This Is the Grass

by Alan Marshall

  When his fight was over he returned to the pie-cart, often with blood on his face, to sell pies to congratulating patrons who found pleasure in making comments on his victories and in being recognised by him. He gave an impression of familiarity with Melbourne’s underworld, an impression that appealed to certain types of respectable and sheltered men who felt they added to their prestige by being able to talk about crooks and street-fighters with authority to their friends. A conversation with a boxer established them as authorities on boxing, acquaintance with tough men gave them a feeling of toughness in themselves.

  The slang of the streets and the gymnasiums punctuated their conversation, robbing it of its naturalness and revealing its pretence. In the company of a friend they greeted Flogger warmly, introducing him with pride, but when a policeman was standing near they avoided him.

  ‘The pies he sells are not the only ones he puts a finger in,’ a man told me. ‘Once a copper sees you with him he remembers it.’

  After my first glimpse of Flogger standing in front of his pie-cart I stood listening to him: ‘ ’Ot pies or frankfurt! ’Ot pies! ’Ot and steamin’! Pie or a frankfurt!’

  He had a penetrating voice that, though easily heard above the noise of the traffic, was still bound to it by reason of long association. Without it the voice of the city would have been the sound of things, and the warmth and excitement of man’s presence would have remained unheralded.

  I walked up and stood beside him with my back to the fire. ‘How ya goin’?’ I said.

  ‘Not bad,’ he replied. ‘Down for the show?’

  ‘No,’ I said, then added: ‘I don’t look like that, do I?’

  The remark pleased him for some reason. The Melbourne Agricultural Show that ran for a week each September drew thousands of country people to the city and it was the custom of Melbourne people to refer to these brown-faced men, who stood on the streets in front of their hotels at dawn each morning, as ‘country bumpkins’.

  The city welcomed them, its feeling of superiority emphasised by their presence, its greed heightened. Prices rose in all the shops and rorters like Flogger prepared to fleece any man who stood staring around him or looking upwards at the tops of the buildings.

  Flogger pondered my remark, smiling.

  ‘No, you don’t,’ he replied at last. ‘What’s your lurk, anyway?’

  ‘I just knock around,’ I said, but suddenly feeling I was out of character and acting a part, I added: ‘I’m a clerk,’ and having said it I felt at ease with him.

  ‘I know Gunner Harris,’ I told him. ‘He reckons he worked for you.’

  ‘Where’d ya meet Gunner?’ he asked me, his eyes sharp with interest.

  ‘At Wallaby Creek. He was working in the pub up there.’

  ‘Yes, he was knockin’ round for the good of his health for a while, on the move like. He’d take a job and snatch it in five minutes. Well, he’s back with me now. He’s on the cart some nights. You’ll see him.’

  He lifted his head and yelled: ‘ ’Ot pies or a frankfurt,’ then began again: ‘What were you doing up there?’

  ‘I was working in the Shire Office.’

  ‘How much did Gunner get off you?’ His eyes were full of knowledge.

  ‘Not much—a few bob at cards.’

  He grunted. ‘You couldn’t have been holdin’ too good.’

  ‘I wasn’t.’

  ‘How ya goin’ now?’

  ‘Just the same—broke.’

  ‘Yes, it’s hard to get the bastards your way, isn’t it! If I had all I’ve spent I’d still have nothin’.’

  A girl with an expressionless face heavily coated with makeup stopped and spoke to him. ‘Is Cassidy on the beat tonight?’

  ‘No,’ Flogger said. ‘You’re right.’

  He watched her walk away then said: ‘Policewoman Cassidy has the wind up the lot of them. Offer her a quid and she’d run you in.’

  Drifting people came to Flogger’s pie-cart to relax before the fire. Others came to it for conversation, for information, for release from a clutching worry that loneliness was emphasising.

  The prostitutes of Collins Street who had failed to get a man by nine o’clock converged there to exchange gossip; workmen on their way home from a late shift stopped to eat a pie; racecourse touts and urgers met there on Friday nights to pick up inside information; children ran from their mothers to pat the pony; plump charwomen, walking stiffly from rheumatics, bought pies to take home with them; sailors from ships in port collected there to stay their hunger; lascars ate bread rolls in front of the fire; country people carrying old suitcases paused to ask direction; men seeking women were told where they could be found. There was never a pause in action, in significant association, in living.

  Flogger’s pie-cart was a front seat in a drama played faultlessly by men and women living the parts circumstances and conditioning had allotted them. It was life they played, their lives. It was full of unfinished acts, meaningless entrances, exits that brought no conclusions. Tragedy and comedy merged, were sometimes indistinguishable one from the other, clashed and fell apart in sudden flares of illumination.

  There was nobility here, sacrifice, greed and lust. It was irrational, misdirected and incomplete but behind it all, justifying it, lifting it to the greatest heights, was truth.

  It was an enthralling play that could only be understood from the stage itself. Playing a role gave meaning to all that had gone before, to all that was still to come. The intricate pattern of its presentation was then revealed not as a purposeless gathering of unrelated incidents, but as a presentation of incidents all contributing to an enveloping theme, the upward struggle of man.

  God! To be in it! To be there! What magic was mine!

  It was played against a backdrop of flickering lights, gay windows, shunting trams, smoke from the pie-cart chimney, the glow of its fire and streams of people going to and from the station.

  Every night I stood beside Flogger and watched the drama, took part in it. The pie-cart became my home.

  2

  It was about nine o’clock at night and a young man stepped out of the station carrying a suitcase with two straps around it. He placed the bag on the kerb and stood looking round. He was wearing a blue twill suit that had been bought some years before when he had been younger and not so well developed. Now it was too small for him. He did not wear a collar or tie.

  I could see he was from the country and I felt sure he would come across to the pie-cart in a minute and ask where he could get a room for the night.

  I had watched many country people step out of the station, then stop and look around as this man was doing. They were the country people who had no relatives living in the city. Their trip away from home was often concerned with an illness from which one of them suffered and they arrived in Melbourne without having booked a room at a hotel.

  I could imagine them saying, when planning the trip: ‘We’ll go down for a couple of days and stay at a pub and you can see a good doctor then. It won’t cost much.’

  Their idea of the pub at which they were to stay was of a building something like the one in the country town they visited each week on sale day.

  The city did not seem so big from their bush home. When they stepped from the station its immensity startled them. The noise and clamour of the streets burst over them like a wave. Towering buildings and crowded streets confronted them. People hurried past them without a glance. It was bewildering and they felt lost. It was then they would see the pie-cart.

  ‘We’ll ask this bloke over here,’ the man would probably say, and they would stumble across the road carrying heavy bags and glancing fearfully at the hurtling traffic through which they had to thread their way.

  I had spoken to a number of these people. I always felt sorry for them. Flogger was never interested in a man if he was accompanied by his wife. He was protected. The country man arriving alone interested him. There were possibilities in him: he generally had money. He left th
e couples to me. I knew the type of hotel for which they were looking and could direct them to one.

  The young man across the street stood for a few minutes looking around him before crossing over. He bought a pie from Flogger, who had dismissed him as being a battler, and stood eating it near me while considering what he would do next.

  ‘Are you down for long?’ I asked him.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how long I’ll be here for. It can’t be too bloody short for me.’

  ‘Where do you hang out?’

  ‘I’m working up in the scrub. I’m on a timber-mill near Marysville.’

  To me the name ‘Marysville’ evoked a picture of mountain ash with their tops entangled in mist, of huge trunks with streamers of bark hanging down their sides.

  ‘There’s some big timber up there,’ I said.

  ‘There’s some big sticks where we are,’ he said. ‘They go up a hundred and eighty feet without a limb. Over a hundred feet of logs is a good tree. They’re all like that.’

  ‘Are you falling?’

  ‘No, I’m breaking down. I break the logs down into flitches. I was working on the twins and one of them is slack in the guts. A cobber of mine is doing my job while I’m away and I don’t like it. I hope he tightens up the packing. If he heats the saw’s guts it’ll take up the slack. I told him but he’s the sort of bloke that don’t remember.’

  He talked about his mates for a while but he was restless. ‘I came down to see a doctor,’ he said suddenly. ‘I’ve been crook for a week.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.

  ‘I got a dose from a sheila I went out with. She was all right; I got nothing against her, but she was jacked up and I was the mug.’

  ‘It was tough luck,’ I said. ‘You want to see a doctor quick. A lot of blokes neglect it.’

  ‘That’s what I reckon. One of my mates up there, he says to me: “Get some sweet spirits of nitre. In a fortnight you’ll be right as bloody rain.” But you couldn’t get it up there in the bush.

  ‘There was a bloke up there who’d had a dose and he reckoned I ought to take turpentine mixed with water and sugar. Hell! You don’t know where you are. Then another bloke told me to try zinc ointment. I’d ’ve tried it if I’d had it but I didn’t have it.

  ‘I tell you I was crook. I wanted to get to town. It’s no good, a man with jack on the job. You see, I never worry, but what’s worrying me is a bloke buggerin’ about down here and his cobbers up there. It’s hard on a bloke’s cobbers, that’s the trouble.

  ‘I’ve known Don—he’s my best mate; we split everything. Like, I’d be out of work and Don wouldn’t be—well, I get half his take. I’ve known Don since he was a kid. We always been together. Well, now I’m dwelling on him to keep me going. It’s not right. Don knows it’s not my fault, of course. Aw hell!’

  He stood for a moment staring across the street. ‘I know a bloke who’s had three doses. By hell I’ll never get another dose!’

  He picked up his suitcase. ‘I must go. I know a pub in Bourke Street. Don stopped there once.’

  ‘Hurroo,’ I said. ‘Good luck.’

  ‘Hurroo.’

  ‘What’s his squeal?’ Flogger asked me as we watched him walk up the street.

  ‘He’s got a dose.’

  ‘Did you tell him to go to the clinic?’

  ‘No, I didn’t. Should I have done that?’

  ‘ ’Course you should. Tell ’em all to go to the clinic. Hardly a night passes without some bloke asking you what he’ll do about it. Melbourne’s full of it. That bloke you were talking to is different from most of them. He spills the lot. The city blokes that catch it try to carry it off like a copper with a black eye. Go careful with them; they’re touchy.’

  As I saw it from the pie-cart, gonorrhoea was a disease of youth—larrikin youth. The fear of contracting it lurked like an animal ready to pounce in the shadow of their sexual yearnings. They talked about it, often with a pretended contempt and a sneering dismissal of its danger. Some, unable to face the truth, carried it like a banner, flaunting it as a symbol of their victories and their manhood. It was an attitude they felt established them as tough men of the world and gave them a feeling of superiority over those who expressed uncertainty and doubt about engaging in affairs that might result in their catching it.

  I didn’t like the larrikins who roamed in pushes. The suburbs were their home. In the city they were submerged by a mass of people and they lost their identity, their power.

  Without exception, they were all products of broken homes, of drunken parents, of an upbringing that drove them out to seek security in mobs where loyalty to each other and to their push was a religion.

  In their homes no one respected them. To their parents they were still children and they were treated as such. Their fathers roared at them, fighting to preserve their position of power against what was first a trembling and tearful rebellion, then a more outspoken and insulting one, then an arrogant and shouting assertion of opinion.

  The growing youth wanted respect. They wanted to be esteemed for their opinions, listened to with consideration for their problems, admired, praised, given a share of deference.

  You couldn’t get these things at home but you could get them in the push—if you were tough and hard and arrogant. So they developed these qualities. If you got your name in the papers for some vicious assault, some petty theft, the push acclaimed you. You were big. You could strut and demand and compel allegiance to your opinions. The values attainable to them were the values they cultivated.

  The seducing of a girl became an accolade in the hierarchy of the push. Their conversation centred, round girls, sheilas, and they hunted them ruthlessly. Those pathetic girls who clung together in pairs and who made the dance-halls their home passed on the disease they had caught from one of these swaggering hunters. When it became known amongst the boys who used them that a certain girl was diseased they avoided her and she was compelled to seek companionship in other dance-halls where she was not known.

  These girls were not prostitutes. They were the female equivalents of the boys who pursued them.

  The few larrikins I met viewed me as quite apart from their world, a person who by the very nature of his appearance could never participate in their life. They had no respect for me, no liking for me, only an ill-concealed contempt. In their estimate of any man they were directed not by mind but by emotion, and they flared quickly into savage insults at any defenceless person who crossed their path.

  When they came to the pie-cart I awaited any disparaging remark aimed at me with a tense, angry watchfulness. If the insult came I moved up to them and told them off with such confidence, such a sweep of eloquent invective that they usually moved back from me.

  My refusal to submit to insult always pleased Flogger who sometimes gave me encouragement in the midst of my outburst by exclaiming happily: ‘Give it to ’em!’

  It was Flogger’s presence that protected me. They were afraid of him. He had a reputation. His name had been in the papers. He was tough. He was big. He was what they wanted to be. One sharp word from him and they cowered away.

  They were ill at ease with prostitutes and spoke respectfully before them. The prostitutes ignored them. Their trade flourished on the patronage of married men and these vain youths with their arrogant bearing irritated them.

  ‘Get moving, mug. You should be home in the cradle,’ one of them snapped at a brash youth who tried to talk to her on terms of familiarity to impress his companions.

  The manner of these women towards prospective clients was quite different. It never contained friendliness no matter to what type of man it was directed, but to those matured men who faced them with money in their pockets and who spoke with lowered, taut voices, they were attentive. But no more than this. Their eyes were hard and calculating as they watched them, their minds keenly assessing, as they brought their knowledge of men to bear upon the self-conscious proposals being made to
them. In those few minutes they established a man’s type, whether some dark, twisted desire guided his words, his experience with women like them, his possibilities with regard to money, his need.

  The men with whom I heard them talking were men seeking their kind, and persuasion from the woman was unnecessary. These men, mostly from the country, found their way to the pie-cart after restlessly standing at street corners watching the women passing. Flogger could always pick them. Before they spoke to him he knew what they were seeking.

  To most of these men Flogger suggested hanging round the pie-cart until nine o’clock when the girls still unattached would wander down from Collins Street to see if he had roped in a man for them. He did not expect any commission for this service. He was never a tout.

  The men varied, but to me they all seemed burdened with a heavy discontent. It was other people who got the breaks, not them. They had all fled for a few days from homes in which love must surely have died to where their symbol of its expression could be bought.

  To one type Flogger gave a still attention. He surveyed them calculatingly. They were suckers with money, boastful men rocking on their feet from an afternoon’s drinking and flashing a roll they had brought down with them from their country farm or business. They were always married and they always asked: ‘Do you know where I can get a woman?’

  Across the street came one such man and Flogger watched him, noting his unsteady walk, the breadth of his shoulders, his reach. He knew instinctively whether a man could use his hands, whether he had courage. This man was soft.

  I did not hear their conversation though I sensed the man was boasting. I saw him reveal a roll of notes and knew what he was seeking.