by Mark Dapin
‘Callaghan told anyone who paraded sick to get out of his unit, anyone who wanted to take it easy to get out of his unit. He gave us all a thousand chances to get out of his unit, and I’ve cursed myself a thousand times for not taking them. But the last time Callaghan opened the door, Moishe picked up his kitbag and walked through it. He’d had enough of all the infantry bullshit, and he’d got this idea that he was going to be a commando. I knew I wasn’t good enough to join him, so I stayed behind with Bathurst Billy. The funny thing is, all of us made the wrong decision – and how do you explain that?’
It was strange to hear Jimmy talk for so long, without jokes or gee-ups, and without even a drink in his hand. It was like he was reciting a book he had learned by heart. Sometimes he had to close his eyes to imagine the words on the page, but for the next half-hour he held the same steady, marching pace.
‘We finished our training in Bathurst, where we had to get up at half past four in the morning to have our tents ready for inspection. You had to make your bloody bed like a housemaid if you were one of Callaghan’s puppies. It’s funny, really, when you think we ended up sleeping on bamboo platforms, that they spent weeks teaching us how to keep the corners of our blankets square. We’d’ve been better off learning how to yodel.
‘Bathurst Billy had lied about his age to get into the army. He was the smallest bloke in the unit – you could carry him around in your kitbag – but he was a vicious little scrapper. We learned how to polish our boots, to shine them until we could see our faces on the toes. “I’d like to see Callaghan’s face on my toes,” said Bathurst Billy, but we stuck with it because we knew we were turning into soldiers and that’s what we’d signed up for.
‘“Polish your fucking boots,”’ said Jimmy. ‘We spent three years of the war in bare feet.’
He looked down at his slippers.
‘Finally they reckoned we were good enough soldiers to die,’ he said, ‘and we got our orders to ship out. We came down from Bathurst on a troop train marked Berlin or Bust. It was bloody bust all right. I didn’t see a single German the whole war.
‘At the docks we were told we had to embark like perfect soldiers. Any man who smoked, or drank, or even fell out of bloody line, wouldn’t be allowed to leave. We could’ve saved ourselves with a cigarette, most of us.
‘But the band played “There’ll Always be an England”, and we climbed aboard the transport ship with our kitbags and our slouch hats, and bits of useless baggage like greatcoats and officers – all ready to chase Fritz around the pyramids. After a few days at sea they told us we were steaming for Singapore and Malaya. I was twenty years old, and I didn’t even know where Malaya was. Bathurst Billy found it on a map. He said, “If I were the Nips, I’d come down from the north.” But the army got the good griff that they’d land in Singapore and fight their way up, which was a bit of luck, since Singapore was an impregnable fortress. When the Japs came knocking at the door, they’d get the shock of their lives. The Royal Navy had total command of the sea. And the Japs weren’t a sea-faring race, Blind Freddy could see that. They didn’t know their arse from their elbow. They couldn’t tell up from down.
‘There was a lot of excitement about race in those days. The Anglo-Saxon race was supposed to be good at some things – sport, war and heroism, for instance – the Asiatics had their own talents, like brothel keeping, swindling and shirking; and the boongs were good at nothing.
‘When we got to Singapore our officers told us everything we needed to know about the Japanese race. They were five feet tall, half-blind with slitty eyes and great big teeth. They couldn’t fly planes, were too small to be any use in a blue, couldn’t see in the dark, and couldn’t aim a rifle because they couldn’t close one eye.
‘Someone said they sounded like Bathurst Billy, and Bathurst Billy backhanded him so hard that he fell onto a steel rail and knocked himself out. It was true, though; the Japs were an army of bloody Bathurst Billys.
‘The officers said they were a surly, savage style of mob, who’d been flogging the Chinese in Manchuria on and off since the nineteenth century. If anything, the Chinks were even lower than the Nips, commos to a man. But the rub was, Singapore was chockers with Chinese and we would have to defend them along with all the good stuff – rubber planters, buildings and loyal Malays and Indians. I learned a lot from the officers, but not one bloody word of it was any bloody use.
‘We got settled into our camps in Singapore and went around the place having a bit of drink – not that I used to drink in those days – while we waited for the war to find us. None of the Sydney boys had ever felt that kind tropical jungle heat, or smelled ginger in the air, and rotten fruit and Chinese cabbage and roasting pork under clouds of bloody jasmine. There were Chinamen pulling rickshaws over bridges like beasts. The coolies used to squat by the kerb, in their straw hats and ponytails, picking rice out of their bowls with chopsticks. The first time I saw them, I thought they were sheilas doing their knitting.
‘Me and Bathurst Billy decided to take a captain cook at the Raffles Hotel. Even the blokes who’d never been out of Sydney had heard of the Raffles. We stood outside and watched the rubber planters and officers file in for tiffin. We weren’t allowed in. The planters treated us like boongs. I had to check in the mirror sometimes to make sure I was still a white man. We were like some new kind of servant for them, and they didn’t like to see us out of barracks.
‘I met a lot of planters in the war, David, and I wouldn’t care if I never met another one. Some of them were tough blokes, some were weak as piss, but not one of them ever planted a single bloody thing. They were slavedrivers, really, but they fancied themselves as thinkers. They had theories about the boongs, theories about the Chinks, theories about the poor bloody Tamils. Their theory about the Japs was that they’d never dare to attack Singapore.
‘One afternoon me and Bathurst Billy were supposed to be delivering some papers to an officer who was having drinks at the cricket club. There didn’t seem to be much of a hurry, so we stopped to watch girls in a tea house when a Chinese funeral passed by, with a carved coffin on a horse and cart and the Chinese wailing and burning incense and banging cymbals, and I thought to myself, We’re in a different kind of place now. This is where I’ll grow up.
‘I felt like a man for the first time, sitting there in my slouch hat, with my little mate across the table and my rifle at my side.’
I tried to imagine Jimmy as a young bloke, to take off his glasses, scribble hair across his head and smooth out the deep lines around his nose and mouth. We had the same mint-cream eyes, flat cheeks, pointed chin and sandy skin. He could’ve been me, all those years ago. What would I have done with a rifle? Shot off my toes, probably, or sat on it and broke it. I wished I had a mate called Billy who I could trust with my life, instead of a friend named Ari who had stolen my pencil case in Year Four.
Jimmy looked at his heavy watch.
‘I’ve got to go for my tests,’ he said.
*
As he grew older, Jimmy coughed harder and slept less. There were things broken in his body that had never been mended after the war, so he was always having tests. I thought of rows of multiple-choice questions, where he had to circle a letter between A and D. Jimmy had used the same doctor since 1947, Emmanuel Feingold of Potts Point, who was also known for playing ‘Hava Nagila’ on the spoons at WIZO charity nights. Manny the Spoons had big rotten yellow teeth, a doctor without a dentist. I had known him since he’d made me have my tonsils out when I was five years old, and I hated waiting in his surgery with the women’s magazines and the clean-toilet smell.
‘There’s no need to sit outside,’ said Jimmy. ‘You can go and keep Katz company. He’s got no mates.’
On the way to the railway station Jimmy stopped to speak to a man with a white stick and a lemon dog. They talked about how it used to be drier in April. The blind man thought the weather had got worse since the Beatles.
‘He used to drink at the Club,’ Jimmy told me.
Jimmy knew the kind of people you didn’t notice, men who sat in booths and kiosks, or rollered the oval or ticketed cars. He bought me a Coke from a convenience store. The owner asked after Frida. (‘He used to drink in the Tea Gardens,’ said Jimmy.) At the ticket office at Bondi Junction, where Jimmy showed his pension card, the railwayman asked if he had any tips for Randwick.
As we waited on the platform, Jimmy chatted to an Aborigine in a Akubra carrying a didgeridoo wrapped in tape. (‘He used to drink in the street,’ said Jimmy.) The train arrived and we breathed the sweat of its brakes. The carriage was warm but not crowded. I never knew where to look on trains. I didn’t like to stare at people because I didn’t want them to think I was weird, but I didn’t want them imagining I was scared either. I usually focused on their necks or their knees. All the kids were plugged into their Walkmans, while adults read the back pages of their neighbour’s newspaper. Only the old fellas tried to catch each other’s eye, to start a yarn about the days when the sun always shone.
A Fijian giant inspected our tickets at the barrier at Kings Cross.
‘Can I see your pension card, sir,’ he said to Jimmy.
‘Are you blind as well as black?’ asked Jimmy.
The Fijian laughed.
‘Go through, you bald bastard,’ he said, ‘and keep your hands off the hookers or you’ll give yourself a heartie.’
(‘He used to work the door at the Beach Hotel.’)
Up until a few years before, Jimmy had drank with friends all over the Eastern Suburbs, but now he didn’t like to pay hotel prices. He hated the Hakoah because no one ever ordered a beer, and he said he didn’t want to be surrounded by Jews, although he always was. His night-time world was the Club, which grew emptier every year, like a milk bar that never restocked because it was always about to close down.
Jimmy was late for his appointment with Manny the Spoons, so he pressed the buzzer on the tall iron gates of Katz’s apartment block then hurried down to Victoria Street. Katz and a locked courtyard, across the street from the El Alamein Fountain. He opened his door wearing a long Chinese robe, like the waitress at the Thai Dee. Jimmy had warned me that all artists were faygelem.
Katz always looked paler outside the Club, before his cheeks were flushed by beer and the dancing lights of the pokies. In his living room were shelves of books and LPs, a guitar, a saxophone and a flute, a typewriter and a stack of closely typed papers, but no easel or paints.
‘They’re in a cupboard somewhere,’ said Katz. ‘I more or less gave up painting when I came back from Singapore. Once you’ve been a war artist, you’ve already painted everything.’
‘What is a war artist?’ I asked him.
‘A liability,’ said Katz. ‘A dead weight. A mouth to feed. A bludger.’
‘How do you get to be one?’
He laughed.
‘I was appointed by the art committee of the Australian War Memorial,’ he said. ‘They liked me because I’d won the Archibald Prize for my first proper portrait, and I was a realist painter, who described the world as they saw it – not one of these commo modernists. They were strange men, looking for a role in the war, and I guess I was too.’
‘Did you have a rank?’ I asked him.
‘I had an honorary commission as a captain,’ said Katz, ‘but no military training and no gun. I used to wear my tunic with a red cravat, and a beret instead of a slouch hat. We had funny ideas about what an artist should look like in those days. You didn’t get to see many of them in Balmain.’
Katz pulled open a drawer and showed me a painting of a head shaped like a balloon, with dark eyes and no front teeth. It was sharp and detailed, like a photograph.
‘That’s my father,’ said Katz. ‘The fruit man. He saw me off to war with a bag of oranges.’
A notebook lay open on Katz’s table, next to a cup full of pens and pencils and brushes.
‘I’m writing my diary,’ he said.
‘Can I read it?’ I asked.
‘No,’ said Katz, closing the cover.
He nodded to himself, then cleared the table for the checkers board. We played six games in silence. He beat me four-two. Either I’d got a lot worse at checkers, or he’d let me win when I was younger.
Jimmy returned from the doctor.
‘How were your tests?’ asked Katz.
‘I must’ve done well,’ said Jimmy. ‘They’ve invited me back next week.’
*
‘Let’s walk,’ Jimmy said to me. ‘I need to get my circulation going again.’
We got as far as the Kings Cross Hotel, on the corner of William Street.
‘Do you want a drink?’ he asked.
‘I’m only thirteen,’ I said.
‘I was apprenticed at thirteen,’ said Jimmy.
We popped into the bar for a schooner of Old and a middy of lemonade.
‘What did the doctor really say?’ I asked.
‘“Hava na-bloody-gila,”’ said Jimmy. ‘What do you bloody think?’
‘You were telling me about the war,’ I said.
‘Was I?’ asked Jimmy.
‘You were in Singapore,’ I reminded him. ‘Sitting in a café with your gun.’
Jimmy looked over the lip of his glass and out onto Darlinghurst Road, as if he might see something on the strip that would remind him of those days.
‘We weren’t usually allowed to take our guns into the city,’ he said eventually, ‘in case it upset the planters with the idea there might be a war coming, but we had to carry them that day because we were on duty.’
He took a sip from his beer.
‘You never know,’ he said, ‘when you’re going to wake up to the day that changes your life. A rickshaw coolie came running up to Bathurst Billy and me, his little legs going fifty to the dozen, and said, “You want jig-a-jig, Tommy?”
‘He was barefoot, wearing blue shorts and a ragged shirt like all the other coolies, but he looked different from the rest because he had a kelpie-chewed Akubra instead of a straw hat. He asked where we were from. We told him we were Aussies. He said all the girls in Singapore loved the Aussies, and rickshaw men knew all the most beautiful girls.
‘“Are you from Townsville?” he asked. “Townsville is the capital city of Australia.”
‘“First I’ve heard of it,” I said.
‘“The men of Townsville are kings,” he said. “You want jig-a-jig? Chandu? Have you ever had a Chinese girl? They do whatever you want. They never answer back.”
‘I always liked a sheila who answered back, but I could see Bathurst Billy was ready to go. “How about it, Jimmy?” he asked. “Want to show these sheilas what a real Aussie’s made of?” So we climbed into the cab.
‘“My name’s Frank,” said the rickshaw man. “Pleased to meet you.”
‘“Are there many Chinamen called Frank?” I asked.
‘“I am the only one,” he said.
‘“You speak good English, Frank,” I said.
‘“I taught myself,” he said. “I made myself up.”
‘“He means he’s a self-made man,” said Bathurst Billy, laughing, but that wasn’t what Chinese Frank meant at all.’
When Jimmy told his story, he was like a troupe of actors reading a play. Bathurst Billy had a high, lilting voice; Chinese Frank spoke quickly, but stumbled over his words. Jimmy gave his characters bodies too. He could shrink himself for Bathurst Billy and grow tall and stiff for Callaghan. He would even do climates, squinting in imaginary sunshine to show a hot day in Singapore. When Tamworth was cold, he hugged himself to keep warm. Fear widened his eyes, confidence strengthened his jaw, parades straightened his back. He bent at the waist to show Chinese Frank dragging his cart.
‘The rickshaw man pulled off,’ said Jimmy, ‘and straight-away I knew something was wrong.
‘“Lavender Street’s the other direction,” I said, but Chinese Frank had suddenly forgotten how to speak English.
‘He galloped off the main road and into a s
ide street that led to an alley that ran by a drain that went under a bridge.
‘“Lavender Street no good,” said Chinese Frank. “I know a better place. Young girls fresh from China.”
‘“That’s what we want,” said Bathurst Billy.
‘The street where he took us was crowded with rickshaws and rickshaw men. Their laundry hung on poles from their windows. He led us into a three-storey shophouse that smelled of sweat and rubber, cabbage and congee. We walked through a stonemason’s workshop, where a Chinaman with huge arms was carving an inscription onto a tombstone, and another rickshaw man was mending a tyre in the doorway. I remember two bony coolies sleeping in a huddle on the steps, rib to rib like the teeth of a hairgrip. Details like that, they stick in your mind. We came to a door on the second floor and Chinese Frank tapped once and then twice. The door opened slowly, as another coolie man answered. We were surrounded by rickshaw men.
‘“What’s going on?” asked Bathurst Billy. “Where are the girls?”
‘“Girls coming soon,” said Chinese Frank. “You want chandu?”
‘A thin, brown-skinned rickshaw man smeared in oil passed Bathurst Billy a pipe, and we smoked opium together, lying on a mat on the floor. There was bugger all in the room bar an opium lamp, a cracked tea pot, a nest of yellow cups and a huddle of red blankets.
‘“It’s a queer style of cathouse that doesn’t have any beds,” said Bathurst Billy.
‘The chandu made me feel loose and happy and free. I knew we were in a rickshaw men’s house. I knew they were going to try to roll us. I saw Chinese Frank didn’t take the pipe. But we were twice their size – well, I was anyway – and we had the guns. This was the kind of adventure we’d come to Singapore to find, the kind you couldn’t have in Sydney – not until your little mate Jake Mendoza took over the Cross, anyway.
‘The door opened again and these two Chinese sheilas came in. I was quite surprised because I wasn’t expecting we’d see any girls. Chinese Frank introduced them as Mei-Li and Lim and said they didn’t speak any English, which was why they couldn’t answer back.
‘The rickshaw men left the room and Mei-Li lay down beside me on the floor and we started to kiss. I pushed at her clothes, but she wouldn’t take them off. I looked over at Bathurst Billy and Lim, and they weren’t even touching. It was like neither of them knew what to do.