by Robert Drewe
‘Another thing, they teach you you can fuck anyone.’
Paul’s right eye gives a twitch. ‘Compulsory, is it, like the colour scheme?’
Yvonne grabs up his cigarette from the ashtray and draws on it savagely. ‘Some Orange chick gives him a dose and he’s out on his Samoan arse.’
As she flicks away an old Hungarian regular is looking up from his coffee and staring at her breasts with a pale intensity. His cheeks are almost translucent; the blue veins show through the skin. Yvonne is still in a state. ‘Can I get you anything?’ she demands, shaking them deliberately.
‘No zenk you.’
‘Not even a pig knuckle?’ she calls over her shoulder as she skims through the kitchen doors.
Breakfast is stretching to its limit but Paul is loath to leave the security of Mario’s. He prolongs his coffee into tortured pornographic imaginings, grainy sauna scenes, bath and bedroom epics featuring the newly compliant Faye and a representative range of performers: brunette spectacled businesswoman types (who let their hair down dramatically), spunky freckled beach girls, a leathered German prison camp wardress or two. Women will take bossiness from other women. Men are dopey innocents, trusting and bumpy as old Labradors. Women are smooth, create secrets and carouse like cobwebs against each other. Did the taste of Joanne come into her mouth as she trimmed and tailored her background material for him? Paul begins to secretly cry.
He must be in a bad way for his thoughts to now turn sentimentally homeward — to beach, school, teenage raging and roast dinners. Abruptly he suffers remorse. Lately he hasn’t been a wonderboy son. He has flown in the face of their proud expectations. Kind, contemporary Mum and Dad had allowed him to sample the Californian education system and Malibu and Huntington Beach with its oil derricks on the bloody sand and La Jolla Cove, not to mention Disneyland and Alcatraz. Who else did he know who had discussed his future as an intelligent and creative adult in a funky restaurant in Santa Barbara often frequented by the Ronald Reagans? They weren’t there that day.
(‘What do you think you’d like to do, Paul?’
‘I’ve boiled it down to either painting or film directing.’
‘Terrific,’ enthused creative Dad, looking up the latest David Hockney exhibition and booking on the Universal Studios tour. Dad liked what Hockney did with Los Angeles swimming pools: ‘Amazing for an Englishman, he gets the water just right.’ A minor sorrow of Dad’s life was that Hockney was (a) homosexual, and (b) an artistic interpreter of still water rather than surf. Dad suggested that when Paul was a famous painter too he could rectify this, fill the art vacuum for heterosexual, surf-obsessed sensualists.)
This was one family with never a squabble on the generation-gap classics — hair and clothing, drugs, drink and driving; rational discussion instead on politics and the drug problem over a Sunday morning backyard beer. And attention had been paid to his own thin-skinned feelings all the way up to, during and after the split. Only he hadn’t realised the split was going on! What a shock! He’d still been getting reconciled to the idea of them fucking each other much less other people.
Some mornings he woke, and for a second he was still a kid and they were all together and everything was sunny and comfortable. There was a particular light coming through the window that recalled holidays, and the future’s farthest reaches were six weeks away.
Paul can’t adjust to the existence of sex this morning. He dries his eyes feeling cynical, bruised and self-righteous. He hasn’t the mental or physical energy to sort out the battery problem just yet. Perhaps a swim will help straighten him out.
As he farewells Yvonne and crosses the street from the café the beach is already dotted with sunbathers and a heavy surf is breaking over a shallow bank near the shore. Narcissists are on display. Bare breasts flash, fleshy buttocks devour their G-strings, oiled couples slither and smoodge. Unhappily, Paul scuffs along, finds a bare section of territory next to three off-duty Hari Krishnas and stretches out.
While the Faye question throbs in the foreground it is hard to redirect his present, much less his neglected future. The problem of somewhere to live suddenly arises. Still in the flat are his clothes and books, his tri-fin and his painting materials. The money difficulty looms larger than ever. And overlaying everything is the general problem of what his father would call ‘attitude and character’.
The trouble is, as he often told Faye, he likes to control his own destiny, hates to feel plucked up and swept along by the fates. (He was no fan of her tarots, astrology and palm-reading.) The fates unfortunately include organised learning and relations with the commercial community. His three retrenchments proved him right. After the last he chose to withhold his presence from further such activities. In his private moments Paul yearns for effortless fame.
In this mood he considers going home to Mosman, but quickly discards it. His mother has a ‘friend’ called Gordon. (‘Dear, I’d like you to meet my friend, Gordon.’) Friend! Come off it, Mum. Until today the shock of his life had been seeing the empty champagne bottle on her bedside table. Two glasses. He’d just been looking for clean socks. He can’t go home.
His father? His father’s patience finally ran out in the lounge bar of the Lord Dudley. Before a crackling fire, in a tasteful atmosphere of middle-class desperates chatting up girls with Rugby anecdotes and business wisecracks, they drank Guinness while Dad wrote out a cheque.
‘I’m afraid this is the last,’ he said. ‘You’re twenty and you don’t stick at things.’
It was peculiar that when people screwed up their lives they wanted everyone around them to act with greater wisdom and responsibility.
Paul was so mortified he could have bolted. His father was rehearsed. His hand was shaking as he wrote the cheque. His voice was very quiet and hurt and his face had a wistful, ageing smile, an and-I-was-pinning-all-my-hopes-on-you-son smile.
‘You want to be a painter who doesn’t paint,’ his father said. ‘Before that you were a student who didn’t study, who became a surfer who didn’t surf. All this aggressive laziness is a pretty shitty philosophy. In my day we worried about Vietnam. Hippies cared in those days.’
‘Yes, I’ve heard your Bob Dylan records.’
‘Do yourself a favour and get an education. I’ll pay for it. At least know what you’re dropping out from.’
‘You think I don’t?’
He had a sickening image of the new-look Dad fucking one of those empty snobbish girls across the bar. He left the cheque on the arm of his comfy pub armchair and lurched out into the street with a Guinness headache.
Paul actually feels too frail for the surf, he realises. He would never have imagined it but he is a shell, a piece of flotsam so insubstantial any one-footer could dump him. Even the neighbouring Hari Krishnas could have it all over him. Pallor, pony-tail top-knots and all, they are showing a joyous vigour and a surprisingly civilian ability at bodysurfing. In their flippers and Speedos they are just ordinary Aussie lads kicking on to the big ones, he thinks, struck abruptly by an idea for a painting, ‘The Haris at Bondi’, the three moon-white, scalped Haris frolicking among the suntans in the breakers. He has never painted this beach and would suddenly like the challenge. To get these mixed feelings down would be stimulating, the nice contrast of the hedonistic sun worshippers and the innocent eccentric sportsmen. Today, he notices, the beach has a post-impressionist, subjective atmosphere worth recording. There is a brightness defining the edges of the headlands and the roofs of the apartment blocks.
Excitement strikes Paul.
He is fidgety now with the idea of painting and gets up from the sand with surprising purpose to plot his creative plans. Ideas flit through his head. Trudging through the bustle of physical pleasure, the screams of children and the Gauguin fleshiness of bare-breasted women, he arrives unintentionally at the Bondi baths. Seeing further potential imaginative vistas in the green deep of the pool and its bordering white-painted rocks, he pays his entrance, takes off his T-shirt and dives
in.
It’s like swimming in the polar bears’ pool at the zoo. The dark still water is overhung by rocks like simulated ice floes. He swims a length effortlessly and lightly, breathing freely in a new dream, turns and swims back, and then again, ten, twelve, sixteen times, half a mile.
Instead of bears the baths’ other inhabitants are skylarking Maori children and elderly Middle Europeans playing cards. Paul spreads out to dry on the warm rocks among them. The sun beats on his eyelids; inside them a paramecium revolves. A blink and it changes pattern like a kaleidoscope. Someone touches his foot.
‘I can’t stand it, you following me around all the time,’ announces Yvonne from Mario’s café. Yvonne is wearing a black bikini bottom and a silver slave bracelet around one ankle. There are no paler marks where a bikini top could be. She is actually eating a Paddlepop, with aplomb, so symbolically he could laugh, her tongue never missing a drip, perched archly on the rocks with her high brown breasts pointing across the Pacific to New Zealand. They sit and talk. The surf breaks against the side of the baths. Sometimes a faint mist of spray passes over them. The tide turns; the sun over the apartment blocks creates half rainbows. Its brightness is refracted by the later hour and the humidity, the edges of the headlands are becoming softer too and the horizon is blurring.
While he’s at it he could paint all this as well.
They leave together. There is hardly any conversation or indecision about their destination. Yvonne’s flat is only two blocks away. It is small and its walls feature gift shop prints of big-eyed street waifs and sad anthropomorphic kittens. Paul blocks out the cats and waifs and more with a glass of wine and a shared joint. The lump is not in his mind to mention. His condition, he would have to say, is stable.
In bed Yvonne is lithe and passionate and full of grave and graceful tricks. She nibbles him with her little broken tooth and runs her tongue between his toes. She swivels around and over him, yelping, with her black hair in her eyes.
Paul licks the musky ear, feels the earrings with his teeth. He plunges into a South Seas heaven. He is totally submerged in thermal springs of heat and sweetness when he makes his final unfortunate discovery of the day. Through the front door and straight into the bedroom with amazing momentum arrives a vision in pink and red, his flying head awhirl with wilting dreadlocks, his hands grabbing up anything for weapons, his sobbing body a testament to instinct.
The Last Explorer
The last explorer wears green pyjamas, embossed with tiny heraldic shields, buttoned up to his chin. A pink coverlet is drawn up to his chest.
From his bed at the end of the ward he can see the Indian Ocean, choppy and blue, outside his window. He never learned to swim. The view of the sea is a favour they have given him, but he does not appreciate it.
Henry Ford also did not like the sea, a point he mentioned during their meeting in Detroit. Hence Ford’s concentration on land transport.
The only ‘ship’ he himself appreciates is the ‘ship of the desert’ — the camel. The camel is the explorer’s best friend, as long as you treat him fairly. You are mad to tease a camel. He can kill you by sitting on you. The chestbone takes the full weight of the camel’s body when he squats. The chestbone is the camel’s instrument of death.
He addressed the British on camels in 1933. The wireless station was in Hampstead. The publicity woman took him to lunch afterwards. The broadcast the British particularly lapped up was the one on the virtues of camels, especially their sense of humour. Camels like a joke. He told them about the camel which disgorged its entire half-digested meal over him, from head to waist, outside Tennant Creek. And that a camel never opens a gate, he just sits on it.
Miss Teasdale appreciated his camel anecdotes both during the broadcast and over lunch.
Funny, he told her, he’d used a motor for his first expedition in 1923, but after that he used camels. He switched to camels because they were slower. The slowness made them better for mineral surveying. In a motor you might ride right over something interesting without seeing it. Swaying along on a camel you could see a reef, some interesting feature, quite readily.
The wireless station played camel sound-effects from a gramophone record. The camel noises punctuating his talk included bells, bazaar bartering and guttural exclamations in Arabic. Miss Teasdale said the British listening public wouldn’t know the difference.
The last explorer’s body makes hardly a lump under the covers. Against a pile of pillows his big pale, strong-jawed head seems disembodied. He removes a hand from under the bedclothes to slowly rub his eyes. They overdid the sleeping drug again last night.
It is awkward being here.
He thought he would be out of here within twenty-four hours.
He has twenty-three lines in Who’s Who. ‘Explorer, broadcaster, author, Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society …’ A life of luck and action encapsulated in a paragraph. He wore a Colt .38 on his belt. He forbade his white men to take their revolvers off their gunbelts. Better safe than sorry.
In London both times he wore a double-breasted suit and his Royal Navy Air Service tie from fighting with the White Russians against the Reds in 1917. He cut a dash.
He was popular with the Fleet Street boys with his demonstration of Aboriginal sign language and how to make fires in Hampstead with sticks. Miss Teasdale kindly arranged the photographic sessions and afterwards they went off to the Dorchester and discussed the desert.
She asked enthusiastic questions about risks and deprivation. An understanding of man’s inner resources was not beyond her.
Grace would not face the desert.
Grace desired the coast; it was a mistake. A house facing the sea, looking back towards England, was her wish. She refused to turn her back on the coast.
The house on the hill at Cottesloe was always windy because she had to face the ocean. For five years the sea-breeze howled through the pines and slammed the doors. A small dugite crawled across the lawn from the golf links. While Grace swooned on the buffalo grass he cracked its back like a whip.
Captain Scott-Bowdler was never optimistic about their chances. He couldn’t visualise his daughter as a West Australian. Night after night Grace sat on the verandah facing the ocean and writing letters home.
On one expedition he rode camels from Alice Springs to Laverton on a nine-month nickel survey. He had his affinity for the desert and two good men under him. Purposely they travelled slowly and allowed themselves to get three months behind, spinning out their rations with bush tucker. They relied on themselves and their bushcraft. When they finally reached Laverton they circled the town on their camels for two days. They didn’t want to come in.
Grace was not sitting on the verandah, she was two months gone on the Stratheden. The opal he found for her at Lightning Ridge was on the dresser with her front door key.
There was a shipping list cut from the West Australian with the Stratheden’s departure time circled. The cutting was yellow by then and the Stratheden well and truly berthed and unloaded at Southampton.
It was the old Oakland he caught to San Francisco, then the train from Oakland to Detroit via Chicago.
It was true what they said about Henry Ford being as tight as a fish’s rectum.
Ford gave him coffee and one fig newton and listened intently to his tale. He said, ‘You’re a very fine and ambitious young man,’ shook his hand again and kept his wallet in his pocket.
So he travelled on to Washington and sold his photographs and story to the National Geographic Society for $150, big money in those days.
The Royal Geographic Society was also generous in spirit. In London they gave a special dinner for him, the youngest man ever to read a paper to the Society, and Captain Scott-Bowdler introduced him to Grace. This was after his first expedition when he crossed the continent from east to west, three thousand miles from Winton, Queensland, to Broome, Western Australia.
For transport he chose a ten-year-old Model-T Ford which cost him £50. Because of
the climate and terrain he replaced its wooden wheels with metal ones. He put in a magneto because the coils were dodgy. He met a man in a pub with £4/1/3 and made him an expedition partner. They crossed the desert on £8/13/2 and arrived in Broome ten months later, where he sold the Ford for £100.
His epic trip would surely earn him a fortune from the Ford Company. He travelled to America and gained an audience with the founder. He had a manila folder containing suggestions for advertising and promotion and his fig newton vanished in one eager bite.
Henry Ford was more in awe of his sea trip across the Pacific. He still had the Titanic on the brain.
As for the Model-T crossing the Australian desert, east to west, Ford said that was only to be expected. It was a Ford after all.
* * *
Recovery from a cerebral haemorrhage is slow at eighty-two, he must be realistic. He has been thinking again that there is something behind his existence. It was obviously planned for him to do things.
In the Depression men were in a mess and had confidence in him. In the thirties he was never busier or more prosperous. He’d return from some expedition or other thinking ‘that’s that’ and next week he’d be out again on the camels from Darwin to Adelaide, from Port Hedland to Melbourne.
For twenty years he led expeditions into the interior on behalf of companies seeking minerals. He surveyed geographical and geological features, made botanical, soil and meteorological readings, assayed deposits, discovered new lakes and rare caves and took photographs by the thousand.
He mapped a lot of country.
Moira Teasdale enjoyed his story about crouching behind a barricade of camel saddles while he fought off hostile blacks. At the Dorchester he ate asparagus and a chicken-and-leek pie and she said it was better than Kipling to listen to him.
The blacks crept up on their camp in their feathered kadaitcha boots to spear them. Luckily Tommy the camel boy, camped thirty yards away, spotted them. They got behind the saddles and fought them off all night.