We played to a string of packed houses too, and to good reviews, particularly for Max Van Cleef as Hamlet; Max had applied his genius here as he did to everything though I cannot imagine the role of ‘The Student Prince’ was ever better cast.
With my father away on a fishing trip the week we played, the night Mum came to see us she was button-holed directly after the show by the Headmaster himself. Yes, by none other than Monty-Python-and-Rock-and-Roll-are-Evil Father Dominic O’Reardon. ‘Well, Angela…’ he conceded, ‘a triumph.’
‘Gracious of you to say so, Father Headmaster,’ Mum fielded carefully.
‘He’s lucky, y’know; it’s a good year.’
‘Father?’
‘Yes… Every now and again there’s a year of boys that, well, that shines. This is one of them. Yet if Justin plays any more roles like that, Angela, I must confess I just don’t know…’ — Father Dominic the Legendarily Stern and Humourless fought hard not to smile — ‘I must confess I just don’t know.’
Work Experience
* * *
We didn’t get any.
Advertising agency? Radio station? TV studio? Nope. None.
I can only presume that Riverview boys are provided with work experience these days but what we got in its place was something termed ‘Community Service’. (Presumably we were being groomed for white-collar careers that would ideally remain one step short of actual jail-time for acts of fraud.) No?
Well it beats me.
For my Community Service I was sent every Friday
afternoon for three months the whole way across Sydney on a minibus with a bunch of disinterested graziers’ sons to the Long Bay Migrant Hostel, where we were to assist new migrants to Australia with their English skills.
The migrants were just so grateful for our presence. Of course the considerable cultural difference between us demonstrated to me (as an actual student of languages) that ‘gratitude’ can be expressed in varying ways by different cultures. For example, sometimes it can look to the untrained eye uncannily like ‘We were watching TV until you came.’ Sometimes like ‘I voz playing the cards. Every week it is same’, or even ‘Totch me, my boyfrient he keel you.’ And our boys from Dubbo proved to me just how splendidly their key school subject of Animal Husbandry in fact equips one to teach English as a Second Language.
I did take a shine, though, to an elderly Romanian couple named Edvard and Viga, and a shine they took to me, yet even I knew they were too old to learn a new language or at least by the time they were fluent it would be to say things like ‘Where am I?’ But they were a dear couple and insisted most adamantly, via non-verbal gesture, that I should indeed play the cassette I had in the mini cassette player in my shoulder bag even despite my desperate ‘Honestly, you won’t like it’ hand signals. Yet at long last I relented, pressed ‘play’ and braced for the worst as what then issued from the cassette player’s speakers were the psychedelic hunchback opening chords of Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix, the most arresting Acid-Rock song ever written.
They pretended to love it, Viga clasping her hands and swaying them and her cheeks from side to side as if entranced by a Romanian folk song from her girlhood village so long ago left behind. They were great, Edvard and Viga from Romania, and in that moment showed me what had presumably kept people in Romania instead of Siberia since the days of Stalin…
Fake rapture in the face of Anything.
Dear Juz
* * *
I had recently turned 17.
A letter came from Madeleine.
She didn’t say, ‘I’m sorry but…’ She simply gave me the facts. She had met someone else. If I had been able to make it down to Melbourne last holidays, she assured, things might be different now but I hadn’t so they weren’t.
She would be putting all the letters and cassettes from me in a large plastic garbage bag, sealing it and stowing it away. This is what she always did, she said, and she really did say this.
As for my own shoe box full of letters, cassettes and assorted love-trinkets from her, I carried it down our back garden path to our ‘incinerator’, an open-topped rectangular oven of soot-blackened stone blocks. There I opened the shoe box, picked out of it and held before me my colour photo of her — freshly removed from my school diary inside-cover, the picture that each of my friends had laid eyes on and been awed by. I looked one last time at her sensual, smiling face. Placed it back in the box. Replaced the lid. Dropped the box into the grey ash interior of the incinerator. Stepped back. Turned around. Walked back up the garden path and into the house and into my room.
Where I closed the door.
Closed the window.
Pulled the curtains shut.
Sat on the end of my bed.
And cried until I was hoarse.
I don’t know if anyone was home. In any case no one came.
Apparently no one heard.
Neville
* * *
My ‘Community Service’ was to have a crowning event.
In the form of an all-expenses-paid week at the ‘Saint Jude the Martyr Sub-Normal Boys Home, Morisset’, as it was then called.
I’m an author. My first three books have been, to my blessed relief, warmly received. Yet even I am at a loss to locate the words that can properly conjure how depressing this place was. Depression so thick you could smell it. I thanked Sweet Jesus, Mary and Joseph that I was only there for a week, unlike its unfortunate little inmates. I do not know what term our society uses for them these days but in 1985 they were termed ‘sub-normal boys’: boys, some not yet 10 years old, who had already been thrown out of every school and institution possible until landing here, the place they finally couldn’t get thrown out of. Except, presumably, to wherever it is that not-yet-10-year-olds are sent for being a physical danger to others.
About a 60 mile train journey north of Sydney, St Jude’s was a collection of old Catholic convent style brown-brick buildings of the type that manages to look dead creepy even in glorious sunshine. There were also fibro-cement ‘transient’ style blocks of the type built as cheap, temporary buildings during the Second World War yet which never went away. The whole place was set on vast, flat pasture land by the shores of Lake Macquarie, a body of water famed for its charming power stations. You could tell it was ‘pasture’ land not by the sight of cows but by the sound of their echoey groans across the dead flat distance as if in agony at being stuck here.
The staff were a sterling bunch of men and women: teachers and carers who, though youthful, seemed withered by their work, plus some plain-clothes nuns, all of them so dedicated, so many determined smiles. Their charges were young boys who referred to themselves as ‘subbies’. Young boys but with old eyes. Though I would be sitting in on their school classes, helping them with their work, my first impression of their world was of their ‘recreation’ room, specifically, of its library shelves: The first book I pulled out was a ‘Boys’ Own Annual’. From 1968.
Over the days that followed, one boy seemed drawn to me, a blond-haired kid by the name of Neville. One of the nuns warned me to be wary of him; he was known as highly manipulative.
‘Be yourself,’ she advised, ‘but try not to talk too much about the outside world. Particularly,’ she stressed, ‘don’t ask about his family.’
One day, after the end of school hours, I walked, as I had the previous day, down to the back end of the institution’s kitchen block, a secluded spot with a view of the lake’s shore — not just for the solitude the spot provided but also for one of the cigarettes I had recently taken up.
‘Buss-ted!’ called a voice from somewhere behind me. Dropping and squashing out the smoke I turned to see a small face poking round one corner of the building. It was Neville.
‘Hi,’ I managed as he sauntered towards me, his eyes avoiding mine as he neared.
‘I saw ya come down here yesterday,’ he said. ‘T’day I followed ya.’‘Well,’ I forced a smile, ‘sometimes I just like to be alone.’
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‘Yeah. So do I,’ he returned. ‘See that?’ He was looking out over the lake.
‘What?’ I turned torwards it, relieved at least he seemed to be ignoring the dead cigarette at my feet.
‘The power station,’ he said.
Its chimney stacks easily dominated the flat horizon of the distant shore.
‘At night,’ he squinted, ‘it’s got lights. All lit up. Real clear… Sometoimes I pretend it’s a boat. Comin’ in all silent. Comin’ in t’take me away.’ He looked up at me intently now. ‘If it did… wouldja come? …Wouldja?!’
‘Neville,’ I struggled, ‘if I did, they’d put me in jail. Wouldn’t they.’
His eyes were wild, his little face agog at my failure to understand: ‘But they’ll never FOIND us! ’
At night the boys slept in a dormitory hall in rows of ancient iron-framed beds that went on forever. After lights-out I stared from the window of my upper floor room, only darkness and the groans of agonised cows in the distance, wondering what the fuck I was doing here. What good was I doing for these poor boys? For Neville and his lights…
Despite each day digging deep within me to be some positive presence for the boys, I knew one thing for certain, though not why. Yet it was a certainty unlike anything I had ever known; a certainty pressing down upon me like a physical force: With a terrible, nervous tension twist in my stomach that just wouldn’t quit, I knew that I wasn’t supposed to be Here.
I’d be gone in a day or so, I knew that.
But I knew I’d long remember Neville.
Neville and his boat.
Its lights coming in all silent to take him away.
When All Hope Is Lost…
* * *
At 17 I had actually grown a grey hair or two by the end of my second-last year of school (and also upped my daily number of cigarettes), my chances of success in my upcoming final year seeming dicey at best. In any case the Christmas Holidays had arrived.
I hadn’t told Mum about my break-up with Madeleine. Though I think she’d sensed it. I wasn’t sure. Sweet Jesus save us from Adolescence: the age where you can no longer talk to your darling Mum despite having done so all the way through Childhood. For the moment apparently Dad was on another fishing holiday…
‘You can go to Melbourne now if you like,’ she said one morning. She said it flatly, firmly. No explanation of why I could go now but not before. I didn’t ask. I just went. I had phoned Germaine and she said she’d just love to have me stay for a week. Even two! Besides, she said, her parents adored me.
In Melbourne, she met me right off the train on the platform of Spencer Street Station. Same black ‘bob’ hairstyle and wicked grin, eyes like a friendly Siamese cat, she was wearing black suede pointy boots, black leggings and an American Indian poncho. From beneath it, she put out her hand. I took it.
‘Come on,’ she smiled.
On the tram ride on the way to her home, as it passed by my window I caught sight of a park through which Madeleine and I had strolled so close together, her arm around my waist, mine around hers, me scarcely able to believe that a girl so beautiful could find ME desirable yet euphoric that she did. And there it passed, the park where we’d sworn we would be once again, in Madeleine’s words, waltzing together just like in the song by The Doors. Wintertime Love.
Clearly Germaine saw my lingering gaze, and placed her hand on my forearm. ‘It’s over,’ she pressed. And I knew it was, in my mind, even as she said it. I knew also, as if something physically lifted off my shoulders in that moment, that I would never think of Madeleine again. And, until writing this, I never did.
Though early December — the beginning of summer in Australia with nights balmy to hot in Sydney — the nights in Melbourne were still mercifully cool. Cool enough to dress up and hit the town. Which we did on that very first night. And when we hit it, I realised Melbourne had something Sydney did not.
Nightclubs.
Sure, Sydney had nightclubs but not the kind that welcomed two kids under the legal drinking age with open arms — perhaps because, as was clear from the first establishment we entered, the emphasis here in Melbourne wasn’t on drinking but on dancing.
Stepping down into the ‘Groove Tube Café’, a whole dance floor full of people going coolly berserk to Stepping Stone by The Monkees, on the walls and on the dancing people were revolving cartwheels of colour, each wheel of numberless coloured spokes all intermeshing with others in perpetual harlequin-shaped motion.
‘This is AWESOME,’ I sided to Germaine above the music.
‘As it should be,’ she returned close to my ear. ‘Sydney’s got natural beauty. Melbourne…’ She shook her head. ‘So we make beauty.’
‘I can’t believe this!’
‘Believe it,’ she flowed. ‘Sydney, you’re fine if you like the one thing that every club in Sydney is doing. Here there’s so many clubs there’s always one doing what you like. I like Go-Go. And here it is…’
Go-Go Dancing! And here indeed it was… Just like in the black-and-white photo in the school library except exactly 20 years later and in colour and I’d just stepped into the photo. And the people before us weren’t just dancing like fools (not that there’s anything wrong with that); here there was a definite style, just like in the still photo from 1965 except here it was moving and, man, was it moving. Some of the dancers were better than others but their style was a mix of mania and grace, a fusion of passion and poise only ever seen elsewhere in Flamenco dancers.
But then Stepping Stone finished and a song began that I had once heard for the very first time through Steve, one he by now famously hadn’t thought I’d like…
HHEOWWWWH! !
I Got You by James Brown meant one thing only. I spun to Germaine.
‘Dance?!’
For the second time that day she put out her hand to me.
Though this time I didn’t ‘take’ it, as such…
I grabbed.
After several similarly wondrous songs to which we danced in full go-go flight with the rest of the floor, we stopped for a necessary breath, and a drink…
While I leant in to the bar to order two gin and tonics in tall, icy glasses, Germaine leant in to me and kissed me sidelong on the cheek. Coming completely out of the blue, I assumed it must have been just a friendly kiss; as far as I knew, Germaine was still with my best friend, Steve, at least in some long-distance sort of way…
I turned to her with our two tall glasses, proffering one to her. ‘Cheers,’ I smiled. She took hers, but also mine, placed them aside on the bar, leant forward to me again, and kissed me passionately on the lips.
When the shooting, sparkling, whizzing fireworks within and all around me had settled to the extent that I could make words once again, ‘But what about Steve?’ I said.
‘It’s over,’ she breathed. And kissed me passionately again.
This time I kissed her passionately right back, happiness flowing all through my body. And the sweetest, sweetest kind of happiness…
The kind that you never imagine in your wildest dreams will ever come your way. When it does.
This time in delicious physical contact the whole tram ride home, until the early hours we played pool and laughed and talked and sipped peach schnapps from tiny glass goblets. One last kiss at the top of the grand sweeping stairway and then to separate rooms, I fell asleep in a state of perfect contentment, once again that herb-scented coolness wafting down upon me through the open window.
Mid-morning, I was woken by Germaine’s call at my door: ‘There’s coffee and orange juice downstairs on the kitchen bench if you want it. Then come back up.’
Sounding lovely to me, I expected to find her charming mother down there, only to find the kitchen and apparently the whole vast ground floor of their house silent and deserted. On the kitchen bench was the orange juice and percolator of steaming black coffee. Also a hand-written note.
Papa and I off to Phillip Island for the day. Enjoy, my darling. Mama.
<
br /> I considered this note as I sipped my coffee and juice and then went back upstairs as invited. Seeing Germaine’s door was closed, I knocked, heard her call to enter, and did so.
Across her room, she was standing by her bed wearing a red silk kimono: a really deep, glossy red but vibrant at the same time and with golden Chinese motifs, below its hem her white shins and bare feet. Beneath her black bob, she was softly smiling.
‘Close the door,’ she said.
I did so. And turned back towards her. She was still smiling, though it had softened further.
‘Merry Christmas,’ she said.
Melbourne Beauty
* * *
Though it had been a wonderful two weeks, bliss, we both knew that the long-distance thing didn’t work — Germaine from Steve, me from Madeleine — and we parted passionate friends. And there’d been no sadness on parting; I think we both knew that what we’d shared had been not romance but fireworks. Germaine had been the smiling, wicked angel who showed me that, just sometimes, you can have everything and be everything you ever needed. And together we made some beauty. Melbourne beauty.
A few days after my arrival home, a package arrived in the post from Germaine. It contained not only a lovely letter from her plus her latest Jackson Pollack-influenced mini work of art in psychedelic crayons but also cassette recordings she’d made for me of late-night programs from Melbourne’s 3PBS and 3RRR FM community radio stations: And thus entered my ears for the first time the rare and utterly brilliant Australian 60s music at the time being reissued on vinyl by Australian music expert, Glenn A. Baker. Yet most striking of all in this lovely package was the latest issue of no less than Melbourne’s ‘60s Appreciation Society Magazine’: Its cover was an illustration looking uncannily like the pair of us in full go-go flight on the dance floor on our first glorious night together.
Memoirs of a Go-Go Dancer Page 11