1988

by Andrew McGahan

  PRAISE FOR 1988

  ‘Every bit as good as its predecessor.’—Sunday Times

  ‘The pre-eminent Australian road novel.’—Mark Butler, The Australian

  PRAISE FOR PRAISE

  ‘Candid and unembarrassed, McGahan’s work throbs with intensity.’—New Zealand Herald

  ‘With his debut novel, Praise, Andrew McGahan announced himself as a precocious master of deadpan, trawling pitilessly and hilariously through the post-Bjelke-Petersen netherworld of Brisbane.’—Mark Butler, The Australian

  PRAISE FOR LAST DRINKS

  ‘One of the most exciting crime stories to come out of Australia in a long time.’—Michelle Griffin, The Age

  ‘I was blown away by Andrew McGahan’s breakout with Last Drinks . . . my pick as the best novel published this year.’—John Birmingham, Sydney Morning Herald

  PRAISE FOR THE WHITE EARTH

  ‘The White Earth builds to a peak that announces McGahan’s arrival as a novelist whose ambitions and skills are grand indeed.’—Rosemary Sorensen, Courier-Mail

  ‘Part family saga, part history and part gothic thriller, The White Earth propels the reader relentlessly towards its stunning conclusion. Not to be missed.’—Good Reading

  ANDREW McGAHAN was born in Dalby, Queensland, and was raised on a wheat farm before moving to Brisbane. Since the publication of his first novel, the bestselling Praise in 1992, he has produced three other novels—1988 (1995), Last Drinks (2000) and The White Earth (2004)—as well as award-winning stage-plays and screenplays. He currently lives in Melbourne with his partner of many years, Liesje.

  ANDREW

  McGAHAN

  1988

  The author would like to sincerely thank the Australia Council for the awarding of a Category B Fellowship which greatly expedited the completion of this novel.

  This edition published in 2005

  First published in 1995

  Copyright © Andrew McGahan 1995

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

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  (61 2) 8425 0100

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  (61 2) 9906 2218

  Email:

  info@allenandunwin.com

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  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  McGahan, Andrew.

  1988.

  ISBN 1 74114 773 5.

  eISBN 978 1 74343 214 3

  1. Young men—Fiction. 2. Australia—Fiction. I. Title.

  A823.3

  CONTENTS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The locations mentioned in this book are real. The Cobourg Peninsula. The Gurig National Park. Cape Don. The groups and organisations mentioned are also real. The Bureau of Meteorology. The Northern Territory Conservation Commission. The Cobourg Aborigines. However, this is a work of fiction. It is not intended to be an accurate portrayal of any of these locations. Nor is it meant to be an accurate portrayal of any of these organisations, or of their policies. Most particularly it is not meant to be a portrayal of any actual persons who live in these locations, or who work for these organisations. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, is unintentional.

  ONE

  There was an argument in Chinese outside my door. It happened often and in many ways I was beginning to hate the language. I rolled over and considered the digital clock. Nearly midday. Time, maybe, to get out of bed. I lay and listened for a while, looking down at my white round belly. It was hot in the room, a stale air of sweat and old sheets. The morning asthma weighed in. I groped around for the Ventolin, found it, sucked in the drug. Outside the voices rose, fell, moved along the hall, came back again. Maybe it wasn’t an argument. Maybe it was just a loud discussion.

  I got up and shuffled around. Five foot, eleven and half inches of me, running to fat. I wrapped a towel around my waist, opened the door. Five of the Chinese were in the hall. I knew some of their names, but only some. They stopped talking and looked at me.

  ‘Morning boys,’ I said.

  ‘Good morning,’ some of them answered. There were nods and smiles from the ones who spoke no English.

  ‘Any luck today?’ I asked.

  Shakes of the head, negatives. One of them laughed. He said ‘You always get up very late.’

  I nodded, began edging my way through.

  Another laugh. ‘You like sleep. Sleep very late.’

  ‘You got that right.’

  I moved towards the shower.

  It was a four bedroom house, in James Street, New Farm. Brisbane. I’d lived there about six months. I’d chosen it because I needed a cheap room and I vaguely knew the owner. His name was William. He dealt marijuana and worked part-time installing dishwashing machines. When I first moved in the other two rooms were occupied by female university students. I never knew them well. Shortly after I moved in, they moved out. As far as I could gather it was nothing personal. Still, we were left with two rooms to fill. Which was where it all began.

  William placed an ad with the local alternative radio station. ‘Relaxed smokers of either sex wanted. No bond.’ We waited. Over the following weeks there were only a few calls and none of them, upon seeing the rooms, were interested. It wasn’t much of a house. The walls and windows were dirty, and the floor had fallen through in several places. William’s plan was to renovate one day and sell at a profit.

  In the meantime the lack of rent was a problem. William needed it to pay the mortgage. And I was in no position to pay extra, I was only a casual worker myself. More time passed. William gave up on selective advertising and went to the mainstream newspaper. ‘Two rooms available. No bond.’ Again, for some time there was no interest. Th
en two Chinese males arrived at the door.

  Their names were Li Ping and Michael Wan. Each was carrying a suitcase. They’d just arrived, they said, from Shanghai. They were in Australia to study English and Engineering. The English they already had wasn’t much good, but it was understandable. William showed them the rooms. They were the smaller two of the house. Unfurnished. They were also slightly cheaper than mine. Forty-five a week, compared to fifty. Li and Michael said that was fine and could they move in straight away. William said yes. He pocketed the first two weeks’ rent in advance and smiled at them.

  ‘You wanna go and get all your stuff?’ he asked.

  Li and Michael held up the suitcases. ‘This is it.’

  There were a couple of old mattresses under the house, and a derelict wardrobe. It was enough to get them started.

  I showered for a long while. It was a fine shower, the spout set high above a large, rusty claw-footed tub, the water strong. One of the few good points of the house. I was grateful for that. Mornings were a bad time and a good shower helped. No matter whether I’d been drinking the night before or not, I always awoke feeling hungover and ill. There were many explanations for it. My asthma was severe, and some of the drugs I took for it caused nausea, especially on a morning’s empty stomach. Others caused throat infections and foul breath. I also suffered chronic hayfever and took vast amounts of antihistamines. They knocked out the hayfever, but took me along as well, made the night’s sleep dead and deadening.

  After the shower I threaded my way back through the Chinese to my room and dressed. Then it was to the kitchen. The kitchen floor was one of the bad spots in the house. A whole corner of it had fallen through and needed to be avoided. Otherwise the room was small and hot and dirty—an overflowing compost bin in the corner, milk cartons and beer bottles and unwashed dishes on the benches, stiffened tea bags and rancid butter on the cutting-board. A small black-and-white television sat on the windowsill. It was the only TV in the house and for some reason William refused to put it in the living room. He liked to watch TV in the kitchen, propped up in a chair amidst the mess, sweating and drawing in periodic belts of his home-grown heads. There was nothing I could do. It was his house and his TV.

  I dug around and found bread, put two slices in the toaster. There was a pot of fishhead soup on the stove. I stared into it while I waited. The Chinese made the soup regularly, it was easy and the ingredients were cheap. I’d tasted it a few times and liked it well enough, but now it was cold and congealed. I thought about dead fish. When the toast was ready I buttered it, Vegemited it, and sat down. I stared out the window. It was a bright sweltering day, nothing to see but the glare from the neighbours’ tin roofs and from the sky. Summer in Brisbane. I contemplated options.

  It was a day off, that was one thing. Exactly what date I didn’t know. Early February. The ninth or the tenth or the eleventh. It didn’t matter. I worked four days a week at a pub across the river. Fridays and Saturdays and two other days more or less at random. Shifts between four and eight hours. I disliked the work, so a free afternoon was something. At least it would’ve been, had I anything else to do. I had nothing else to do. I sat there, thinking about time. It was 1988. Australia’s Bicentennial year. The country was two hundred years old. I was twenty-one.

  They were, I knew, significant numbers. Something should have happened in my life by then. But I’d already made my big move, and it hadn’t worked. It was two years earlier, when I was nineteen. I was at uni then, studying literature. I dropped out. I was to write a novel. A horror novel. It was supposed to be a best-seller. A money-maker. Somehow it all went wrong. I wrote the novel but no-one wanted it. I threw it away. I started others, got bogged down, gave them up. Things got slow. After a while I was barely writing at all. I’d never quite made it back to uni either. Now it was mostly pub work, and sleeping late, and the wasting of days. A steady decline. Happy Birthday then, Australia.

  One of the Chinese came into the kitchen. He was better dressed for the heat than me—as most of them usually were—naked except for a pair of white Y-front underpants. This one was tall, lean, dark-skinned and quite beautiful, as again, most of them were. William and I were constantly shamed by them. Both of us were pale and overweight, patched red with rashes from sweat. We took to keeping our shirts on, no matter how hot it got. The two of us, western decadents.

  He said, ‘You will be home all today?’

  ‘Probably. Why?’

  ‘We all going out. You take messages?’

  ‘What messages?’

  ‘Work. Jobs.’

  ‘I see. Yes, I’ll be home all day.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  He was gone. There were more discussions in Chinese in the hallway, then the front door slammed and it was silent. The house to myself. It was a rarity. I sat there. Just past midday. There were at least twelve waking hours ahead of me. I sneezed. Once, twice, three times. My eyes watered. The familiar, first itch of hayfever settled. I headed for the antihistamines.

  The first couple of weeks of Li and Michael’s residence had passed painlessly. Indeed, William and I were aware that the living arrangements offered no small opportunity for cross-cultural interchange. After all, neither of us knew much about China. And Li and Michael, it was clear, knew equally little about Australia.

  On their first night thus we introduced them to Fourex beer and the one-day cricket on TV. Our intentions seemed sound, but it wasn’t a great success. The cricket meant nothing to them, and they found the Fourex merely amusing. It seemed the Fourex stubbie was identical in shape to a bottle used for some foul Chinese laxative. After that we asked them about the political situation in China. ‘Not good,’ they replied, and showed no interest in commenting further. They asked us about job prospects in Brisbane.

  ‘What sort of jobs?’ we asked.

  ‘Anything.’

  ‘We thought you were here to study.’

  ‘Yes, but we have no dollars.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Getting here very expensive.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Rent here very expensive.’

  The conversations never really improved. William and I ran out of polite questions about China, and Li and Michael offered nothing more themselves. Their prime concern was finding work. They had paid in advance for the private college that would teach them English and Engineering, but for day-to-day living they needed cash. Every morning they rose early and went out searching.

  They tried Chinatown in the Valley first, but hundreds of other Chinese students were already after the limited jobs there. They asked William if there was any work going in the dishwasher installation trade. He said there wasn’t. They asked me if there was any work in the pub trade. I thought about my boss, and his attitude to Asians, Blacks, The Unemployed, Anyone. I said it was unlikely. They looked further afield, out of walking distance. They came to me for help in deciphering bus timetables. I was of no use. I had my own car. I’d barely caught a bus in my life.

  Finally they came to William.

  ‘We cannot pay this rent,’ said Michael, ‘Not without a job.’

  ‘That’s a pity,’ said William.

  ‘We have two friends. They just come from Shanghai. They need rooms.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Between four we could pay.’

  ‘You mean two to a room?’

  ‘Yes. Same rent, but between four. Or else we have to leave.’

  William thought for a moment. I knew what he was thinking. Basically there were the house repayments to meet, and if Li and Michael left, then there were all those empty weeks while we looked for someone else.

  ‘Okay,’ William said, ‘Sure.’

  They moved in that afternoon. Our two new housemates were named Xo and Robert. Robert’s English was bad and Xo had none at all. They were also from Shanghai, also English and Engineering students, and also in need of work.

  Time passed. The Chinese, now that there were four of them,
kept mostly to themselves. In the evenings the kitchen was used to cook two separate meals. Mine and William’s, and the Chinese’s. Not that William and I cooked many meals. There was a takeaway down the road and we often ordered our meals there. The Chinese cooked every night. They made their dishes out of cheap leftover cuts from the markets. William and I rarely asked, or were invited, to join in. Within a few weeks communication between East and West had come down to little more than the odd nod when we bumped into each other in the kitchen, or on the way to the toilet.

  Then one day the four of them came to William. None of them had found any work yet. ‘We cannot afford this rent,’ they said.

  Two more of their friends moved in. Students, fresh from Shanghai, no money and no work. I didn’t bother learning their names.

  The day showed no signs of picking up. Even TV was no help. Bad midday movies and poor reception. I settled on the back steps. I sneezed a few more times. Hayfever made the light painful. The antihistamines swung in. I stared at the mango tree in the back corner of the yard. Over-ripe mangos littered the ground beneath it. Somewhere, several houses away, someone was playing a record that sounded like Cossack dance music. I could hear the faint clapping and stamping of feet, the sound drifting across the roofs. No dancing here, I thought.

  I got up and headed back to my room. I looked at the computer on the desk. I’d purchased it to help with my writing, in the more hopeful days. Before that I’d written on an electric typewriter. Before that it was an old manual, and before that again it was with a fountain pen on finely-crafted paper. One thing I’d learned from it all—the method didn’t matter when you had nothing to write about. The computer was coated with dust. I thought about switching it on. Didn’t.

  Drinking then. There was nothing in the house, but the Queen’s Arms Hotel and its bottle shop was just down the road. The only problem was that I took no joy in drinking alone, either in bars or at home. I didn’t know why. All it meant was that to drink I had to find at least one partner. That often involved spending time with people I had no real interest in seeing, or them me. It made the drinking dull and pointless, but it was better than not drinking at all.