by Alan Collins
The Bondi tram rattled on its way to the terminus at North Bondi, leaving the four of us on the grassy verge beside the tracks framed by the curve of the beach. Ma Compton had no eye for its beauty, being a denizen of the inner western suburbs' urban drear. This was the first time in her circumscribed world that she had set foot in a seaside suburb, reserving Bondi for her particular scorn; a breeding ground of crime and debauchery, or so it was reported in her favourite tabloid, the scurrilous Smith's Weekly. This xenophobic, horridly racial, anti-Semitic rag was Ma Compton's vade-mecum from which she fuelled her store of malevolence.
Naturally, Sampson Collins, the Jewboy she had acquired as a son-in-law, would choose to bring her daughter here rather than around the corner from her in Arncliffe or Tempe or Marrickville or . . . she gripped my shoulder fiercely as a young man clad in thin cotton bathing trunks, his crotch clearly defined, strode past her, his towel brushing her dress. My father, with Shirley on his arm, like some Portuguese navigator sighting the coast of Terra Australis, pointed to the signboard. 'Francis Street, Shirl, not like with my sister Fanny. Y' wouldn't like to say you're living in Fanny Street, now would you?' Shirley giggled at this mildly risque inference and clung possessively to her new husband's arm. Ma Compton propelled me forward with a bony finger in the small of my back and the frequent use of 'brat' when the need arose to speak to me. Our tour group scrambled up and down the little hills as Francis Street wormed its way from the beachfront towards the junction with Wellington Street, a distance of just over half a mile. Rows of simple little semi-detached cottages were sometimes interrupted by stolid blocks of flats on the low side of the street providing dark, below-ground-level living at lower rents. My father counted off the house numbers on the even and high side of the road. His voice rose from a mumble to excitement as he came nearer.
'Fortyfour, fortysix - ah, look there Shirl, fortyeight! That's ours, the one with the loquat tree in the front.' He broke into a trot, hobbled by Shirley in her tight skirt. I was not far behind and had run ahead of Ma. I reached my father's side and insinuated my wiry body between him and Shirley Compton, only now she was Mrs Sampson Collins, the fourth lady to own this title. For the second time in my small memory, my father put his hand on my head.
'What do you think of your new home, Alan me boy?' Quite dizzy from this affection, I hardly looked at the cottage in front of me. I looked up at my father but he was now, aah, actually kissing Shirley and she with a free hand was pushing me out of the circle. 'Does it matter, Sam, what the brat thinks? What about me? Ask me, why don't you?' My father flushed and said, 'There's three bedrooms and a kitchen and dining room and the agent said it was painted only a short time back. Shops 're just up the street and . . .'
Ma Compton arrived, breathless but far from wordless. 'What rent we payin'? she panted out. 'Not worth more than thirty bob a week in anybody's money.' She elbowed me aside and attacked the wire gate, only to yell with pain as a broken strand tore her palm. She swore with plenty of 'bloody's and 'bugger's being thrown around, scything down the rampant sunflowers bordering the path to the front door. 'Well, don't stand there like a bloody ninny. Where's the front-door key?' My father dug it out of his fob pocket but Shirley took it from him and held it, with her little finger crooked as though it was a teacup.
'OK, big boy,' she said in the style of one of her Hollywood blonde heroines. 'You gotta carry me over the - what's it called, Ma?'
'Doorstep, Dad,' I put in excitedly. My father (I was warming to him enough to call him Dad but not to try for Daddy) said, 'Threshold, Alan, and I'm supposed to carry me wife across it.' He managed to lift his bride off her feet and moved to the door where she inserted the key while her husband puffed with the effort. I went to follow the lovebirds inside but, wouldn't you know, the stick insect's claw gripped my neck and threw me out of the doorway where I fell onto the splintery verandah. The front door slammed and then opened enough for Ma Compton to stick her head out. 'You'll come in when I say so and not before,' she spat at me. My spirits sank; the hope and the happiness I had no reason to expect had gone in a moment. I could have shown some fight, banged on the door, kicked at it, even called 'Dad', but knew in my childish heart that it would do no good. I sat on the gasmeter box and blubbered. When that subsided, I climbed up the loquat tree; from its branches I could see into the empty front room. My father had Shirley in his arms. Looking over her shoulder he saw me among the foliage and gave a halfwave. Shirley, freed from his embrace, spotted me; her mouth worked angrily. I didn't need to hear her to know that hate was spewing out.
My father came out some time later. He patted my head. Why, I asked myself, couldn't he hug me like he hugged Shirley, why did I have to be content with a pat on the head, like a fuckin' bloody rotten shithouse dog, I swore with all the words I had ever heard. 'Well now, son,' he started (oh ho, now I was SON once more, no ALAN, thank you), 'the girls are going to the shops soon so we'll have a bit o' time to ourselves to look around, alright?' Like a scared rabbit, he popped back inside the house.
A girl of my own age, about eight I reckoned but you don't know with girls, paused outside the gate. She tossed her shiny sausage curls and called out in a tinny littlegirl voice, 'Are you going to live here, are you?' I nodded; then, responding to a voice that held no threat, I got off the gas box and came down to the gate. 'Your eyes are all red. I bet you've been crying,' she commented, but not unkindly. She pushed the gate open, came in and, lifting up her dress hem, dabbed my eyes. 'My name is...' but before she could tell me, Ma Compton yelled over her shoulder, 'Come here, you two, come and see what this filthy little beast's been up to. Gawd save us, he's hardly in the house for a moment and he's liftin' up the dress of this poor child.'
The 'poor child' stood her ground. 'Go away, you, he's my friend,' she said in a sturdy voice. She took my hand. 'What's your name? Mine's Gertie but I wish it wasn't.'
Ma Compton spat out, 'Brat, that's his name, so now you know so go away.'
Gertie turned her grey eyes to me. 'Do you want me to go?' Her tinny littlegirl voice had now changed to one of childish gravity. I screwed up my courage, went up close to her, so close that I could smell the Pears' soap that floated around her like a halo. 'My name is Alan,' I said and simultaneously inhaled her aura. Gertie nodded, mouthed my name silently and with a swish of her dress skipped to the front gate. She paused and waved by fluttering her fingers and once more became a little girl, consciously skipping down Francis Street like the saccharine little girls in her storybooks.
By this encounter, my fear of the stick insect had been reduced ever so slightly; when she now slapped my face, I barely felt it. She called me brat but I was sure I detected a tiny crack in her ferocious facade. Maybe through Gertie's courage I had gained some ground and Ma Compton had retreated ever so slightly.
I resumed my seat on the gas box as she went back into the house. The door slammed behind her. To me it was a welcome sound; my dreams of a happy home at No. 48 had been destroyed anyway. I would sit here on this bloody gas box and wait for what would happen next in the life of my father Sampson Collins, his new bride Shirley and the stick insect Ma Compton. Still, I hoped it would not be too long in coming. I was getting very hungry!
.... ....
Shortly after, the two women came out of the house, ignoring me as I sat like a gnome on the gas box. They were out the front gate and up the side lane before I moved. I climbed the loquat tree once more to see my father in the front room, sitting on a fruit box. My heart went out to him. I saw no difference between him on the fruit box and myself on the gas box. 'Dad!' I called. 'Hey, look at me, I'm out here on the tree.' I picked a loquat and threw it at the glass. He looked up, then left the room to reappear at the front door. He came to the foot of the tree and gazed up at me. I had never viewed him from this angle; he seemed diminished or had I grown? Whatever it was, at this moment our position was reversed. I felt older, and when I spoke, it was with an inexplicable maturity. 'What'll we do now, Dad?' I
looked down on him, his upturned face, anything but the smiling, joking, king-of-theroad ladies' man commercial traveller he fancied himself to be. Sampson Collins, I reckoned, could be a much diminished husband and father.
He looked around furtively. 'I reckon we could go into the house together, Alan, and have a good look around.' He held out his hands to me as I climbed down. I really did not need his help but it was lovely to have his hands around my waist. Well . . . Alan and Sam mounted the steps, went in through the front door and at that point I felt for his hand and curled up inside as we stood in the bare hall. Not having ever lived in a house (Uncle Harry's was a tiny one-bedroom flat), I was open-mouthed as we progressed from one room to the next, hardly listening to my father calling off the three bedrooms, the front room, the kitchen and bathroom and so through to the back where to the left was a lavatory behind a wooden door with a gap at the bottom and a spiky top; this was joined to the laundry on the right-hand side by a strip of red concrete and roofed over with corrugated iron.
I was bursting with questions. I tugged on his hand. 'Where will I sleep, Dad? Can I please have the one with the tree outside it?'
'No, son, that's the main bedroom,' and to forestall me, 'the one on the other side is going to be the sitting room.' I giggled. 'But Dad, you were sitting down in the bedroom. Are you going to sit in this room as well?' I ran down the hall and pushed open the door of a smaller room. He followed me and stood in the doorway. 'This can be your room, Alan.' He sucked in his breath. 'At least, I hope so.' He took my hand once more and we walked into the backyard, which was kneedeep in paspalum. The pods stuck to his pants and to my socks. We went back to the house and paused in the kitchen, the only room that gave any clue to the previous tenants - a calendar from a rubber company and a dried-up knob of Reckitt's Blue. My father anchored his fingers in his waistcoat, a gesture that seemed to restore his confidence. 'Listen, Alan, why don't you hop outside and look for the delivery van. Should be here pretty soon. Mind you, it's a long way from Surry Hills where my stuff is stored.'
I did as I was asked and sat once more on the gas box where I had a clear view up and down Francis Street. A van appeared and disappeared as it traversed the little hills and hollows of Francis Street. As it grew near I could hear the gears grinding and the engine labouring. Finally it stopped outside No. 48, the driver swinging down and checking his docket book. He looked up and called out, 'Hey, young shaver, Collins 'ouse, is it?'
'Bloody right,' I said, as grown up as I could. 'Hang on. I'll call the old man.'
'Cheeky little bugger, aren't you,' he grinned. 'You can gimme a hand if you like.'
I went inside and reappeared with my father who had unaccountably put on his coat and now assumed an air of authority. He climbed into the van and started counting the boxes, then he took out his gold Eversharp propelling pencil and signed the carter's docket with a flourish. The nuggety carter said, 'I hope you and the nipper will give us a hand with this lot.' There ensued a lot of huffing and puffing but the tough little carrier did the lion's share while my contribution was no more than holding the doors open. Soon he was back in the driving seat, having chastised my father for not having so much as a bottle of ale for him. Did I see him stroke an imaginary beard behind my father's back in imitation of what he imagined all Jews were like?
There really wasn't that much after all. My father's possessions, representing maybe seven or eight years since the death of my mother, amounted to two tea chests (with weird Ceylonese words stencilled on the sides), two pineapple cases (produce of Bowen, Qld) and three soap cartons (Sunlight by Lever Bros). This was the detritus of one room in the Commercial Travellers' Club and three attempts at homemaking.
We stood and looked at them. The tea chests and pineapple cases were nailed down. My father searched helplessly in his pants pockets and came up with nothing, unless you counted a slim silver penknife. He was about to tackle the soap cartons with this. I slipped out the front door and ran down to the loquat tree; from my foothold in its branches I remembered seeing in the long grass a broken spade. Yep, it was still there just a rusted hunk of steel with about two inches of rotten wood still riveted to it. I scraped the mud from it in the long grass and bore it in triumph to my father, who was staring in disbelief at his open knife minus its main blade now wedged under the flap of the carton. He took the busted spade from me and in no time flat had the boxes and chests open to expose wads of old newspapers. He threw these aside before I could read the lurid headlines about a headless body found under a Moreton Bay fig tree in the Domain.
Before he could stop me, I dived into one of the boxes and withdrew a chrome naked lady holding a bare lightglobe. My father took it from me and dug around until he found the pearl globe shade that went with it.
'Isn't she a beauty, Alan?' I tried not to look too closely at the naked lady with the pointy chest, not too different from Shirley's. I dived once more into the box and came up with a flat parcel very carefully wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. My father took it from me and, with the remaining blade of his penknife, slit the string.
'Go out the front, Alan, and see if the girls are coming.'
I did as I was told but peeped around the door. Sampson Collins stripped the wrapping away from the parcel to reveal two picture frames. He held them up to the light. I could now see them quite clearly. Naked ladies (again!) cavorted around a little stream while men (at least I thought they were men, they had horns on their heads) gawped at them. It took me half a lifetime to establish that they were drawings by the uninhibited, talented artist, Norman Lindsay. When he called me back inside, the pictures had been covered over and stood against the wall. The unpacking proceeded but I took little interest in it. A lot of it was his traveller's samples: thick hotel crockery and glassware, some towels and so on. He kept mumbling, 'Dunno if it's worth keeping. Could give it to the old woman. She could take it home, get her out of our way.'
Nothing had been said as to where we were to sleep that night. There wasn't a skerrick of furniture anywhere. I tugged at my father's sleeve and posed the question.
'Ah, Alan me boy, where else but up at the Royal Hotel up the top of the street. I spoke last week to Andy Flannery, used to be a good customer of mine, well, Andy says he's got a couple of rooms he could let us have for a while until we get settled.' He hooked his fingers in his waistcoat as he always did whenever he was about to lie or exaggerate. He bent down to me. 'Farshteyst? Alan?' He laughed, 'That's Yiddish, me boy, means understand. Got it? The only other word you need to know is bilik, means cheap. Farshteyst?'
I went outside and sat on the gas box, rolling these two words around and saying them out loud. The sparrows understood Yiddish ' they sat on the railing and mimicked me.
...6...
Like the sparrows but over and above their bickering, I heard Shirley and her mother coming down the lane that ran next door but one to 48 Francis Street. I left the gas box and climbed up the loquat tree, the best place to be where Ma could not get at me. I froze in the tree until the two of them entered the front door. They were laden with shopping bags carrying the names of Mark Foy's and Snow's, the department stores. In the couple of hours my father and I had without them, they had managed to go into the city and return.
Sampson Collins, married only a few hours earlier, got in first before the stick insect could spear him with the obvious, 'And where do you think we're going to sleep tonight?' She threw her arms about encompassing the empty house.
Sam slipped his arm around Shirley: 'We're going to have a night or two at the Royal Hotel in Bondi Road. It'll be our honeymoon, won't it, darls?'
'I thought we were going to the Hydro Majestic in the Blue Mountains.'
'All booked out,' he lied. 'Anyway, this way we can...'
'And what about me, if you please?' Ma screeched.
'Got a double room for you, same as for me and Shirl. Alan can share with you.'
The old woman exploded and her curses made it quite plai
n that I would not 'whatever it was that was planned for me. 'The brat can mind the house. Get him a stretcher or some thing. I don't give a damn if he sleeps on the floor.'
The light was fading. Sampson Collins, brand-new bridegroom, had forgotten to have the electricity connected. He rummaged through the packing cases and came up with what I recognised as the travel rug from his days on the road in the Ford tourer. He also spread on the floor the once creamcoloured dustcoat that was the uniform of the travelling man.
'Keep you snug for a while, Alan,' he said apologetically.
'I'm hungry,' I whispered, not wanting the women to hear me. He whispered back, 'Stay shtum.' (This was another Yiddish word - that made three that he knew! Any mug could figure that it meant be quiet.) 'I'll nip up to the fish 'n'chip shop and bring some back for you.' Another rummage and he found a torch that miraculously still worked. I went outside and sat on my friend, the gas box.
All was not well inside the house. My father's voice was a blustering but futile acquiescence to the two women, who flourished a department store catalogue. He never got further than, 'But listen . . .' Of course, they didn't listen until he finally exploded.
'For God's sake, I've spent bloody years on the road. D'you think I don't know what goes on in business?' I watched through the curtainless windows. He now sat on one of the tea chests and wagged a finger at them; he stuck his thumbs in his vest, a sure sign that he had something portentous to throw in. 'Solly Berman, that's who we should be talking to. Smartest fella in the furniture game. Known Solly for years. A bloody wizard when it comes to a metsieh.'