by Alan Carter
You still have your sense of humour, Jack. That’s good, you’ll need it here. And, by the way, we are not as formal in the islands, so, please, call me Richard.
Thanks, Richard, I will.
Ted here has asked that you two have the day off so he can show you around town. Are you happy with that arrangement?
Sure, I’m just not so sure about his bike riding.
No one is, said Symons. But look, let’s make it half a day off, because I want you to come back here to see what we have in store for you. Given your knowledge and intelligence, we have quite a challenge for you and I believe you are up to it.
Gee, thanks, Richard. Okay.
Robbo lifted his eyebrows at me as we walked out the main entrance, past two neatly dressed white girls. I almost missed them because I was going over Symons’ words.
Deep inside me there was a small part making noises, maybe wanting to believe in me and hoping to show the disbelievers back home that I had something, could do something, if I wanted to, if I felt like it. The old headmaster. Dad. Mum. My brothers. It would be a new experience, to make good; I’d have to stay focused, to concentrate, to dedicate, to strive for consistency. I felt nervous, anxious, but ready. I decided to buy some salt to keep in my room because salt would help me keep my cool. When I was a kid I was diagnosed with pinks disease, mercury poisoning, and the family doctor reckoned salt would help me stay calm. I wasn’t sure, I still experienced sudden rushes of anxiety, but I loved salt and most days ate a handful of the stuff. And when drinking I couldn’t keep my hands off the beer nuts and the potato chips.
I laughed out loud.
What? said Robbo.
Symons, I said. Did you hear what he said about me?
Yeah, he’s got the hots for you.
Ha ha. You got any idea what he has in mind?
Nuh, but I’d keep your pants on at night and maybe rig up a piece of string and some tin cans, so if he comes into your room you’ll hear him before he gets to your bed.
Shut up you filthy bastard. Get on your bike. Let’s go see some naked ladies.
The capital looked like a frontier town, a town struggling to find itself in a maze of buildings randomly erected. Robbo rode around it like he owned it, yelling over his head and occasionally whistling at attractive mixed race girls. It might have been 1968 but there was no sign of it here, no hippies and no bearded students marching against colonialism, capitalism, fascism or calling for free love. Not all the white people wore white but they were all neatly dressed and behaving in an orderly manner.
Do you play footy? he yelled.
Which one?
Aerial ping-pong, you wanker. You sandgropers only know how to play one.
It’s a better game than chimp footy.
What?
Chimp footy. You play an ape’s game.
Robbo took both his hands off the handlebars and made like a chimp, just for a second, but long enough for my guts to hit my throat.
There were no naked ladies in town that day, but Robinson took me up a hill to see the sights from high, then down the hill and across town to the place we would visit often at night in many futile attempts to find the perfect mix of feminine beauty: Melanesian, European and Asian. When I say futile, I don’t mean ladies approaching perfection did not visit, they did, but they were usually on the arm of some flash, rich, or important, prick.
My first day in teller’s box number two almost convinced me I had a career in banking. I felt like the new Australian prime minister, John Gorton, who had been elected PM even though he was a senator and thus a member of the wrong house of parliament. Here I was wrongly appointed well above my capabilities, to a teller’s box I didn’t belong in, with a float of fifty thousand dollars, more money than I’d ever seen. I shared the box with Tom Hallett, the bloke leaving, going home after his two-year tour of duty. That’s what we called it. National Service was in full force in Australia and to do your time in the islands you had to apply for a stay on your conscription papers. As soon as I headed home I’d have to let the defence department know and it would chuck my marble in the barrel and that could mean another tour of duty in another tropical climate fighting slimy Viet Cong communist bastards. Hallett was going in the barrel as soon as he got home to Melbourne. He was a tall, good-looking man and an Aussie Rules footballer. If his marble came out, he was sure to go to Vietnam.
I play for one of the local teams, he said. You interested in a game?
Yeah, maybe, I said. I wasn’t too bad in school and I played a few amateur games in Perth but I’m a bit off the boil.
I’ll take you down to training one night and you can see how you go.
Great.
The day was a blur. As soon as the doors opened the customer tide rushed in and didn’t go out until the doors closed. All kinds trooped up to the counter: wealthy whites, drunk whites, whites in whites, whites in suits, handsome whites, very pretty whites, glorious looking blacks, blacks in whites, blacks in skirts with naked breasts, blacks with bones in their noses, blacks who stank and blacks who looked at me as though I was some kind of film star. All the while Hallett stood beside me and commented.
You see that bloke, he’s worth a million. She’s been around. Phil’s played Rugby League down in Sydney. I saw her the other night, after the footy game, mate, she scrubs up well. Whatever you do, don’t lick your fingers when counting the notes, you never know where these maries have kept their money.
What?
Yeah, that’s what they call the women — maries, said Hallett. They’re all called Mary and they keep their notes up their fannies.
You’re bloody joking.
Nuh. You see that one down the end of the line? After you count her notes you better go and wash your hands.
I started with fifty thousand dollars, I took in over forty thousand and I handed out over twenty-five thousand and, at the end of the day, I balanced. I couldn’t believe it. The old man couldn’t believe it. Okay, he wasn’t there, but I felt him breathing down the back of my neck, waiting for me to fuck up, to lose count, to mess the numbers up, but I didn’t and inside I said a quick, silent, fuck you, you prick.
My little teller door opened. I turned and saw Symons. His hand was out, looking for mine.
There you go, he said. I had plenty of confidence in your ability to master this position. I knew you’d handle it. Knew you wouldn’t let us down.
Phew, I said. Good to know I’m no John McEwen.
Symons looked at me.
You know, forced to take charge because someone died, but the wrong man for the job.
Would have been better to shove in Billy Big Ears McMahon, said Hallett. Billy might not be up for the top job either, but looking at his wife would make up for it.
McMahon had not long married a delicious woman twenty-five years younger than him and the best looking politician’s wife ever. No one could explain how such a big-eared dill got to marry such a beauty, especially after so many thought he was a poofter. And no one could explain why I was still a virgin in a world gone mad with promiscuity. Not that anyone knew. It was my pathetic little secret. Along with all the others, like the lingering, occasional conversation I had with Jesus and the reason I ate so much salt.
What a day, that first one in the second teller’s box. I was pumped. I needed a drink. That’s the way to make euphoria last: you win a game, you get engaged, you win money, you get a pay rise — you go out and get pissed. Sober, euphoria only lasts a couple of minutes; pissed, it lasts for hours. That’s what it was to be Australian. I had begun to think of myself as Australian, as belonging to a nation of people. I wondered if it had happened to the other expats, if before they had arrived they had considered themselves Queenslanders, or Victorians, but once away from our island continent, they began to think of themselves as Australians.
That whole first week in the teller’s box was sweet and amazing. One night I also had another one of my flying dreams. A good one. They aren’t always plea
sant and sometimes I can’t seem to get off the ground, no matter how hard I frog-kick or stroke with my arms. That’s how I move through the air, with the breaststroke kick and stroke. It never ceases to amaze me how I do it. I never see anyone else up there with me. People look up and wave or try to get at me but they never get off the ground. In this dream I was shooting through the air, just flying, feeling the air, doing a few rolls, having fun. And when I came down Mum was waiting for me with the evening meal. She watched me land but she didn’t look surprised and didn’t say anything other than: Dinner’s ready. I looked around for Dad but he wasn’t there.
I couldn’t believe how well everything was going. Everywhere. In Perth, the greatest Aussie Rules footballer ever, Polly Farmer, was back home and appointed captain-coach of West Perth; my brother Thomas was working in Perth as a lawyer; brother Bill was winning races and looking to be a future athletics champion; Dad had opened a new business in the town next door; and here I was straining at the bit, biting at the rope, wondering what to do now I had conquered the second teller’s box. This was turning out to be my best year ever. There had to be more and bigger, brighter, better things out there for me to take on, here in the islands, at home, Europe, America, England. The world was my oyster. Maybe this was where it all started and then I’d move on to even greater success, eventually returning home triumphant: the prodigal son knocks on the door at the end of the gravel driveway, but not alone, he comes with fame, fortune and prestige, a wife, a great bundle of things they never imagined. Mum will cry, of course. Dad will look at me, in disbelief, amazement, stand back, take another look, have a think about it, check out my wife, be very impressed, then he will walk up to me, perhaps give me a traditional Italian greeting, a big man-hug with hands slapping my back. Even Jesus will weep then. What? What’s he got to do with it? Shut the fuck up about Jesus. He doesn’t exist, or maybe he does but not as the son of God, more likely a bloke like Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, or Herb Elliott. The longer I lived the more it looked like there was no God, but in a little piece of my brain, somewhere up the back, every so often, a conversation took place and I kept thinking it might be Jesus. Maybe I just needed someone to talk to and he was the only bloke available, even though he wasn’t.
Surely Dad wouldn’t be surprised by my current burst of success; after all he sent me to Grammar School. Grammar boys were destined for greatness, leadership, wealth, that was their birthright, their destiny. And look at me now, surging ahead, things appearing at my feet with very little effort. Even a mixed race girl of astonishing beauty was coming into the bank, eyeing me off, laughing at my little jokes. Maybe it was time to find out her name.
That first week in the second teller’s box was a revelation. I had no idea I could handle so much money, or even that I could handle money. When I wrote home I made no mention of my success. On the Friday night we all went over to the Pacific Hotel and drank like dogs in a spring after a run in a desert, and then I walked back to my little cockroach-infested room drunk, so drunk I slept the entire night in my designated room, the room without the massive ceiling fan and the stored documents. When I woke up at three a.m. to piss, I got a shock, I thought I was back home, in Genoralup, and I wondered why the room was facing the wrong way, why it was hot, so muggy, and my arm was a mass of bulging mosquitoes on heat and what were those soft noises like tiny things scratching? By the time I got to the toilet, I remembered. And when I got back to the room I decided to leave the cockroaches to my underpants, the mosquitoes to Robbo down the hall, and shift back to the paperwork and the fan.
The sad thing about getting pissed on a Friday night was that you had to get up again on Saturday morning and work until midday. Then, of course, unless you played sport, you could go off and get pissed again. My Saturday in the teller’s box was marred by a small error. I finished the day fifty dollars over, but I was forgiven quickly, because I was over and not under and because fifty dollars in a float of fifty thousand was not deemed a disaster.
The next week was another major success, except I was getting a little bored. Life seemed to be all about work. You got up, you went to breakfast, you went to work, you bought lunch, you worked, you closed the doors, you went to your room, you went to dinner, you went out and got a little pissed, you went to bed. If you got a little too pissed you might have to get up and chuck your guts, you got up, chucked them, and on and on it went until you died and the mosquitoes sucked the last of your blood and the cockroaches consumed what was left and thirty-five years later someone noticed you were missing, went upstairs to the old document storage room and found your clothes and a letter from your mother reminding you to eat plenty of salt because you were once diagnosed with mercury poisoning.
By the third week the boredom was getting to me. The mixed race girl at Friday night rugby was still only smiling at me, laughing at an occasional comment, but not inviting me to share her secrets, her bed or her vagina, and my old school chum Bainbridge was about to leave town and go south.
There was a football match each week, the Aussie Rules game on Sunday. I went down to one training session for a look at a practice match but the sight of one local, built like a brick outhouse, roaring into one of the pasty white blokes was enough to make me flinch twice, then think. The game seemed to be a mix of rugby and Aussie Rules, some finesse, an occasional high mark, but a lot of punching, kicking, shoving in scrums and bashing, smashing, running as though their lives depended on the ball under their arms. I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t like the game I knew and of the codes on offer I preferred the raw and brutal honesty of Rugby League. But when you’re away from home you get all the entertainment you can and so I went to all games.
One Sunday, right after the booze-up in the clubrooms, six of us squeezed ourselves into the Volkswagen of the Bulimbi branch accountant. Jim Jackson was an older man, an alcoholic and, naturally enough, more often than not, pissed. He drove like he was pissed. What did we care? We were members of an expatriate community and expats driving pissed was normal. For most of us there was no other way to drive.
You right there? called a South Australian from the back.
The croweater, Roger, sat in the middle of the back seat. I sat on the outside, the left side, the side facing the bay, and Robbo sat on the right side, looking up the cliff face. In the front were two Victorians and Jackson at the wheel. It was a narrow road around the bay linking Bulimbi with the centre of the capital.
Too bloody right, said Jackson.
The road was wet and the rain hadn’t stopped for two hours. Jackson was taking us back to the old bank quarters. Robbo and I were going out later that night to the Bulimbi Bar. My old school mate Bainers was playing his last gig and he had a hot, new, mixed race drummer in the line-up. This was a good thing and the night might well attract the drummer’s sisters, their friends and their friends.
Jim was driving like a sober man. We were all laughing. All was well with the world.
You all right up front? yelled Robbo.
Too bloody right, yelled Jackson.
Jackson turned his head to show us the laughter on his face, but he turned too far, lost concentration, took a bend a little too tight, tried to correct, overcorrected, just missed an oncoming Volkswagen, overcorrected again and headed for the edge. We might have been pissed but we all knew the edge was not a good place to be. We yelled at Jackson, not so much because of the edge itself, more because after the edge there was nothing for a good twenty feet and at the bottom of the fall, on the bay floor, there was nothing but rock and an incoming tide.
Jim, yelled Robbo, we’re on the fucking edge.
We hung there. No one really thought that we would go over and it looked like we wouldn’t, then it did, then it didn’t and then Jackson made a strange noise from his throat and his hands seemed to leave the wheel, then they took it again but moved in the wrong direction. The car shook. There was uncertainty about how much of us was on the edge, or over it. One wheel? Or two? I was sure the wheel under me w
as over, had been for a second or two. We seemed to hang for a long time, then a small shift, then, ever so slowly, we fell. The fall was nice. I enjoyed the fall. It was almost like flying. Someone screamed, a woman, and it was then I realised that one of the Victorians in the front was a woman. Lucky for her she was in the middle, over the handbrake. The other Victorian, Nigel, was in front of me and as the car fell I thought, shit, I better put my elbow on the roof or a rock will come in through the window and smash my arm to smithereens, and in just the amount of time it took to think that and do it, a rock appeared at my armpit. Nigel and the Victorian woman next to him screamed, Robbo yelled, the croweater between us screamed and Jackson was silent.
On the bottom of the bay, moving quickly was important because the tide was coming in fast as it always did and lying there in a smashed Volkswagen was not a good idea. Robbo yelled at Jackson to open his door. Jackson sat slumped, gurgling.
Jackson, I yelled. For fuck’s sake move.
Robbo reached over him, opened his door, pushed his seat forward then climbed out over him. Roger the croweater followed. From inside the car I helped them lift, pull and push Jackson out. He was sobbing and blubbering, apologising to everyone and offering to buy us all a drink when we got out and even take us all out for a meal. The Victorians in the front were next out and in no mood for either drink or food. The woman was helping Nigel, who was no longer screaming but moaning.
It’s all right, Jim, said Robbo. Come on, we gotta get out of here because the tide’s coming in and we have to get Nigel to hospital. His arm is cut up pretty bad.
Nigel’s arm was in threads and blood was leaving his body in gallons whichever way he turned. The front passenger door looked like it had aimed itself for the biggest rock and most of his arm must have been on it because there wasn’t much left of it where it used to be.
Here, I said, take my shirt.
The woman took my shirt and I helped her tear off a strip.
Thank you, she said. I’m June, by the way.