Spirit House

by Mark Dapin

  ‘And certainly not for ten bucks,’ said Myer.

  He opened his wallet and counted out the notes.

  ‘Lap dancing, they call it,’ he said.

  ‘How would you know?’ asked Katz.

  ‘Cock teasing, I call it,’ said Myer, putting his wallet away.

  ‘Nobody cares what you call it,’ said Jimmy.

  Solomon had his own thoughts.

  ‘Do you know what I remember the most about Izzy Berger?’ he asked.

  ‘The taste of his tochis?’ asked Myer.

  He stuck out his tongue and licked like a lizard at his upper lip.

  ‘The time he managed that singer, Lucky Jack Gold,’ said Solomon.

  Myer swatted at the air, as if an invisible Jack Gold was trying to climb his thigh.

  ‘Lucky by name,’ said Myer, ‘putz by nature.’

  ‘He was in Vietnam,’ said Solomon. ‘There weren’t many yiddisher fellas in Vietnam.’

  ‘It’s a Buddhist country,’ said Katz.

  Jimmy swirled his glass.

  ‘You know what I remember?’ he asked. ‘You were going to make a fortune selling tripods.’

  ‘Tricorns,’ said Solomon.

  His fingers traced three corners around his head.

  ‘Admirals’ hats,’ said Jimmy. ‘Like Lucky Jack wore when he sang “Sail On”.’

  Solomon smiled glumly.

  ‘I wish I’d written that song,’ said Katz.

  ‘You’d’ve written it for Izzy Berger,’ said Jimmy. ‘He stole the publishing rights. So now every time there’s a sale on at schmatta shop, run by a shonky shnayder who’s tone deaf and – for the sake of this illustration – as fat as the bear on a Bundy bottle, and they play Lucky Jack’s “Sail On” over the speakers, it’s another quid in Izzy Berger’s pocket.’

  ‘I’ve still got those tricorns,’ said Solomon. ‘Eight dozen boxes in a warehouse in Surry Hills. I ought to have got Jake to burn it down.’

  ‘Buildings don’t just burn down any more,’ said Katz. ‘Have you noticed that? It used to happen all the time.’

  ‘Everything’s changed,’ said Solomon, ‘and none of it for the better.’

  ‘It’s better that buildings don’t burn down,’ said Katz.

  ‘Not if you’ve got one that’s full of tricorns, it isn’t,’ said Solomon.

  ‘You had them made specially,’ said Jimmy.

  ‘Of course I did,’ said Solomon. ‘There weren’t twenty bloody admirals’ hats in Australia. We’ve only got about twenty bloody admirals.’

  ‘And even they don’t wear those hats,’ said Jimmy.

  ‘No, they bloody don’t,’ agreed Solomon.

  ‘No one does,’ said Jimmy.

  ‘I’ll tell you who does,’ said Solomon. ‘Lucky Jack Gold. And every year, when he needs a new one, he rings me and I send it to him, wherever he is in the world, which is usually some Hashem-forgotten hole like Winton or William Creek. I reckon he’d be about fifty now. If he lives to be one thousand two hundred and twelve, I’ll be shot of all them.’

  ‘Methuselah died at nine hundred and sixty-nine,’ said Katz.

  ‘I’d still have two hundred and forty-three hats left,’ said Solomon.

  ‘Listen to him,’ said Katz, ‘the human calculator.’

  ‘What makes you say he’s human?’ asked Myer.

  ‘He shares some characteristics with human beings,’ said Katz, ‘but has a greater volume and density.’

  The men each emptied their whiskies, then all looked at me, as if it was my shout.

  ‘I’m only thirteen,’ I reminded them.

  ‘I should’ve given you a tricorn for your bar mitzvah,’ said Solomon.

  ‘Maybe you could sell them to the frummers,’ suggested Katz. ‘When they start a navy.’

  ‘He had a voice, but,’ said Myer. ‘Lucky Jack.’

  ‘They should have called him “the Voice”,’ said Katz, ‘instead of “Lucky”.’

  ‘Then Johnny Farnham could’ve been called “Lucky”,’ said Solomon, ‘which would’ve been more appropriate, since that man’s made a career out of a voice that could’ve come out of my tochis.’

  BONDI

  SATURDAY 28 APRIL 1990

  The frummers walked to shule in long, happy families. Although the men wore dark suits, they never looked smart or even tidy. Their beards dribbled like gravy down their white shirts.

  Their wives had skirts down to their ankles, and wigs to cover their heads, since God didn’t like heads any more than their arms. He also didn’t like being called God, which was why they always used Hashem, which means ‘the name’.

  I used to have to go to shule with my dad, but once I’d had my bar mitzvah and become a man, it was my choice whether to keep going, so I didn’t and Dad didn’t either.

  Jimmy, who never went to shule, was sanding down his posts with wetordry paper when Barry Dick, who was off to worship Hashem with his seven housemates, stopped to give the time of day to an elderly Jewish war veteran who had gone soft in the head.

  ‘Not going to the service this morning?’ Barry Dick asked Jimmy.

  ‘At the ashram?’ asked Jimmy.

  ‘You like a joke, Mr Rubens, eh?’ said Barry Dick.

  ‘No,’ said Jimmy, and stared at him.

  Barry Dick turned to me.

  ‘He likes a joke, doesn’t he, Dov?’

  ‘No,’ I said, and stared at him.

  ‘Well,’ said Barry Dick, ‘we can’t all stand around joking together like this. The service is about to start. Good Shabbes.’

  ‘Haribol,’ said Jimmy, which is Hare Krishna for shalom.

  The frummers all left in a line, as if they were about to start dancing with their hands on each other’s shoulders.

  I asked Jimmy what Townsville Jack had done next, and Jimmy went back to rubbing the poles, even though they didn’t need rubbing any more.

  ‘Townsville Jack had the same idea as the officers,’ said Jimmy. ‘He knew the men needed to find something to keep them occupied, but his idea wasn’t so much digging holes as two-up, crown and anchor, and pontoon.

  ‘He seemed to know all about it, so I asked him what he did in civilian life.

  ‘“The same as we’re doing now,” he said.

  ‘“Soldiering?” I asked.

  ‘“No,’ said Townsville Jack, “prisonering.”

  ‘There were a couple of fellas who tried to stand over blokes in the early days,’ said Jimmy. ‘They were hard men from the bush, who’d been starved off the land. They blamed the Jews, because they thought Jews owned the banks that’d foreclosed on them. One of them was Quilpie, and he wasn’t a bad bloke; the other, Bargo, was a bastard.

  ‘The two of them pushed Katz around a bit, stole his brushes and held them to ransom. They called it “jewing” him.

  ‘He was trying to snatch them back when Townsville Jack strolled up with his big hands in his pockets and asked what the blue was about. “We’re all Aussies,” he said, “we don’t want to fight among ourselves. Save it for the real enemy – the Poms.”

  ‘“He’s not an Aussie,” said Quilpie. “He’s a Hebrew. They started this war.”

  ‘Townsville Jack put on a stern face, turned it towards Katz and said, “Is that the good griff, sport? Did you start the war?”

  ‘“I didn’t,” said Katz, which was a bloody miracle, since that contrary bastard would put his hand up for anything.

  ‘“You’ve got the wrong bloke,’” said Townsville Jack to Quilpie. “Try one of those little yellow fellas in the IJA camp.”

  ‘“What’s it got to do with you, Townsville Jack?” asked Bargo.

  ‘But Townsville Jack had done a bit in the Old Tin Shed and he knew the only way to finish first was to get in first, so he lifted his hands with his palms turned towards Bargo, as if he were trying to back off, then rolled his right into a fist and knocked the bastard down.

  ‘We both kept an eye on Katz after that. It made us f
eel good to look out for someone else, like we could still be useful. We were always checking he was okay, and that meant we spent less time thinking about ourselves and how we weren’t okay. I’d thought that carrying a putz like Katz would make us weaker, but it did the opposite. We were frightened for him and that made us fearless for ourselves.

  ‘But Bargo and Quilpie were wary of us – well, of Townsville Jack, anyway – so they left Katz alone. Besides, we were living off a rice-flour bun and two bowls of rice a day. We needed all our energy for fetching water and chopping wood and going on bloody parade. No bloke was going to wear himself out fighting.

  ‘Bargo and Quilpie moved from standover to the black market, and they recruited Bathurst Billy, who was so short he might’ve walked under the wire. He could squeeze himself into any hiding place and scurry up a tree like a bloody monkey, and after a couple of months he disappeared from our barracks completely. I don’t know where he was sleeping. In a shoebox, probably.

  ‘Most of the POWS had a bit of money left over from their pay,’ said Jimmy, ‘or a pen or a watch they’d sold to the Japs. Townsville Jack started up a couple of card schools and a regular two-up game, but he reckoned frog racing was going to make his fortune. You see, Townsville Jack never stopped trying to make his fortune.

  ‘Before I realised it, I was partnered up with him. I was his cockatoo, watching out for officers or other kinds of Japs. One day I had to run the poker game myself, because Townsville Jack had volunteered for a working party. Nobody wanted to go out with this gang because it didn’t look like there’d be a dog’s chance of scrounging a bone. It was our own officers’ idea: the blokes were supposed to collect saltwater from Changi Beach, so the salt might make the rice taste like something you ate, instead of something you grouted with, but Townsville Jack didn’t give a bugger what the rice tasted like because he wasn’t eating it anyway. He got all his tucker on the black market. The only reason he went out was to find some frogs. When he got back, he was dying to show me them. He called them “our” frogs, which made me a bit wary. He kept our frogs under his bunk in a bucket, fed them on bugs and called that “training”.

  ‘In Changi you could find somebody who knew something about anything. Townsville Jack had met a gunner they called “Professor Scaly”, who’d studied amphibian biology, and he identified Townsville Jack’s stable as mangrove frogs. He didn’t think much would come of Townsville Jack’s plan of marking out a track and having them chase each other to the finish, because he didn’t believe mangrove frogs understood competition or the idea of a straight line. He said we’d have to fence off an individual lane for each frog, to encourage them to move forward.

  ‘Townsville Jack wanted to know how he could identify a winning frog. I think at that stage he had a plan to breed them off a stud. Professor Scaly said he didn’t think there’d be much variation between them, but the biggest would be the strongest and the strongest would probably finish first, assuming you could get them going at all. Frogs aren’t known for much else apart from hopping, but they don’t even do a lot of that. Your average mangrove frog likes to sit in the swamp and catch bugs on his tongue. He doesn’t harbour bloody sporting ambitions. We ran a couple of trials, and three out of six frogs just sat where they landed.

  ‘Townsville Jack was a bit dark on Professor Scaly’s abilities as a frog handicapper, but he kept him on retainer as a steward. We held race meetings every Tuesday and Thursday night on a track that Townsville Jack said was “specially designed by an expert in the field”. He meant it was half-a-dozen lanes pegged out over a ten-foot distance, with barriers made from blokes’ shirts stretched between bamboo poles.

  ‘Townsville Jack turned up with a white tote bag, which he had carried with him all the way from Australia, through the fighting and on the march to Changi. He was an incredible bloke, really. He didn’t let the war get in his way, he just carried on like nothing had changed.

  ‘Each frog had a number painted on its back, and the stable was divided into two year olds and three year olds, according to size. I remember the first real race, before we’d got the rules properly sorted out. Each frog had its own steward whose job was to hold the animal until the start. They all let go at the same time, but none of the frogs hopped more than once. The stewards shouted at them and threw mud and stones, and sometimes the frogs would jump to the side, to get out of the way of the rocks, but there was bugger all anyone could do to persuade them to move forward. Blokes got down on their hands and knees and crawled behind the frogs, slapping the ground, trying to beat them out like game birds.

  ‘We had to outlaw projectiles, use a bit of frog psychology and put something on the finish line that the frogs would want to reach. So we dug a little dam and filled it with waste water and had them jump towards that. It still wasn’t much of a spectacle – some of the races took five minutes – but it wasn’t as if we had to compete with the cinema or anything.

  ‘Blokes loved the frog racing, and it was good for morale – if you won, or if you were Townsville Jack. A few fellas used to complain that Townsville Jack was switching frogs but, truth be told, Townsville Jack couldn’t tell one frog from another and he didn’t give a monkey’s arsehole. He was making easy money, and the whole business kept us as occupied as bloody Singapore.

  ‘Meanwhile Sergeant Major Ramsay was always trying to re-enroll Townsville Jack in the war effort. I remember Ramsay asking him, “You think of yourself as a fighting man, don’t you, soldier?”

  ‘“No,” said Townsville Jack, “I think of myself as a bookmaker.”

  ‘“I don’t mean fighting in the sense of running around the battlefield in uniform,” said Ramsay.

  ‘“You mean fighting in the sense of setting the odds on frog races?” asked Townsville Jack.

  ‘“I mean the old one-two,” said Ramsay, and shadowboxed a jab and cross. “A bit of mixing it up, eh? A choke here, a rabbit punch there, a knee to the niagaras . . .’

  ‘“What’re you talking about?” asked Townsville Jack.

  ‘“The old man wants to train a few tough blokes in hand-to-hand combat,” he said.

  ‘“The blue’s over,” said Townsville Jack. “We lost. And we gave the Nips our guns.”

  ‘“That’s precisely why we need to know how to use our bare hands,” said Ramsay.

  ‘But Townsville Jack already knew everything he needed to know about fighting the Nips, which was that it’s a mug’s game without air cover, so he wasn’t going to get excited about bear hugs and wristlocks.

  ‘Townsville Jack treated the war as an interruption to business. He had to change his operating methods to get around the obstacle, but there was no reason to shut up shop. It was different for me and most of the other blokes. We felt humiliated, demoralised, resentful. I had black moods. And I was hungry, like every other bugger.

  ‘The fellas started to get beri-beri. It made their breasts swell up like sheilas’. Then their bellies bloated with hunger and they looked like they were up the bloody duff.

  ‘I was fit and healthy, but sick about Mei-Li. It was tough for the blokes who’d left their wives and girlfriends at home, but the worst thing that could happen was they’d end up in bed with a Yank. As far as I knew, Mei-Li was still in Singapore with the Japs.

  ‘I joined a work detail to the docks. We skirted the rickshaw men’s house by a couple of streets, and all I saw was Chinese heads on poles. Our guard told us they were looters. “Thieves and communists,” he said. Their eyes were still, but they followed me all the way back to bloody Australia.

  ‘The blokes on salt parties had seen bodies washed up on the beach, and we knew the Japs were taking the Chinese out on boats, tying them up and shooting them, then drowning them just to make sure.

  ‘There was a bloke on the docks detail called Snowy White. He was one of the toothless and ruthless, the fat and bloody useless. He’d been to war before and he tried to see the Japs’ point of view. He wanted to understand them so he could anticipate t
hem, and deal with them like anyone else.

  ‘“This isn’t indiscriminate murder,” said Snowy. “They’re not cutting babies out of their mothers’ wombs. They’ve learned from their mistakes in Nanking. They know they’ve got the boongs on side, so they’re not going to chop all their heads off, are they? But they also know there’s always going to be a few diehard resisters, so they’re tracking them down and eliminating them. They’re torturing them, yes – nobody’s saying they’ve turned into white men – but they’re doing it to send a message to all the other boongs: ‘Behave and we’ll treat you well, because all us slopes are in this together. Step out of line and we’ll chop you into little pieces like we’ve done these few blokes who were all troublemakers and commos, so don’t get any ideas yourselves.’ ”

  ‘“It’s commonsense,” said Snowy. “It’s not sadism.”

  ‘I was training frogs with Townsville Jack – which just meant looking at them, really, and talking about them – when Katz came over to our billet to paint our living conditions. He asked Townsville Jack if he could paint the frogs, but Townsville Jack said they were secret and vital to the war effort (on the morale side of things) but earbashed Katz for half an hour about being an artist. Townsville Jack wasn’t sure why the war needed to be painted, but Katz told him he’d been instructed to draw it as well. We were sure to batter the Nips, he said, once they realised we had superior draughtsmanship.

  ‘Townsville Jack was just a bookmaker at heart. He wasn’t interested in buying and selling. But he got the griff that a fella called Keneally would give good money for one of his frogs. Townsville Jack couldn’t figure out why, because you could just pick them up in the swamps around the beach. But Keneally was willing to trade this one frog for a torch, which Townsville Jack needed to light his way to the dunnies at night.

  ‘Keneally was after frog number eight, which meant bugger all to Townsville Jack, who painted a different number on each animal every time they raced. But Professor Scaly pulled it out of the stable and passed it on to Keneally, who gave Townsville Jack the torch (which, if I remember rightly, ended up being swapped with a Dutchman for a jar of chilli paste).