he was paid. Wes was the harder fighter, from a tighter corner, not for money but from idealism and loyalty.
Linton related a few bitchy words of Dijana’s. They made him laugh, he said. They made Judy laugh too, but at Linton with his measly idea of what counted. Otherwise they made her cry.
‘Judy Compton. Brain potentially the size of a cyclotron bred back to insignificance by the mating of a brilliant mother to a hayseed farmer.’
Something like that or along those lines.
To teach or not teach was not the question but where to teach and how. Ken was so gingered up by the changes going on after meeting Gerry Tubman that Dijana thought he was having it off with someone. She wondered if there was a new find, a lovely lost young one in tears in a wrecked classroom. Dijana didn’t as a rule feel jealous. But when a mature man made a friendship with a young woman, and said it was innocent, it wasn’t innocent, not if it was Ken or anyone else. It wasn’t innocent because a man might kid himself around the question of what was going on in his trousers but a woman did not.
Ken still thought he might have to sell Rattler but after the planned cruise. Gerry Tubman was behind him around keeping her. The two men made a plan to go up to Blackheath and down the Shipley Plateau road to visit Whisker Martin on his clifftop eleven acres, perched like a whale-watcher’s pulpit over the Kanimbla Valley.
Whisker needed little persuasion. It was where he had rock-climbed, demon-walked the Five Peaks, bird-watched and planned wilderness rescue campaigns with nationally known conservationists. Now he was on to other pursuits. Tubman put up an idea to run in parallel with Boatwear Bushgear’s evolution. Ken listened, smiling, the thought of it spraying out the top of his head like a roman candle ablaze. They would start a school together, a private school. Tubman would teach economics and handle the fees. Ken would have a free hand with ideas and teach.
‘I’m getting excited,’ said Ken.
Excited? It was an understatement. A school. Of his own. Without interference. It was so much a lifelong wish, of himself as a state schoolteacher unbuttoned, that he had never dared step it out naked or even think of it at all, this way, except deep down where pirate Ken cut corners in the night-time brain.
That such a school would have fees, against Ken’s fundamental beliefs, would be a temporary expedient, an alliance of necessity until state aid was allowed. A high school at Wellington, near Dubbo, had shown Ken a dream in his first year out almost twenty years ago. The headmaster, Bill Eason, had f
lown Australian, Indonesian, Malaysian, French and Japanese flags out the front with, it was said, the Red Chinese and Soviet ensigns kept in a cupboard in case their ambassadors or consul generals dropped in on a tour of district grain silos and shearing sheds, where their wool and wheat stockpiles originated. It was a great year for a young teacher back then. Ken acted in local plays and when there were parties, which was often, was lent new releases by the part-time disc jockeys from Dubbo who moonlighted in the tiny Wellington studio. He snaffled from there, and still had in his collection, the original Beatles 45rpm EP of ‘She Loves You’, recorded in German.
Ken went home to change and got ready to go out. Dijana was not in. It was a Wednesday night. A note said she was out with Margaret Wells and would join him at his talk.
Margaret and Dijana were tipsy around eight when they made their way upstairs to the room at Trades Hall, where Ken gave adult education lectures on Wednesdays. Tonight it was the DNA ladder and how the cell packed in life.
Harold Wells listened with half an ear. The world was changing, said Ken, the closer it was looked into. We all know that, thought Harold with peevish jubilation around his rekindled marriage.
‘We can look with great confidence into the chain of invisible connection,’ said Ken, making it political, as he did by reflex. ‘The world is changing to the disadvantage of conventional parties. Wilderness conservation, mining, anti-nuclear are the new frontlines.’ He’d been thinking about revised action fronts ever since his talk with Dr Elizabeth Darke at the Australian Club. The political Ken met the educational Ken in his podium mode of nudging, encouraging, suggesting.
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