One evening as he was sitting on such a bench in such a park, and the big fig-trees were casting their most substantial shadows on the white grass, a woman came and sat beside him. With no intentions, however. She looked deliberately in her handbag for a cigarette. And lit one. With her own match. Then she blew a trumpet of smoke, and watched the water of the tranquil little bay.
If they had not re-crossed their legs at exactly the same moment, they might never have spoken.
As it was, the woman had to smile. She said:
“Two minds of the same opinion. Eh?”
He did not know what to answer, and looked away. But the attitude of his shoulders must have been a receptive one.
“How do you find it down here?” the woman asked.
Again he was perturbed, but just managed to reply.
“All right.”
Knotting his hands to protect himself.
“I came from up the country,” the woman persisted, and named a north-western town.
“Many of you boys down in the city?” she asked.
She was kind, and polite, but bored by now. She frowned for a shred of tobacco that she could taste as it drifted loose in her mouth.
“No,” he said. Or: “I dunno.”
He did not like this.
She was looking idly at the colour of his hands.
“What is that you’ve got?” she asked.
“What?”
“That is an ulcer,” she said. “On the back of your hand.”
“It is nothing,” he said.
It was a sore which had broken out several weeks before, and which he carried for the most part turned away from strangers, as he waited for it to disappear.
“Are you sick?” she asked.
He did not answer, and was preparing to go away from the seat, from the park, with its dusty grass and little basin of passive water.
“You can tell me,” she said. “I should know.”
It was very strange. Now he took a look at the strange woman, with her rather full, marshmallowy face, and her lips that she had painted up to shine. She smelled of the powder with which the white women covered their bodies in an effort to soften the impact of their presence.
The woman sighed, and began to tell her life, which he listened to, as though it had been a spoken book.
“You are sick,” she sighed. “I know. Because I had it. You got a dose of the syph. When I was young and foolish, a handsome young bastard of a Digger put it across me with a hard-luck story. God, I can see ’im! With the strap of his hat hangin’ on to ’is lower lip. I can smell the smell the khaki used to have then. Well, that chapter was short, but the consequences was long.”
The woman was a prostitute, it began to emerge, successful, and fairly satisfied in her profession.
She told him that her name was Hannah.
“Of course,” she said, “I had luck too. I got my own home. An old cove who used to come to me regular left me a couple of semidetached homes. I let one, live in the other. Oh, I am comfortable!” she said, but aggressively. “We all laughed when some solicitor wrote about Charlie’s will. But it was a good joke, as it turned out. No one thought Charlie had the stuff to put away. He was a rag-dealer.”
This story made her audience glad. He loved to listen to the tales in which the action was finished. They had the sad, pale, rather pretty, but unconvincing colours of Mrs Pask’s sacred prints.
“Of course,” said Hannah, “although I am comfortable, I am not all that. That is why I have never retired from business. You never know.”
She threw away her cigarette, and frowned, so that he noticed how the white powder lay in the cracks between her brows.
“Many young fellers would not notice me now,” she said. “I know that.” Suddenly she screwed up her mouth excruciatingly. “You would not notice me,” she fired.
He looked down, because he did not know what to answer. He only knew that he would not have noticed Hannah.
“Go on!” She laughed. “I was not trying you out. Or rather, I was. I have a proposition to make. And did not want you to think I was offering you the job of a ponce. Oh, I am in no need of men. I have my friend, too. No,” she said, sinking her chin. “Sometimes I will take an interest in a person. And you are sort of down on it. See? Well, I have a small room at the back. Lying idle. What do you say, Jack, to dossing down in my small room? Eh? Of course I won’t say you needn’t pay me a little something for the privilege.”
He was very, very silent, wondering whether it could be a trap.
“It was only an idea,” she said, looking over a couple of passers-by. “I never influenced even the cat. Funny, I was to have been a teacher. Can you see me with a mob of kids in a shed beside the road? But do you know what,” she said, turning to him, “I was frightened at the whole thing. I took up with men instead. Men are stupider.”
The black fellow laughed.
“I am a man,” he said.
“You are something else as well.” She pondered something she had not yet solved, but could not begin to speak again too quickly. “I could help you, too.” Pointing at his hand. “There is a doc I know a little.” She mentioned a certain hospital. “You are not frightened, are you, Jack?”
Then he knew that he was, and that this floury woman in her dress of lace doileys was leading him poignantly into a dining-room from which the kindness had not yet fled.
“Anyways,” said Hannah, “if you decide, I would let you have that small room for ten bob.” She had begun suddenly to enunciate very clearly, as some people did for blacks, but dropped her voice a little to give the address at which she lived.
It was getting dark by then. People with tidy lives were setting tables, or leaning bare arms on window-sills. The lights were lit.
“Well,” said Hannah, and began to arrange herself, “business is business, isn’t it? It is a queer thing, but I never liked men one little bit. Only you had to do something, and they told me I was pretty good at it.”
She could not comb too hard.
“Oh,” she said, “I don’t say I don’t like a yarn with some man, on a tram, about what he has been doing. I don’t mind that. Poor buggers! They are so uninteresting.”
Soon Hannah, who had snapped her handbag on her comb, and dusted off her dandruff, was ready for the streets.
“Then, I might see you,” she said.
But he could tell that something had made her no longer really care. He was the one that did. He had twisted his body right round till his bones were painful on the hard seat.
“At Abercrombie Crescent,” he was saying, in a stupid-sounding, muddy-coloured voice, and repeating other directions she had given.
“Yes,” she called, farther now, throwing the words over her shoulder. “It is a street, though. No one knows how Abercrombie got stuck with a crescent.” Her voice fell away from her as she went. “And not before twelve. I’d take the axe to anybody. I am not fit.”
Hannah walked towards the road, inclining somewhat as she went. The night was darkening and purpling across the park, and soon she was sucked up by it.
Alf Dubbo went to live at 27 Abercrombie Crescent, in the small room which Hannah had offered. He did not take long to decide; he was too relieved. He had locked his box, tied a cord round one or two things he had been working on, and gone.
He was happy in the back room, which was stuffed with many objects of doubtful virtue: a spare mattress full of kapok lumps, a rusted, burnerless kero stove, a dressmaker’s dummy, boxes of feathers, and a scattering of rat pellets. Outside, the wires of aerials were slackly strung above the slate roofs. He was fascinated by the wires, and began the first day to paint them, as they intercepted the sounds of feathers and his own tentative thanksgiving.
But he kept the door locked.
Some time after the light had gone, Hannah came and rattled the knob. She announced:
“My friend has come, Alf. I will have to introduce you.”
Dubbo went out to
them. Hannah was nervous, but obviously proud.
“I want you to know Alf Dubbo,” she said. “Mr Norman Fussell.”
Doing with her hand as she had seen done.
Norman Fussell had been arranging his waves in front of the glass.
“Norman,” Hannah explained, “is a male nurse. He is off duty for a while, and that is how he is able to be here.”
“Pleased to know you, Alf,” said Mr Norman Fussell.
He was very brisk for one so round and soft. He began to prepare himself a meal of beans on toast, which was the kind of thing he liked, and which he ate, holding his head on one side, half out of delicacy, half because of a difficult denture.
Hannah was solicitous.
“How is the Sister, Norm?” she asked, but dreaded.
“Bloody,” said Norman Fussel through his beans.
When he had finished, he informed:
“Nurse is feeling better now.”
And sat and smiled, arranging his canary-coloured waves, and smoking a cigarette which he had taken from a pretty little box.
Hannah got Alf Dubbo aside.
“They will tell you,” she said, “that Norman is a pufter. Well, I am too tired to argue about what anybody is. I am sick of men acting like they never was. Norm could not impress a woman even if he tried. And that is what is restful.”
Hannah would attempt not to let business interfere with Norman Fussell’s off-duty, but if it did, he would doss down with a blanket on the lounge. Though he might also sometimes go in search of trade. Sunday was religiously kept for Norm, if he happened to be free. Sunday was bliss, such as is possible. They would lie in bed overlapping each other, and read the murders and divorces, and consult the stars. Or would slip out to the kitchen to fetch the red tea and snacks they loved: bread spread thickly with condensed milk, or tomato sauce, or squashed banana. Or would snooze and melt together. Dubbo painted them later on, as they appeared to him through the doorway. He painted them in one big egg of flesh, forehead to forehead, knee to knee, compressed into the same dream. It was not his most ambitious painting. But an egg is something; even a sterile one is formally complete.
On going to live at Abercrombie Crescent, Dubbo began to receive treatment as an out-patient at the neighbouring hospital of St Paul’s, either from the young doctor known to Hannah, or from one or other of his colleagues. For a long time the patient could hardly tell them apart. Their white coats and aseptic minds made them about as dissimilar as a row of the white urine bottles. As he had anticipated, the blackfellow was frightened at the touch of hands, but realized in time that he was just a case. He even grew bored and irritated by what was being done to him. It was necessary to endure the manufacture of cardboard boxes, but while he waited at the hospital of an evening, he could see the light was failing. He would be straining to prevent it. There were days when he did not take up a brush.
Eventually he was told he had been cured of his venereal condition. He had almost forgotten what it was they were treating him for; it was so much more important to find a way out of other dilemmas. Disease, like his body, was something he had ended by taking for granted. His mind was another matter, because even he could not calculate how it might behave, or what it might become, once it was set free. In the meantime, it would keep jumping and struggling, like a fish left behind in a pool – or two fish, since the white people his guardians had dropped another in.
While he continued painting, and attempting to learn how to think, Dubbo discovered that a war had broken out. So they told him, and he did slowly take it in. Wars do not make all that difference to those who have always been at war, and this one would not greatly have affected the abo’s life, if it had not been for the altered behaviour of the people who surrounded him. Certainly, after he had been examined medically, and pronounced unfit, he had been drafted from the stapling of cardboard boxes to the spray-painting of aeroplanes, but that was part of his rather unconvincing, to himself always incredible, communal existence. But there were the people in the house, the people in the street, who now forced their way deeper into his mind. His brush would quiver with their jarring emotions, the forms were disintegrating that he had struggled so painfully and honestly to evolve.
Now he began to dawdle at night in the streets, where there were more people than ever before investigating the lie of the land. Since the men had gone out to kill, a great many of those who had been left were engaged in far more deadly warfare with their own secret beings. Their unprotected, two-headed souls would look out at the abo, who was no longer so very different from themselves, but still different enough not to matter. Mouths, glittering with paint, would open up in the night like self-inflicted wounds. That, of course, was already familiar, and in another light he would have accepted it along with what he sensed to be other tribal customs. Now it was the eyes that disturbed most, of the white people who had always known the answers, until they discovered those were wrong. So they would burst out laughing, or break into little snatches of tinny song. Some of them danced, with open arms, or catching at a stranger. Others fell down, and lay where they were. Or they would lie together on the trampled grass in the attitudes of love. They would try everything sooner or later, but it was obvious they were disappointed to find they had not succeeded in killing the enemy in themselves, and perhaps there would not be time.
Dubbo’s workmates were in the habit of allowing him a swig or two, because, when they had got him drunk, he gave them a good laugh. Occasionally he would persuade somebody of an accommodating nature to buy him an illicit bottle. Then he would rediscover the delirious fireworks, as well as the dull hell of disintegration, which he had experienced first in Mrs Spice’s shack. Except that by now, an opalescence of contentment would often follow nausea; a heap of his own steaming vomit could yield its treasure. He appeared to succeed, in fact, where the others in the wartime streets failed.
Once, after a bout of drinking, he fell down and lay on the lino inside the front door at Abercrombie Crescent. Hannah, who came in late and unsuccessful, just about broke her neck. After she had switched on the light, and kicked the body again for value, she felt the need to holler:
“Waddaya expect? From a drunken bastard of a useless black!”
But he did not hear that.
Next evening when he got in, she called him, and said:
“Look here, love, some john with a sense of his own importance who finds a piebald lurching around, or even laying in the street, is going to collect you, and plenty more said about it.”
Hannah, without her make-up, was cold, pale and grave. She was too intent, she let it be understood, on the matter in hand, to bother all that about her lodger’s fate. Her naked nails blenched on the little pair of tweezers with which she was pulling the hairs out of her eyebrows.
“Of course,” she said, and pulled, “it’s nothing,” she said, “to do with me. Every man’s business is his own. See?”
All the while pulling. She would pull, and squint, and drop the hairs out of the window as if she was doing nothing of the sort.
Alf Dubbo listened, but was more fascinated by what he saw. She had not yet made her bed, and the sheets were the colour of Hannah’s natural skin – grey, at least in that light. Hannah herself was the colour of oysters, except for the parting of her breasts, where water could have been dripping, like in an old bath, or kitchen sink.
“By the way,” she mentioned, “that room of yours is going up to twelve bob. There is a war on now.”
But he remained fascinated by what he saw: Hannah’s hand trembling as she worked the tweezers.
“Okay, Hannah,” he agreed, and smiled for other things.
“Don’t think I am trying to shake you off, Alf,” she had to explain. “I need those two bob.”
She was smoothing and peering at her eyebrow, to make it as glossy as it might have been.
“Any tart,” she said, “even the plush ones, is a fool not to take precautions.”
As she tried
rubbing at her eyebrow with spit.
So Hannah, too, he saw, was afraid of what might happen, and most of all in mirrors.
One day when she was running the feather duster over the more obvious surfaces of the lounge-room, she opened one of the compartments of her mind. She left off in the middle of The Harbour Lights, to say, or recite, rather:
“Those old women, Alf, the ones with the straight, grey, greasy hair hangin’ down to their shoulders, like girls. The old girls. With a couple of yeller teeth, but the rest all watery gums. You can see them with an old blue dog, and sometimes a parcel. Pushin’ their bellies ahead of ’em. Gee, that is what frightens me! And the snaky veins crawlin’ up their legs!”
But he could not help her, although he saw she was waiting for some sort of easy sign.
He was sitting on the good end of the lounge, the points of his elbows fitted into the shallow grooves of his knee-caps, the slats of his fingers barely open on his cheek-bones. In that position, but for the supporting lounge, he might have been squatted beside a fire.
Fire did protect, of course. Indeed, in deserted places it was not desirable to move at night without it. Alf Dubbo was fortunate in that he had his fire, and would close his eyes, and let it play across his mind in those unearthly colours which he loved to reproduce. But which did not satisfy him yet. Not altogether. His eyes would flash with exasperation. He could not master the innermost, incandescent eye of the feathers of fire.
As he remained seated, and dreaming, and wordless on the lounge, on that occasion when she had been foolish enough to ask for guidance, Hannah was compelled to shout:
“You are no bloody good! Any of yez! That silly sod of a Norm, we know. Not that I don’t take ’im for what he is worth. God knows, there is plenty of women without a friend, let alone a human hotwater bottle. But you, Alf, you got something shut up inside of you, and you bloody well won’t give another person a look.”
She began laying about her with the duster with such violence that the back fell off a book, which he had never more than noticed, in spite of the fact that it was the only one; it was too old, and black, and dusty, stuck in behind some ornaments which clients had presented to the owner in moments of drink or affluence. He stooped and picked up the brittle strip of leather, which lay in his fingers curled and superfluous as a shred of fallen bark. The rather large gold lettering of a title was still legible, though.
Riders In the Chariot Page 44