Spirit House

by Mark Dapin

  ‘And what are you doing this morning, Mr Rubens?’ asked the frummer.

  ‘We’re going to the Club,’ said Jimmy. ‘And what’re you doing? Waiting for Moshiach?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Barry Dick, pleased.

  Jimmy shook his head and walked into the shade of the crumbling electrical substation next door to my grandmother’s house. Barry Dick followed us, trying to persuade us to put on teffilin, which was the main thing he did while waiting for Moshiach to return. The frummers believed Moshiach would come more quickly if all Jewish men strapped little black boxes to their heads.

  We arrived at the Club earlier than usual, and Jimmy and I were the only people we knew. I sucked my drink through a straw, then blew the bubbles back into the glass, imagining a head of lava on my lemon squash.

  When Jimmy had finished his whisky, he palmed the glass under the table, where he refilled it from his hipflask. For the rest of the day he would buy middies of Old from the bar, but chase them with shots of Bells from his drinks cabinet.

  Sollykatzanmyer came in together.

  ‘Whose round?’ asked Katz.

  ‘Who’s round?’ asked Myer, slapping Solomon’s belly.

  But Jimmy had already shuffled to the bar. While he was gone, the old men asked me how was everything with my mum.

  ‘I hear he boarded up her room at home,’ said Solomon.

  ‘No he didn’t,’ I said. ‘He just turned a picture around.’

  ‘I can’t believe he got his tools out,’ said Solomon.

  ‘He didn’t,’ I said.

  ‘And he’s covered all the mirrors,’ said Myer.

  ‘He hasn’t,’ I said.

  Jimmy handed Solomon a middy of Old, which Solomon held up high and close to his chest.

  ‘It’s times like this,’ said Solomon, ‘a man needs a table.’ He looked down in despair.

  ‘You’ve got a bloody table under your big red nose,’ said Jimmy, who had made all the furniture in the bar.

  Solomon planted his glass with a shudder. Dark dribble spilled over the lip. He grabbed the tabletop and shook it, spilling more.

  ‘Call this a table?’ he asked, angry hair sprouting like bush grass from his nose.

  ‘What would you call it?’ asked Jimmy.

  ‘I’d call it “Lucky”,’ he said, ‘after the three-legged dog.’

  Jimmy took a sip of his whisky and a gulp of his beer.

  ‘A table is a raised platform with several supports of equal height,’ said Myer. ‘Using that definition, this is not, in fact, a table.’

  ‘What kind of gonif would make a table like this,’ asked Solomon, ‘then sell it to a shikkered old clublican to taunt members and guests?’

  Katz leaned his elbows on the table.

  ‘Watch it,’ warned Solomon. ‘One nudge’ll bring the whole lot down.’

  He slapped the wet surface. Cigarette butts jumped around in the ashtray.

  ‘This table would have been better off if it had stayed a tree,’ said Solomon. ‘A tree is a thing of beauty, a work of God.’

  Katz asked me about school. I told him I was getting better at football.

  ‘You should study hard,’ said Myer, ‘and pay attention to your teachers. Otherwise, you might end up a carpenter.’

  ‘Jesus was a carpenter,’ said Solomon. ‘Carpentry is for goys.’

  ‘Jesus was a yiddisher fella,’ said Katz.

  ‘Would you let him marry your daughter?’ asked Solomon, his eyebrows shooting upwards, crushing his forehead into worms.

  ‘Too late,’ said Myer, ‘he’s already run off with Jimmy’s.’ Jimmy’s face showed no change.

  Solomon folded a coaster and passed it to me.

  ‘Shove this under the stump, will you?’ he said.

  I ducked beneath the tabletop and made my way between the old men’s feet. As I scrambled among the boots and shoes to find the shortest table leg, I heard the old men hissing over my head. When I came back up, they were talking about the handjob Myer got from a blonde shiksa at the National Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen’s Anzac Day march in 1951.

  ‘She was a real professional,’ said Myer. ‘I think she must’ve worked on a dairy farm.’

  ‘She must’ve worked in the Pussycat Bordello,’ said Solomon. He turned to Katz. ‘Remember the party the night that place opened?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ said Katz.

  Solomon sighed.

  ‘Ernie Katz,’ he said, ‘is a septuagenarian. This means, as my mother ava ashalom would say, he is as old as his tongue and few years older than his teeth. In the case of Katz, however, my mamen would have been only half-right – which, truth to tell, is considerably superior to her lifetime average. After the war Katz had his few remaining teeth pulled, as was the fashion in those days, replacing them with a notably unconvincing set of dentures. The idea was that dentures would require less maintenance than natural teeth, be free of decay and cause the wearer to suffer only occasional phantom pangs of toothache, in the manner that – so we are told – amputees are wont to feel a twinge in their missing limb, wherever the hell that may be.’

  Katz bared his teeth at Solomon. They were all the same size, like a mouthguard. He pretended to bite at Solomon’s pink cabbage ear.

  ‘Yes, Katz, like all of us, is in his seventies, and he has seen a lot but done very little. Perhaps the most surprising thing about Katz is his lifelong association with Jake Mendoza, the King of the Cross, one of the few genuine yiddisher gunsels in the milieu. Katz was born in Balmain and went to school with Mendoza (then known as Rosenblatt) and his partners in crime, Maurice “the Little Fish” Bass (then Baser) and Big Stan Callahan (whose real name is lost to history, which is no loss at all). Katz came from a poor family and, in order to earn an income in his early teens, he turned his right hand to pornography. With the aid and encouragement of Jake Mendoza, he produced a portfolio of drawings of men with cocks like cucumbers making love to women with the breasts of watermelons. (It should be noted here that Katz’s father, Isaac, was the local greengrocer.) Katz and Mendoza manufactured and distributed pornography that was extremely well liked – loved, even – by its consumers. Katz’s gimmick was that he would draw the customer together with the movie star, stage actor, neighbour or schoolgirl of his choice, in a position nominated by the client. Although Jimmy and I were educated – if you can call it that – in Bondi, even we had heard of this yiddisher Norman Lindsay, this modern master of the female form. Indeed, I myself owned an illustration of the young Solomon Solomons (drawn from a photograph) passionately embracing the younger Gertie Steinberg, doggy style.

  ‘At the height of his fame and commercial success, Katz was producing three or four commissioned artworks a day, and up to two dozen in a week, but the whole operation came to an end when Katz won entry to Fort Street selective school. Free of the supposedly baleful influence of Jake Mendoza, he never once equalled the output of those heady years at Balmain High, and when an artist in his seventies looks back on his life to discover that he reached his creative peak at the age of twelve, he must surely feel a phantom twinge of regret, in the place where his talent used to be.’

  ‘Don’t you ever get tired of repeating yourself?’ asked Katz.

  ‘Don’t you ever get tired of being yourself?’ asked Solomon. ‘They were the good old days.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ said Katz.

  ‘When Mendoza ran the rackets,’ said Solomon, ‘crims didn’t shit in their own nests.’

  I imagined convicts as birds, carrying worms in their beaks.

  ‘They rolled in their own shit,’ said Jimmy.

  Solomon thought Jewish crims kept you safe from goyish gunsels, but Jimmy said the only crooks you had to look out for were people like Mendoza, who knew where you lived. Solomon said Mendoza understood how to dress, which was an important thing.

  ‘He is a mensch, underneath it all,’ agreed Myer.

  ‘He was always a gentleman when he came to have his s
uit fitted,’ said Solomon. ‘He recognised a good piece of cloth, and was prepared to pay the price. Not like some.’

  Katz smiled and patted Solomon on the head, as if he were retarded.

  ‘Jake and his boys never mugged old ladies,’ said Myer.

  ‘Listen to him,’ said Jimmy, ‘“Jake”. I’ll bet he calls you Pincus, too.’

  ‘It’s my name,’ said Myer. ‘It would be nice if somebody used it. Even if it was a gangster.’

  Jimmy shook his head like a pony.

  ‘Gangster!’ he said. ‘You call Mendoza a gangster? The Kray twins in London – now they were gangsters.’

  He made gun barrels out of his fingers and fired off two silent shots at Solomon and Katz.

  ‘Their zayde was Jewish,’ said Katz, ‘and he was a fighter. They say he tried to knock out a horse.’

  Katz threw a left hook at an imaginary animal.

  ‘Your breath could knock out a horse,’ said Jimmy. Katz panted on him, heavily and deliberately.

  ‘With the twins in the East End,’ said Myer, who had been to London, ‘you knew you were safe.’

  ‘Your tochis wasn’t safe,’ said Katz.

  ‘Twins?’ said Solomon. ‘He calls them twins? The Schiller twins – now they were twins.’

  He danced around in his seat, thrusting his hips at the table.

  ‘Whoo-hoo!’ said Myer. ‘Were they ever.’

  He bent his right arm at the elbow and wobbled his fist.

  ‘I could’ve had them both,’ said Solomon.

  ‘But you had neither,’ said Katz.

  ‘I got tit off Elsie,’ said Solomon, squeezing the air like a ball between his fingers.

  ‘He got tit when he was fourteen,’ said Katz, ‘and he’s still taking about it today.’

  ‘Listen to you,’ said Solomon. ‘What did you get when you were fourteen? The clap?’

  ‘What’s the clap?’ I asked.

  Solomon clapped his hands.

  ‘It’s what girls do,’ he said, ‘when they see a tiny weenie. They think if they clap, they can make it bigger.’

  I was horrified, but I enjoyed thinking about it.

  The old men’s speech shared a rhythm and tone. After a while, their voices blended into a chorus and I couldn’t separate their words. I thought about Mum and Dad and the Dark Man and the Woman in White. If Mum hadn’t left Dad, he would never have met the Woman in White, who worked as a dental nurse because she liked to strap people to chairs and torture them. Mum must have known Dad would have to find someone new, since he couldn’t even make toast, and that he would cling to the first Jewish woman he met just to keep from dying of starvation, but she hadn’t thought what that might mean for me. For the first few months, when he was lonely and single, I had Dad all to myself. We had to go to the zoo a lot, which was boring, but we also talked about the holidays we would take and the presents he was going to buy me and the pocket money he was going to give me when I stayed at his house, which used to be our house, and which was now their house because the Woman in White had moved in, even though she had her own two-bedroom unit in Bellevue Hill.

  She had drafted a new set of rules for life in their house, including taking off your shoes at the door; keeping the front room for best; washing behind your ears; asking to leave the table; and not listening to the Walkman in bed. This last was the cruellest since, when I went to sleep over for the weekend, after a day of walking in bare feet around the back room with a spotless head, I had to listen to her and Dad bouncing, giggling and squelching on their queen-size bed. At the unit where I was now supposed to live with Mum in Redfern, she and the Dark Man were quieter and more serious in their bedroom, but they went on for longer. At least at my grandmother’s house I could get a good night’s sleep.

  We’d been in the Club since before lunch and it was now nearly time for dinner. Jimmy walked home carefully, sometimes pausing to lean on my shoulder. When we reached the end of his street, he stopped and looked down the empty road.

  ‘Where’ve the elephants gone?’ he asked.

  ‘There weren’t any elephants,’ I said.

  He bit down on his jaw, then tapped his fingers against his thigh, as if his patience were slipping away.

  ‘Digger,’ he said, ‘where-are-the-fucking-elephants?’

  His eyes were burning. He clenched his fists.

  ‘It’s yasumi day for the mahouts,’ I told him.

  Jimmy let his hands relax.

  ‘Ah yes,’ he said. ‘That’d be it.’

  BONDI

  FRIDAY 20 APRIL 1990

  Grandma grilled a mound of toast for breakfast, slices of white bread as thick as books, soaked in salted butter. She passed Jimmy a mug of sweet tea, which he took with both hands. His fingers were shaking.

  ‘One morning I shot an elephant in my pyjamas,’ he said in his Groucho Marx voice. ‘How he got in my pyjamas, I don’t know.’

  Jimmy winked and I knew he was all right again.

  Mum rang, because she was feeling guilty. I answered the phone and Jimmy left the room, because he was pretending she was dead. I asked Mum how she was and she said, ‘Oh, he’s fine. He’s just on his way to work.’

  ‘Who is?’ I asked, although obviously I knew.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’ll tell him.’

  Our conversation clattered. Mum spoke quickly and clearly, as if she were reading from a set of instructions. I tried to trip her with the truth to make her human again.

  She told me the Dark Man had been decorating. ‘He’s very good like that,’ she said, because she knew my dad wasn’t. She asked how were Grandma and Jimmy. I said they’d been arguing about elephants.

  I told Mum I was going on the Anzac Day march with Solomon.

  ‘Solomon Solomons?’ she said. ‘I’m surprised he can still walk.’

  I wished Jimmy would come with us.

  ‘He’ll never go,’ said Mum. ‘He hates the army.’

  She said she had heard from my brother Daniel in Lyon, and he had a new girlfriend.

  ‘He’s just showing off,’ I said. ‘I bet he’s never had any girlfriends.’

  ‘Why are you going on the march anyway?’ asked Mum.

  ‘Because I like war,’ I said.

  (The Rats of Tobruk were my favourite part of the Second World War, although I also enjoyed the Kokoda Track, the atomic bomb and the Holocaust.)

  ‘I’m not sure that’s what Anzac Day’s really about,’ said Mum.

  She told me to wrap up warm because the weather forecaster had said it would be cold, and to take care when I crossed the road. She warned me not listen to everything Jimmy said, especially when he was in his cups. She asked me to tell Grandma she’d phoned and ask her to call her back when Jimmy was out of the house. She told me again that the Dark Man was fine, and blew a kiss down the receiver. As soon as Jimmy heard me hang up, he came back in from the yard.

  ‘That was Mum,’ I told him.

  ‘Another wrong number,’ he said.

  Grandma brought more tea.

  ‘The bath is full again,’ she said. ‘It’s such a waste.’

  ‘Having a bath?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ said Grandma. ‘Not having a bath.’

  ‘It’d use less water than having a bath,’ I said.

  ‘Not if you don’t get in,’ said Grandma.

  ‘You’re talking about nothing,’ said Jimmy.

  ‘I’m talking about you,’ said Grandma, ‘you water pirate.’

  ‘All pirates are water pirates,’ said Jimmy.

  ‘Can’t you talk sense just for once?’ asked Grandma. ‘Why the hell do you keep running the bath?’

  Jimmy wiped the air to brush her away.

  ‘And you dug another hole last night,’ she said.

  ‘I did not,’ said Jimmy.

  She took his hand and led him outside.

  ‘What’s that then?’ she asked, pointing to a burrow near the front step.

  ‘A wombat hole,’ said Ji
mmy.

  ‘You’re the only bloody wombat around here,’ said Grandma.

  She plunged her arm into the hole.

  ‘Watch it, love,’ said Jimmy. ‘They bite.’

  Grandma pulled out a tin of shortbread.

  ‘What’s this?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s a type of unleavened biscuit,’ said Jimmy.

  ‘For God’s sake, Jimmy,’ said Grandma, ‘why did you put it there?’

  ‘Storage,’ said Jimmy.

  ‘It was already in storage in the larder,’ said Grandma.

  ‘It wasn’t safe there,’ said Jimmy.

  ‘Safe from what?’ asked Grandma. ‘Bloody wombats?’

  ‘Thieves,’ said Jimmy eventually. ‘Some of the men, they’re so hungry they can’t help themselves.’

  ‘Which men, Jimmy?’ Grandma asked. ‘Dead men? What is going on in your bald bloody head?’

  She thundered off to put the shortbread back in the pantry, but I heard her sit down at the kitchen table and sob. Jimmy heard it too. He hung his head and pressed his lips together tightly, and his shoulders trembled like his fingers.

  ‘Bastard,’ he whispered to himself. ‘You bastard.’

  He wiped his eyes.

  ‘Go to her,’ he hissed, ‘you bastard.’

  He bent beside Grandma in the kitchen, and spoke into her ear.

  ‘I’m sorry, love,’ he said. ‘I’ll fix everything.’

  She batted him away.

  *

  There was a muffled knock at the front door, like a mallet hitting meat. Grandma peered through the gap in the wood.

  ‘My brother is here,’ she said, ‘with your sister-in-law.’

  Uncle Maurice’s wife Sylvia was my least favourite auntie, although they all got worse as they grew older. She wore horn-rimmed glasses and her hair in a bun, and her husband was a pharmacist, who waddled around with spectacles balanced on his head.

  ‘Hasn’t Daniel grown,’ said Sylvia.

  ‘I’m not Daniel,’ I said, ‘I’m David.’

  She took me by the shoulders and held me at arm’s length.

  ‘Let me look at you,’ she said. ‘Aren’t you tall.’