Ten Pound Pom

by Griffiths, Niall

  –To do what with?

  –Anything you like, I suppose. You don’t ever see the person, just their arse. Backside Alley.

  –This true?

  –Well, it’s what I heard. You hear all kinds of stories about these places.

  I drink more. Early hours, in a taxi, and the cabbie says:

  –Where you boys go now? Hotel?

  –To sleep, yeh. Knackered. Flew in from London the UK today.

  –I take you boys somewhere.

  –Where?

  –Special place. Very special place.

  –What, a club?

  –No club, no. Better. Special place – Four Floor Whore!

  –What?

  –Four Floor Whore!

  I turn around in my seat and my brother’s laughing.

  –D’you hear that? It exists!

  The cabbie laughs with us and shouts: –I am fifty-five!

  We go back and sleep. My sleep is deep and dreamless. Up, shower, coffee, wander, Buddhist temple, cab to Raffles Hotel for the lunch buffet. Another Singapore legend; I’d heard a lot about it. Travellers’ tales. Always wanted to try it. By all accounts, the Raffles lunch buffet is spectacular. It’s named after Sir Stamford Raffles, who founded Singapore in 1819, and it hosted its first guest in 1887 when, owned by the Sarkies brothers from America, it was ‘basically a commodious bungalow’, to quote William Warren’s Raffles Remembered. It was extended in 1890, with the opening of the Suez Canal. Somerset Maugham visited, as did Noel Coward, Charlie Chaplin, other luminaries. Occupied by the Japanese during the Second World War but re-opened for business in 1946. The Singapore Sling was, apparently, invented in the Long Bar, probably in 1915, by a Hainanese bartender called Ngiam Tong Boon, whose adept hand I’d like to warmly shake. The hotel is all balconies and fragrant courtyards and grand ballrooms and marble balustrades and tinkling water features and by Christ it’s posh. Sepia photographs show famous personages and colonial types in white suits and pith helmets and handlebar moustaches. How did they stand this heat, dressed like that? Much dabbing of empinkened brows with silken handkerchiefs went on, I imagine. Much spluttering too, no doubt. Tight white gaberdine buttoned up snug to the extravagantly bewhiskered thrapple in 80% humidity. I can almost hear the harrumphing. I say, Carstairs! What is it, Carruthers? Tell Gunga Din to fetch another gin, there’s a good chap.

  Forty shops in the arcade. Souvenirs and collectibles and gourmet food, that type of thing. I buy a notebook whose pages are watermarked with a stylised drawing of a louche bespatted fellow holding a cocktail glass with the words ‘RAFFLES HOTEL – THE ONLY PLACE TO ENJOY A SINGAPORE SLING’ beneath. And the buffet, God, the buffet… you pay your fifty-two dollars – about twenty quid –and are ushered into a cavernous room cooled by fans and assailed by smells and colours and the dash of diners and cooks. It’s incredible. You pick up a plate and wander and fill it, eat, wander and re-fill, wander and re-fill, until you’re a balloon. Half lobsters. Oysters and writhing sushi. Roast duck and kimchi. Roast lamb and spuds, beef stew, carrots, green beans, mashed potato and gravy for those who want to do a rainy British Sunday in the tropics. Curried pumpkin soup, pork loin, crab claws, ratatouille and goat’s cheese pasta, smoked salmon, prawns, braised lamb shank, twenty different kinds of bread, runny and socky French cheeses. Literally hundreds of dishes, and you can try them all, as often as you want, for your initial plate fee, for as long as your guts hold out. All you have to buy is the drinks. And the puds! Tiny little artworks of chocolate and sponge and candied fruit and laceworked spun sugar. Large spikey fruits and odd nuts I don’t recognise. It’s brilliant. It’s tremendous. It’s wonderful. Apparently a tiger was shot beneath the pool table in 1902; he’d probably come in for the buffet. I could stay here for ever.

  I am loving Singapore. That food and the heat insisted on a siesta, and sliming heavily back to the hotel I realised that my blue shirt was now zebra-striped with streaks of dried salt. From the sweat. A new one was needed, but the sizes were designed for Asian morphology, so even the XXL sizes equated to a British M; that is, for me, nipple-outliningly tight. I buttoned one up in the department-store changing-room and looked at myself in the mirror and could see, distressingly delineated, everything I’d just eaten at Raffles. Deeply unpleasant. I take it off and return it to the shop-girl.

  –Too small still, I say. –Need big, big! Like a tent!

  I find one, eventually, a short-sleeved billowing green thing which also, by that evening, sports foully fancy white stripes. Had it been black, I’d be looking like a piano keyboard. That night we end up in Little India, dirty and hectic and frantic and cheap and brilliant, worlds away from the skyscrapers and malls of the city centre. In the Prince o’ Wales bar, the Cwrw Felinfoel y ddraig goch is up on the wall. The barmaid tells me that her boss is an Aussie of Welsh heritage; ‘name Davies, his’. She asks me where I’m from, where I was born: ‘Ah, you scouser!’ There’s a shelf of well-thumbed paperbacks by the door and I scan it and find a copy of my third novel and an anthology containing an extract from my second; next to my name on the contents page, someone had ticked it with biro and written ‘YES!’

  Singapore gets better and better. I’m loving Singapore. This is going to be a good trip, I think, the food and the booze and the colours and the sounds and revisiting my self thirty years ago, meeting my own ghost, childhood me, on the other side of the planet, those formative years and would I recognise that place or that boy growing up 12,000 miles from his home? Will I know his voice, should I hear him speak? The roots of the neuroses and obsessions that burn in this boy, now just past forty, will I see them? And if I do, will I know what they are? Around a booze-bath in Singapore’s Little India, beneath a shelf bending with books with my name on some of them, a kind of delirium sets in and the planet contracts and expands as if it’s taking deep breaths, as if it’s tired, and I grow dizzy with discovery and possibility and every cell seems to hum in anticipation and I make for the riverside and drink still more in the salted haze and go back to the hotel and sleep and I’m liking Singapore very very much and then I get up and look at the ash still there on the railing and then I fly to Brisbane.

  THEN

  The ground isn’t moving right. All those hours in the sky and the solid ground now feels to the boy like water, wobbling and unsteady, unable to be trusted. More heat, close and wet and heavy on his face. He’s gone beyond tiredness, and confusion; it’s as if all will and volition has left him and he is allowing himself to be steered and directed, his only response obedient indifference. This is Australia. He’s in Oz. He drifts through the airport with his family and picks up luggage and gets into a minibus that will take him to the Immigration Hostel. On the bus, he meets a friendly, bearded Scottish biker called Stuart, and a large, round, pink man called Tudor George who bangs his head getting into the van and yells: ‘Oo!’ The boy’s mother speaks to Tudor. Tells him that she doesn’t feel as if she’s in Australia and Tudor agrees:

  –No, no. It hasn’t quite hit me yet.

  He says this with such jowly seriousness that the boy cannot help but laugh. Tudor and Stuart will, later, be allocated lodgings together, and each night Stuart will tell the adults in the shared kitchen how Tudor repeatedly tries to climb into bed or the shower with him.

  –Ehs hamesick, eh sais. Tells ays ehs hamesick. Ah jist wish eh’d leave ehs alaine.

  They are taken to Yungaba, the Immigration Hostel, a sprawling colonial-style building beneath a giant clanking steel bridge on Kangaroo Point, a mile or two out of Brisbane city centre, across the river. Whitewash and balconies and large-leafed plants and ferns and big loud flowers that make the boy think of dinosaurs. Strange bird and animal noises, whoopings, in this thick vegetation. Dripping heat. Their accommodation is an apartment with very high ceilings and partition walls that do not reach those ceilings and it is strange and big and echoey and very un-cosy. Mosquito nets can be unrolled from a box above the headboard to cover the beds but the boy will
like that; it’ll be like sleeping in a cave, or like being a spider in a web. Outside their block is a huge tree in which the boy’s brother discovers an embedded Chinese throwing star. By that tree is a little kitchenette where the British and Irish adults will gather of an evening to eat toast and complain. Huge fruitbats fly over at dusk; the boy and his siblings count them, one night, and reach 250. There are lizards, and birds, of astonishing colours. Yungaba used to be a convent. Mince on toast, or ‘shit on a shingle’ as the Americans call it, is served for breakfast. The frightening matron hovers to deter people from second helpings and ensures that, during the day, while the men are out working, the ladies get to eat steak, while the men get pumpkin in the evening. The canteen’s resident cleaner is from Liverpool and is called Thickbroom. That’s his real name. The children quickly discover that fun can be had on clothes-lines; they’re not simply cords strung between two fixed points, these are inverted pyramid-like structures, the likes of which they’ve never seen before, which can be hung on and spun. And they can be broken. And the shouting matron can be fled from, with much excited laughter.

  The boy and his siblings settle in quite quickly. Children do – they have the knack of shrinking the world, of living entirely in the moment. It is discovered that empty soda bottles lifted from behind the nearby pub can be exchanged for money at the general store and one day they take in a bottle filled with large aggressive ants which scatter in their hundreds over the counter into the sweet display and the shopkeeper in his apron bellows at the children:

  –Gerraht of it yer little pommie berstards!

  More fleeing. The boy now needs to go to another shop to buy his Snowflakes; crumbly white chocolate in a shell of milk chocolate. Maybe with desiccated coconut on; the man the boy will grow into will be unable to recall.

  The ants, and in fact the insects in general, fascinate the boy. Yungaba has a room with a ping-pong table in it and the boy is delightfully appalled to see the sea of scarpering cockroaches flee from the turned-on light in this room. Sometimes he and his friends dare each other to walk across this room in the darkness, to feel and hear the crunch underfoot, the tickling on their legs. And there’s a spider, a palm-sized spider which lays its eggs on a leaf of the throwing-star tree; every day, the boy checks up on this spider to see if the eggs have hatched, until a local worker, Bluey, gleefully burns the egg sac with his lighter while his mates encourage him and laugh and the spider drops and scuttles into the grass and as boots stamp that grass the boy runs upstairs into his apartment and sits on his bed and cries for the spider and her never-to-be-born babies. He’ll never forget the hysterical mob-mentality which accompanied the burning of the spider’s eggs; the ugly joy and the base encouraging. Burn the fahkin eggs, Bluey! He’s learning lessons, the boy.

  A ferry takes people from Kangaroo Point over to the city several times a day. It’s a brief journey; ten minutes or so. Less. The city is close; a good catapult could hurl a stone from Kangaroo Point through one of the windows in the skyscrapers that are shooting up, on one of which the boy’s father is working. From the mud beneath the jetty, usually at dusk, thousands of crabs rise up and seethe in their thousands into the river. One day, the boy and his brother and their father watch huge, dark, triangular fins cut through the murky water. The boy’s brother almost falls in; he loses his footing on the slimy decking and grabs onto the paling, just saving himself. Soon after that, the area hums with gossip about a man, an immigrant, who one morning filled his pockets with bricks and walked straight off the jetty at high tide. The boy is learning.

  Eager to leave the hostel, the family moves into a house in the suburb of Inala. 53 Poinciana Street. Pampas grass in the garden. For a while, they will share the house with another Brit immigrant, Peter Higgins, from Oldham. When asked at school to write a piece about where he lives the boy will write that Uncle Higgy comes from ‘Auldum’, because that’s how Higgy says it. This makes the boy’s dad laugh a lot. But the boy likes how that word, as he’s rendered it, looks on the page; it seems to resonate, pulse, although with what the boy cannot say.

  NOW

  Jesus, the security. Ridiculous. Huge signs everywhere with long lists of prohibitions. Don’t do this. Don’t do this, either. Australian airports might as well just have one massive sign saying DON’T. Easier, and takes up less room, to list the things you can do. Fuck’s sakes. Been on the plane over ten bleedin’ hours and I could do without this.

  Fellers with ponytails and dogs hovering around the luggage carousel. Brogue-style shoes and shorts and tight socks pulled up to the knee. One dog sticks his head into the handbag of a Latina-looking lady and its handler perks up. Even his ponytail stands erect.

  –Can I see yer passport, mate?

  The bags shuffle around. I’m waiting for the wee happy lurch I always get in my breast when I see the familiar blue-and-black of my rucksack on the belt.

  –Passport, mate.

  I dig it out, give it to him to riffle.

  –What you doing in Australia?

  I tell him; revisiting, Ten Pound Pom, writing, etc.

  –So yer a writer? What kind of writing?

  –Journalism, reviews, novels. All kinds of stuff.

  –What kind of novels?

  –Superb ones.

  –Yeh, but what kind?

  –Science-fiction.

  There’s my bag. I see my bag, my friendly bag, shuffling towards me. I take it and my passport into Immigration Control.

  –Yer a writer, are ya?

  –Yes.

  –What kind of books?

  –Historical romance.

  Stamp. On into Customs.

  –So yer write books?

  –Yes.

  –What kind of books?

  –Whodunnits. Detective stories.

  And I’m waved big-fingeredly into Oz. I rejoin my brother in the busy concourse and marvel at its gleam; I don’t remember it very clearly but what I do recall of Brisbane airport was a corrugated-iron shack or two and lots of claggy red dust. But this around me is all polish and glass and reflective steel. And I haven’t seen Higgy in thirty years either but I recognise him instantly; smaller than I remember, of course, and with greyer hair, of course, but unmistakably him. Jeez: Higgy. Three decades on. How strange this is. He shakes my hand and I notice his lack of fingers.

  –What happened there, Pete?

  –Accident with a power saw.

  Thirty years in Oz has not diluted his accent; still straight out of Auldum. We do the greeting thing and he drives us into the city. I’m knackered. My eyes are all gritty and all muscles moan. We pass through grimy suburbs, the typical surrounds of airports everywhere in the world, and enter the city at the Bradfield Highway onto the Story Bridge, from where I now get my first glimpse of Brisbane proper, its CBD, clustered glass towers erupting out of the river. The city didn’t look like that in the seventies. My dad worked on the sixth skyscraper to be built in the city, lost now among scores of others. Yet I see the Custom House at the foot of the city, on the far bank of the river, and I remember it clearly – that green-domed roof. Unchanged. And I recall, too, the rhythmic thumping noise that the cars make as they pass over the Story Bridge. A lullaby, that sound was. Strangely soothing.

  –Anything like you remember it?

  –God no. Not at all.

  –People go on about Sydney, Higgy says, –but I prefer Brisbane, me. Sydney’s plastic, but what Brizzy has is heart.

  I can see the roofs of Yungaba below me to the right and another memory returns – the sight of those roofs in a child’s eyes. The valleys between the gables and the thick green vegetation around the building but of course all has shrunk in the intervening time. But the smells and the noises of the birds in the branches have me shrinking too, limbs contracting, wrinkles smoothing out, hair returning to some parts and vanishing in others, scars unpuckering off my skin into the humid air. I am small again.

  We go into the canteen, the kitchen, the apartment wh
ere we lived. Yungaba is now a Multicultural Ars Centre, so the immigrant/refugee spirit of the place still exists, and the room in which I and my siblings used to sleep is now the office of Bronte Morris, Director of BEMAC (Brisbane Multicultural Arts Centre). She’s a nice lady, and she lets us wander around. I sit at her desk to write some notes, and if the spatial calculations of myself and Tony are accurate, then the desk sits precisely where my bed used to be. Thirty years ago, I snored and dreamed here, wrapped in a mozzy net, 12,000 miles from where I was born. I could sleep here again, now, so tired am I, just rest my head on my arms on the desk and drift peacefully off. I’m truly knackered. And I’m feeling big in my skin again; the smaller me doesn’t fit. I’d burst his skin, were I to try and climb back into it. This is how it works, though; we shed skins like snakes. And I like being close to that boy, sitting here writing as he lay here dreaming. Lives pass in drips and drops and the years can be compressed in your hands like snow. Beginnings and ends don’t, really, have much meaning or relevance; our notions of linearity are just theoretical, and open to disproof. None of them are irrefragable. None of them are uncontestably true. Maybe it’s all just one immeasurable wheel and we jump off it and on it and off it and on it as it spins forever in space.

  I pick up some information leaflets and go outside to smoke. I’d like to sit under the tree, the throwing-star, spider-egg-burning tree, but it’s gone now; just a stump in the centre of a small car-park, that’s all that’s left. I find a bench by it and roll and light up and read a xeroxed extract from Yungaba 1887–1987: A Century of Service to Migrants, author not given. It tells me that ‘Kangaroo Point, the garden suburb of the mid to late 19th century, was an ideal choice for the site of the new Immigration Depot, fulfilling Thomas McIlwraith’s wish for a “barracks where immigrants would get a favourable impression in pleasant surroundings”.’ Hmm; that word ‘barracks’. Interesting. A memory comes back; hiding behind a bush to flick the V at a group of boys I’d just had a row with and then turning to see the matron smirking at me from her balcony. The taste of pumpkin. (Why are the Aussies so big on pumpkin? The Yanks too, for that matter. Why do they both like pumpkin so much?)