Johnno

by David Malouf

  And before Hider and Mussolini leapt on to the scene I knew no terrors, except for the rats in Cassie’s pantry, a baboon at the Gardens where we sometimes went for a treat (a sullen, red-eyed creature that played with itself in the most shameful manner, and with no warning would hurl itself screaming against the bars), and a radio serial on 4BC that was, Cassie had told me once (no doubt, “to get rid of me”), about a boy who took rat-bait. I was petrified. We had rat-bait ourselves. My father got it in brown-paper packets from the Council, and spread it about under the house — little squares of pink-and-white like coconut ice. The first spooky notes of the rat-bait theme (actually it was Dvorak’s Humoresque) would send me fleeing into the yard, where my grandfather, a dark, uncommunicative old man whose whiskers prickled, would be pottering about among his eggplants and tomato bushes or chasing one of our chooks with an axe. I was scared of him too. He spoke no English and was always grabbing me on the run, sweeping me up into the air and crowing like one of the roosters. But I was even more scared of the fate of that foolish boy who had taken rat-bait and staggered off to die of thirst in one of the drains. I would sit under a lantana bush or in Cassie’s garden under the back steps, where she grew waxplants, mint, and big red Christmas lilies whose stalks broke with a snap and were hollow like gun barrels, till I thought the wretched serial was over. Or watch my grandfather at one of his strange rituals: winnowing wheat by tossing it into the air with a shovel or shaking it in golden showers from a sieve, or making white cheese by slapping it from palm to palm. He worked here all day, just beyond our overgrown tennis court, behind a lattice fence. His garden was orderly rows of beans, spinach, tomatoes, with strings of flickering tinsel to keep off the birds, and a lopsided scarecrow that looked so much like grandfather himself that I went sometimes, after he had gone home, to stare at it and wonder if there weren’t two of him. Occasionally I helped him pick the beans. And once or twice after a storm I went out with him into the street to shovel up garden topsoil that had been washed into the gutter. He never once entered our house. Late in the afternoon he would come to the bottom of the back stairs, Cassie’s stairs, and shout “Something for you, Missus …” and go off. On the bottom step, when I went down, there would be a lettuce, with dirt still clinging to its roots, or half a dozen yellow tomatoes, or a couple of eggfruit. When he died early in the war our garden went wild like every other garden in the street, a wilderness of old grey stakes that crumbled and showed their grain amid six-foot thistles, with occasionally, as a last reminder, a purple bean-flower glowing among the weeds.

  The rituals by which my own life was regulated it never occurred to me to doubt. They were so utterly reasonable. When I came in from school I changed out of my good things into a sweater and shorts; hung my uniform in the closet by the bed, put my socks in the washbasket, my shoes in the cleaning cabinet, and was allowed on the back verandah (but never never in the kitchen or any other part of the house itself) either a wedge of Cassie’s date slice or two anzacs, with a tumbler of malted milk and an apple to clean my teeth. I didn’t shout indoors; I never said “she” (She was the cat’s mother); and I never swore. If asked to do a message for a neighbour I never refused of course, but I never accepted payment either, no matter how strongly encouraged; not even an ice-cream out of the change. I ate my vegetables, even horrible silverbeet, without complaint; always washed my hands after the lavatory and never called a shilling a “bob”. All these rules and regulations, I was convinced, not only trained you in the best behaviour, they also taught you discipline, and discipline was character-building. Like never taking the day off school unless you were really ill (“Come on now,” my mother would say brightly at the first sign of a complaint, “we’re not Catholics today, we’re Christian Scientists — and there’s nothing the matter with us!”). Or skipping the dentist. Or the silverbeet. Doing what you didn’t like doing gave you moral backbone, as silverbeet gave you muscle and all that drilling at the dentist’s gave you perfect teeth. Moral backbone was what prevented people, when they grew up, from drinking and gambling and getting into debt. Children who lacked discipline grew up spineless and had false teeth.

  I don’t know when all this came to seem to me anything less than the gospel truth. Or what part Johnno, with his wildness and not the sign of a filling, had to do with my growing scepticism, my defection from the dogma that if what you didn’t like doing was good for you what you did like doing was not.

  When I think of myself at thirteen I see a neat, darkly serious, well-brought-up little figure with a straight tie knotted in the conventional manner (my father abominated the Windsor knot), clean nails that I was prevented from biting with bitter aloes, a clear left-hand parting, shirts that Cassie insisted on starching till they were so stiff I could barely move in them, and the air of someone who is too well pleased with himself to be true. I wasn’t true, of course. I had too many secrets. One of them was a sense of humour (though I had found as yet no good use for it) and the other was the shrewd suspicion, based on irrefutable personal evidence, that there was more going on under people’s clean, well-brushed clothes than the building of muscle by silverbeet. I had begun, secretly, to believe some things and disbelieve others, and I was overwhelmed by the discovery that I had a choice. I was still strong enough on Mister Menzies, Commonwealth Savings Bonds, Stromberg Carlson radiograms, and something I had picked up from Band of Hope meetings on the beach at Scarborough, that even a slave is free under the British flag. But I had lost all faith in Santa Claus (years ago), the power of peroxide in the treatment of warts, was beginning to be shaky about the Catholic Church, and had freed myself, by frequent scientific experimentation, of the absurd notion that touching myself “down there” would make it fall off— though I couldn’t entirely discount the possibility, at some later date, of going blind.

  Some of my upbringing had begun to wear off. And now that I had stopped being impressed by the hon-our-boards at school, with their lists of prize-winners and the war dead in indiscriminate gold leaf, I even had some notion of being a rebel. Of sneaking over, as it were, to Johnno’s side.

  III

  ✧✧✧

  It was for this reason, perhaps, that when Johnno asked me one day, in his usual shoulder-shrugging, take-it-or-leave-it way if I would like to come over during the holidays, I didn’t find excuses as I might have done a few months earlier but shrugged my shoulders in what I hoped was a gesture every bit as casual as his own, and said: “OK, I might. I’ll see what happens.”

  I let three weeks go by, not to appear eager, and rode out one Saturday midday in a half-empty tram, still sweating and a bit shaky from having committed, on the way, my first desperate act of theft. In my trousers pocket, along with a library card and my tramfare home, were two miniature screwdrivers and a Matchbox jeep, which I would produce dramatically, sometime later that afternoon, as proof positive that I wasn’t at all what I seemed, that in spite of my nice accent and the good marks I got at Latin unseens, I was really on the side of disorder and was preparing, behind a show of middle class politeness, to defect.

  Johnno met me at the tramstop, wearing an old football jersey that he must have had from primary school and a pair of ragged shorts. I felt overdressed. We walked to his house in sticky silence. He introduced me gruffly to his mother, who looked surprised, as if I wasn’t really expected, then positively alarmed when I commented, politely I thought, on her front garden.

  “Roses?” she said, as if someone might have smuggled them in when she wasn’t looking. “Oh, the roses. Well!”

  She stood drying her hands needlessly on a floral apron and Johnno said abruptly, “We’re going for a walk.” And to me: “Come on, let’s piss off.”

  We went over the sagging fence at the back of his yard and descended through prickly lantana bushes and swathes of orange and yellow nasturtiums into a quarry. It was still and hot. Greenflies clustered on piles of dogshit as we tramped along a festering path and came out into the dazzling arena of the
quarry itself. Here, for an hour or so, we made desultory attempts to scale a rockface —Johnno getting higher with his bare feet than I could manage in my best school-shoes — then lay facedown on warm rock and grabbed in the clear-water pools for yabbies, little pale crustaceans that nipped your fingers and when you hauled them out on the sunlit ledge froze into sudden immobility, effacing themselves against the pinkish buff of the stone. We hardly spoke. The two screwdrivers and the Matchbox jeep burned a hole in my pocket but would have to wait. Johnno seemed almost hostile. Why, I wondered, had he bothered to ask me? Why had I come? His attitude to me at school was one of tolerant amusement, which I had come to accept as preferable, at least, to the sort of savagery he reserved for other boys in our class who were equally serious and well-behaved. He never asked to copy my homework. He didn’t hustle me into taking bets. He had even joined in once to support me in an argument about the Berlin airlift, then got exasperated and pushed off. This was the first time, I suppose, that we had been alone together for more than five minutes since the old days at Scarborough. Was it because of Scarborough that he made a distinction in my case?

  At the far end of the quarry we came to the foot of a long slope that was used by the locals as a tip, and for another half hour I poked about on the edge of it while Johnno waded knee-deep in furry vegetable scraps and climbed high on to a suburban Everest of tin cans, butter boxes, car tyres, enamel basins, old treadle sewing machines, broken Venetians, a meatsafe, a punctured waterbag like the one we used to hang on the front of the Hup, dining chairs without seats, paperbacks swollen into a damp wad, and any number of buckled 78’s.

  “You can find all sorts of things here,” Johnno explained unnecessarily. He scrambled down with an old motorbike exhaust. “Can you see anything you want?”

  I shrugged my shoulders and looked about in the hope that something small and cleaner than the rest would present itself to my gaze.

  “Well, not really,” I admitted. My mother would have a fit if I came home with any of this stuff.

  “OK then, let’s go back.”

  I had been tempted, while Johnno was scouting about, to make my own contribution to the pile, the screwdrivers etc., which suddenly seemed like an awful mistake, but I was afraid his eagle eye might rediscover them. Instead I hung on, and a little later, in his sleepout room on the side verandah, after we had finished the peanut cookies and milk his mother provided, and listened twice to the Storm from William Tell, I produced them, one two three, on the coir mat. Johnno looked puzzled. “I pinched them,” I told him hotly, “from Woolworths. On the way through town.”

  I don’t know what I expected exactly. Whatever it was it didn’t come. No sign of recognition, no grin of complicity. Instead Johnno looked pained, embarrassed even. His brow puckered. He made a little gesture with his shoulder and turned away to get another record from the pile, and while he cranked furiously at the gramophone handle I sneaked the wretched objects back into my pocket, my face burning with the shame of it all.

  For the next half hour we both pretended that nothing had happened, that the two screwdrivers, one red, one green, and the khaki jeep, had never materialised and sat there for a moment on the floor between us. The scratchy gramophone played the Light Cavalry Overture; Toti dal Monte sang “Lo Hear the Gentle Lark”; and a comedian did a piece called “When Father Papered the Parlour”, and on the other side “Father O’Flynn”. Johnno lounged about flicking through a sports magazine and then fiddled with his crystal set. On the weatherboard wall over his bed were pictures of Don Tallon, a taut blur that was Zatopec winning the fifteen hundred metres, and an old man with a white moustache and a spidery glow around his head who was, Johnno informed me, Albert Schweitzer. When it was time to go he walked me to the tramstop. Or rather, pedalled beside me on his bike, standing high up in the saddle and occasionally making a slow figure-of-eight while I talked my head off. Anything to forget his embarrassment and my own shame.

  Because I saw entirely now what it was all about. His embarrassment was for me. What I had done was utterly out of character — all I had revealed was my low opinion of him. That was what I felt ashamed of now. That I had shown him so openly what I thought of him. He was quieter and more generous than I would have thought possible as I chatted on about the pictures I had seen during the holidays and the girls I had met at Surfers. There was no tram at the terminus, and we waited for what seemed hours before far-off lights appeared in the dusk and the tram could be seen bucketing along through the shopping centre half a mile away, then making its way steeply uphill. Behind us, in the gully, kids were playing on the swings.

  Suddenly there was a hissing on the road to our left and a knot of cyclists came flaring into the lighted circle where the tram would turn.

  “Hi Johnno. Hi! Hi! Hi!”

  They went round again in close formation and came to a halt on the pavement opposite. One of them was Carl Reithmuller. He looked surprised, and a little suspicious I thought, to find me standing with my hands in my pocket at Johnno’s tramstop. He looked to Johnno for an explanation.

  And if I expected Johnno now to betray whatever loyalty he might have to me and go over to Carl, who stood there gaping expectantly, he surprised me yet again.

  “Here’s your tram,” he said, pushing off into the centre of the road as the tram came sparking around the circle. “I’ll see you.”

  Carl looked confused.

  “What we doing then, Johnno? Where’re we going?” He pushed off. And the others set themselves in motion behind him, wheeling about on the road like big heavy birds, making uneasy shadows in the dusk.

  “Go where you like,” Johnno told him sharply, “I’m off home”, and he sped away downhill leaving the others to regroup, turn, and hiss off after him.

  I climbed into the compartment at the back of the tram and waited, while the driver and the conductor sat with their feet up blowing smoke across the car. I felt miserable. Taking the two screwdrivers out of my pocket I placed them carefully on the seat between me and the wall, then added, furtively, the model jeep. And there I would leave them, by accident as it were, when I pulled the bell and got off.

  IV

  ✧✧✧

  Johnno didn’t fail the Junior after all. He even did well. And when the school year began he appeared before us in an utterly new light: the flamboyant waves had given way to a neat brushback; he had no further interest in the SP business, though he still spent long hours studying the racing forms; he even turned, suddenly, into a sporting type, and could be seen most dinner-hours in singlet and spiked shoes jogging round the sodden oval, or doing press-ups on the grass.

  “He’s putting it on,” people told one another, hoping it was true. “It’s a swindle. You’ll see.”

  But the weeks went by, and except for rare flashes the old Johnno failed to reappear. He did his own homework, kept his own notes, and was generally considered nobody’s fool. In the early days, when he got up and asked one of his involved questions, we were inclined to giggle, expecting some sort of elaborate joke. But even masters had to admit at last that he was a reformed character. “It’s unbelievable,” people said, finding it just a little dishonest of him to have been, all this time, something other than a buffoon. Even Soapy had to accept, reluctantly, that Johnno’s interest in geology was genuine after all and that he was making fair to be his star pupil. He looked grumpy and out of sorts.

  One factor in Johnno’s transformation was the absence of what we had called The Boys. Stal Henderson had gone onto his father’s property. “I don’t care,” he had boasted once when Soapy warned him he would never get the Junior, “I’m going on the land.” And Soapy: “What as, boy, manure?” Carl Reithmuller was at Dalgetys, the Mango was a storeman at Edwards and Lambs. Free at last of their expectations, Johnno had simply settled and become himself.

  Or had he? Was there really a change? We watched him closely, waiting for the new Johnno to crack, waiting for him to give up this silly pretence that he wasn
’t what we had long since accepted him as, our very own Tamburlaine and A1 Capone, the one among us who could be depended upon to reject everything that was decent, respectable, sensible even, and take off on his own extravagant parabola, that would lead who-knows-where? Was he about to settle, after all, for the predictable? We simply refused to believe it, and he was forever being called upon to repeat some old triumph from his repertoire of burps and farts, or to live over again some piece of outrageous buffoonery that had become part of the Johnno legend. On such occasions he would redden and look pained. It was, I suppose, a kind of meanness in us to insist that the old Johnno should not die, and I thought hotly of my screwdrivers. If Johnno was not Johnno where did any of us stand? But changes can’t be resisted, and we might have observed, if we had bothered to look, that he had ceased to be an ugly duckling, all arms and legs, with a head too big for his body, and had developed, as if to match his aspirations, the long hard lines of an athlete. He was tall, well-knit, relaxed as he jogged round the oval in his spiked shoes; and girls, if they hadn’t been scared off by the tales they had heard of him, might even have found him good looking. He had simply outgrown our idea of him, and we found it difficult to accept the fact without making allowance for commensurate changes in ourselves.