Babylon South

by Jon Cleary

  Dural put away the rest of his belongings, looked around the room again and decided he had to spend as little time as possible in it. It was clean, but you couldn’t say much more for it; he had changed one cell for another. Even the single window had bars on it, something he had never had on the windows of the Macleay Street flat. The view from this room was terrific: four feet away was the blank wall of the house next door. Even at Parramatta he had always been able to catch a glimpse of the sky beyond the bars.

  He put on his jacket and went out of the room, locking the door behind him. He was halfway down the narrow hall to the front door, aware now of the smell of the house, when the little old man came out of another room and looked at him like a suspicious terrier.

  “G’day. You the new bloke? Waddia think of the place?”

  Dural could be affable when he wanted to be. “Bit early to tell. Plenty of smell, though, ain’t there?”

  “That’s the bloody Viet Cong upstairs. They’re always bloody frying rice. Me name’s Killeen, Jerry Killeen.”

  Dural hesitated. But he couldn’t let go of the past; all he had left was his name. “Dural. Chilla Dural.”

  The old man raised an eyebrow. He was thin and bony, all lined skin and a shock of white hair; but he would take on the world, he was afraid of no one. He looked at this hawk-faced, balding man with the muscles bulging under the cheap suit and nodded his appreciation. “Oh, I read about you. I read the papers, every page from go to whoa. There was a little piece about you this morning, about you getting out. Something to do with that feller’s skeleton they found up in the mountains.”

  “What feller was that?”

  He hadn’t looked at a newspaper since he had left Parramatta yesterday morning. He had never been a reader and he hadn’t wanted to find his way back into the world through a newspaper’s cockeyed view of it. He would do that through a TV set, where the view was just as cockeyed as the commercials, but you got the comic liars like politicians and union bosses.

  “Springfeller, Sir Walter Springfeller.” Jerry Killeen had a photographic memory for names; he could even remember the names of strangers in the births and deaths columns. His circle of friends was those he met in his newspapers. “You going out now? I’ll leave the Herald and the Tele under your door. I’ll shove „em under so the bloody Viet Cong don’t pinch „em.” He jerked his thumb towards the stair at the back of the hall. “They’d steal the bridle off of a bloody nightmare. You wanna come in for a cuppa?”

  Dural thanked him, but said maybe some other time. He left the little old man and went out of the house, glad to leave behind the smell of frying rice and other odours he hadn’t identified. There had been smells in prison that he had never become accustomed to: the b.o. of dirty bastards who didn’t wash, the overnight bucket in the corner of the cell . . . He stepped out into the narrow street and filled his lungs with what passed for fresh air in the traffic-clogged city.

  He walked up the street, passed a narrow-fronted shop that looked faintly familiar. Suddenly he remembered: this had been El Rocco, another cell but where you had been free to come and go, where he had come to listen to the best jazz in Sydney. Jazz had been his sole musical interest and he still had a good ear for it. He would have to find another club where it was still played. He had no time for what passed as music these days.

  He went to his old bank. As soon as he stepped inside its glass walls that looked straight out on to the street, he saw there had been changes. Everything inside here was exposed to the street; any stick-up artist would be playing to the passers-by. Not that sticking up banks had been his caper; Heinie Odets had always told him that was for desperate mugs. Rob banks, yes; but at night or on weekends, taking everything that was in the vaults. Heinie had masterminded one job like that, with Dural acting as driver and look-out, and they had got away with £200,000, big money in those days. His share had been £20,000 and he had blown the lot in a year on horses, cards and women.

  He took his place in the queue and worked his way along the guide ropes; he felt like a ram in a sheep-fold. At last he reached the counter and presented his passbook. The girl teller looked at the greasy, ragged-edged book as if it were a cowpat.

  “Sir, when did you last use this book?”

  “The date’s inside.” He opened the book. “May 23, 1964.”

  The girl, plump, pretty, not really a career banker, the engagement diamond already glinting on her hand, blinked at him. “That was before I was born. Don’t lean on the counter, please.”

  “Eh?”

  “The security shield.” She pointed to the strip of steel that was sunk into the woodwork of the counter, “If there’s a hold-up that shoots up and you get your arms chopped off.”

  “Jesus,” he said. “Banks used to be safe.”

  “Not any more. Will you excuse me a moment, sir?”

  She went away and Dural stood at the counter looking at the steel strip. He’d heard about bank protection methods; there was one guy in Parramatta who was said to have had his head almost taken off by something like this. It was nice to know his money was safe.

  The girl came back, signalled for him to go to the end of the counter. “The manager would like to see you, sir. We’ll have to issue a new book.”

  He was taken in to see the manager, a square-faced, square-minded man who was out of place in a King’s Cross bank. He longed for a transfer to head office, where the chances of being held up or getting AIDS or having a passbook presented that looked like something off the sole of a shoe were practically nil.

  “You are Charles Dural?”

  Dural produced his old driving-licence, just as greasy and tattered as the passbook.

  The manager looked at the licence. “That’s years out of date, Mr. Dural. I guess you were driving an FJ Holden then?”

  Dural wondered if he had already sent for the cops; but he humoured the smug bastard, “It was a 3.8 Jaguar, actually. Look, Mr.—” He glanced at the name-plate on the manager’s desk. “Mr. Rosman, just between you and me I’ve been in prison for the last twenty-three years and a bit. I had a cheque account here at this branch—I suppose you’d of still been in high school then—and when I knew they were gunna send me up for a long time, I changed over to an interest-bearing account. I dunno what interest I been getting—if you ever sent me any statements, I didn’t get „em. This book says I left £3,202 in it when I went in. You oughta owe me quite a bit of interest, right?”

  “I suppose we do—” The bank manager looked uncomfortable. “The truth is, Mr. Dural, in this area we have to be, well, extra careful. You have no idea some of the types come in here. I’ve got three bag-ladies as depositors—” He stopped, as if afraid that one of the bag-ladies might be Dural’s mother. “Well, you know what I mean. We just have to be careful.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.” Dural was surprised at his own patience; in prison he’d have blown up if he’d been interviewed by a screw like this uppity bastard. “Now could you let me know how much you’re holding for me?”

  It took ten minutes to reveal that he was now worth 23,332 dollars and 22 cents. It seemed to him that he was suddenly wealthy, but the bank manager didn’t appear impressed with his rich client. “It doesn’t go far these days, Mr. Dural. Perhaps you’d like us to invest it for you? Interest rates are still high. Unit trusts are the thing.”

  “I’ll think about it.” He had heard the talk in gaol amongst the white-collar crims that this was a boom time. He had wondered why, if everything was booming, so many of them were doing time. “I don’t wanna rush into nothing.”

  He drew a hundred dollars, got his new passbook and went out into the street again. He hadn’t walked more than a hundred yards (he still thought in yards, feet and inches; he’d never get used to the metric system) before he was aware that this wasn’t his Cross, not as he remembered it. It had always been an area where there were more sinners than saints; now it looked sleazy, a corner into which had been swept the dregs and grime
of the city. Sex had always been sold in the Cross, but, as he remembered it, there had been a time and a place for it; now, even in early afternoon, there were girls in doorways and on street corners. He was shocked at how they were dressed; in the old days the cops would have run them in for indecent exposure. A police car drifted by, the young cops in it looking out at the girls with plain boredom.

  One of the girls accosted him. She was about sixteen, her ravaged face ten years older than her body; she wore a gold body stocking and black fishnet panty-hose and smelled as if she had fallen into a vat of Woolworth’s perfume of the week. “You want a bit, luv?”

  “How much?” He wasn’t really interested, except in the price of nooky these days.

  “Fifty bucks.” She saw the look of surprise on his face. “You from the bush or something? What you expect, something as cheap as doing it with a sheep?”

  “It’s twice what I used to pay. And the sheep didn’t answer back.”

  “You want a cheapie, try the Orient Express down there on the corner, the Filipino. She’ll give you a quicky, a knee-trembler for ten bucks.”

  He shook his head and walked on, more and more disillusioned with every pace. The traffic was thicker and quicker. He stepped off on to a pedestrian crossing and was almost run down by two young men in a Toyota with two surfboards strapped to its roof. One of the young men, earring flashing, his snarl just as bright, leaned out of the passenger window.

  “Why don’t you look where you’re fucking going, dickhead!”

  Dural took two paces to his right, grabbed the young man by his long bleached hair, pulled his head halfway out of the window and punched him on the jaw. Then he shoved the unconscious youth back into the car, leaned in and said to the startled driver, “Okay, smart-arse, move on!”

  He stepped back and heard the clapping behind him. He turned round and there was a bag-lady, standing beside her loaded pram, clapping him. “Good on ya, mate! We need more men like you! Good on ya!”

  Dural grinned, then went on across the street, feeling a little better: he had done something for the old Cross where decent crims like himself, not today’s shit, used to hang out. He passed a group of kids who looked as if they had spent last night in the gutter; they glanced at him and sneered, but said nothing. The sharper-eyed amongst them had suddenly recognized the brutal toughness in his face, the muscles under the too-tight suit. All at once he hated everyone he passed, the sleazy strangers on what had once been his turf.

  A taxi cruised by and he hailed it. He got in beside the driver, a kanaka, for Chrissakes. “The Cobb and Co.”

  “What’s that, mate?”

  “A pub. Where you from?”

  “Tonga.”

  They had told him in Parramatta that the place was now overrun with wogs, slopeheads and coons. He was beginning to feel like that mug in the story, Ripper van Winkie. “One time you used to have to pass a test before you got a taxi licence, be able to know every street in the city. Especially the pubs.”

  “Mate,” said the Tongan, “you wanna sit here and discuss Australia’s history, it’s gunna cost you money. The meter’s running.”

  “You’re pretty bloody uppity, ain’t you? Who let you in here?”

  “Your government. I’m studying economics and you taxpayers are paying for it. We’re the white man’s burden. Now where’s this pub?”

  “The corner of Castlereagh and Goulburn.”

  The driver thought a moment, then shook his head. “Not any more, mate. That’s where the Masonic Temple is now. You don’t look like a Mason to me.”

  “Jesus!” Dural slumped back in the seat. “Okay, take me into town and drop me anywhere.”

  “Put your seat-belt on.”

  “Jesus!” He clipped the seat-belt across himself, felt he was locking himself into some sort of straitjacket; there’d been no seat-belts when he’d last driven a car. He began to get the funny feeling that he had been freer in prison.

  An hour of the inner city was enough for him. He was amazed at how much Sydney had changed; the much taller buildings than the ones he remembered seemed to arch over his head, blocking out the sun. The face of the crowd had changed, too; where had all the Aussie faces, with their long jaws and narrow eyes, gone? As Heinie Odets’s bodyguard (they called them minders now, so he’d been told) he had been a student of faces; it was one way of staying ahead of trouble, Heinie had advised him. He couldn’t get over the number of Chinks of some sort he saw; it was like being in some part of bloody Asia. And the black-haired wogs; there had been a fair number of them in Parramatta, but here on the outside (how long would he go on calling it that?) they seemed to make up half of those in the city streets. He was the stranger come home to a strange land.

  He caught a taxi back to the rooming-house. As he stepped in the front door, two young Vietnamese came down the hallway and passed him with shy smiles. When they had gone out into the street he saw Jerry Killeen peering at him from a half-opened door.

  “You see „em? The bloody Viet Cong. You wanna come in for a cuppa?” His desire for company was pathetic, it hung on his wrinkled face like a beggar’s sign.

  “I gotta take a lay-down,” said Dural. “Maybe later.”

  The old man looked disappointed, but nodded and went back into his room, closing the door without another word. He reminded Dural of some of the pitiful old lags in prison, the ones who would always be lonely even in the close company of a thousand men.

  Dural opened the door of his own room, picked up the newspapers lying just inside it and sat down on his bed. Then he glanced at the still-open door, frowned, got up and closed it. For so many years he had been accustomed to someone else closing the door on him: the sound of good-night was the clanging of iron on iron.

  He leafed through the newspapers, but none of the news meant anything to him. He knew the names of the major politicians, but they were irrelevant to him; he was like an African heathen arriving in Rome, wondering at the importance of bishops and cardinals. The sports pages had a few names he recognized (sport had never been censored on the gaol’s TV and radio; football brawls and thuggery were enjoyed as much by the prison officers as by the prisoners), but the cricket season was starting and he had never been interested in cricket. The financial pages were a foreign language to him; once, in the prison library, a white-collar criminal had tried to explain to him how the financial world worked, but Dural had just shaken his head and said he would rather remain dumb. The newspapers, he decided, would lead him nowhere, at least nowhere that he wanted to go.

  He was about to drop the papers on the floor when he remembered why the little old bloke next door had shoved them under his door. He leafed through the pages again, came to the six-inch item at the bottom of one of the inner pages of the Telegraph. There it was: his name and that of Sir Walter Springfellow, the released prisoner and the skeleton in the Blue Mountains bush. A strange coincidence, they called it: fucking reporters, they were always looking for an angle. He re-read the story, but there was no guts to it; even he could see that. He threw the paper on the floor and lay back on the bed, staring up at the ceiling and the single electric globe with its yellow paper shade. He had cursed Springfellow in court on the day the judge had sentenced him. The cold, stuck-up bastard had chopped him down, slice by slice, with words that had rung in his ears for months afterwards. He had raved for a couple of years against Springfellow, but in the end he had realized he was just shouting into a wind that blew back his abuse like piss in a gale. The rage and the wind had died down a long time ago and now, here, in this bare, lonely room there was only stillness. Only the skeleton in the bush could have been lonelier.

  It suddenly came to him that he was lost.

  III

  Mosman was a suburb that, to an outsider, never seemed to change. It was a good address from end to end; unlike other parts of Sydney, it had no poor end. The houses, even the smaller ones, were solid and had their own gardens; the few semi-detached cottages had a shy look ab
out them, as if their owners knew they were being tolerated only so long as they behaved themselves and kept themselves neat and tidy. Blocks of flats, known in the estate agents’ argot as home units, as if they were just cards in a game of Monopoly, were lumped about the district, but high-rise development was forbidden. Mosman prided itself on its conservatism; it was a suburb not given to spontaneity, at least not in the streets. Swingers from the eastern suburbs might have called it dull, but under the dull facade there was old, real money; and real money is never dull, least of all to the swingers from the eastern suburbs. Mosman was sure of its place in the sun; it was the suburb, its residents knew, where God would have resided if ever he had emigrated to Sydney from England. A thought that God had probably never had.

  Clements parked the car in Springfellow Avenue and looked around at the houses at this end of the dead-end street. “Respectable, aren’t they? You can smell it from here—respectability. You think they make love with their clothes on?”

  “You look as if you do. Why don’t you come over some night and let Lisa run the iron over you?”

  “I’m always reading about the heights of fashion. Why doesn’t someone write about the depths? I see you’re wearing your best suit today. Is that for Lady Springfellow?”

  “Wait till you meet her. You’ll wish you’d been to the dry cleaner’s.”

  Clements grinned, uninsulted, and got out of the car. He was not dirty in his habits; he was a regular at the dry cleaner’s. He just had the knack of being able to turn a suit into a mess of wrinkles within ten minutes of donning it. He had put polish on his shoes only once since buying them ten months ago, though he occasionally rubbed the toes of them on the bottoms of his trouser-legs. He straightened his tie and patted down the ends of his collar. “How about that? Bewdy Brummell.”