Johnno

by David Malouf

  I was utterly bewildered. Ever since those days, long ago at Scarborough, when Johnno had been identified for me as “bad company”, I had used him as a marker. His wildness had been a powerful warning to me in those carrot-chewing days when I thought bad habits meant not getting your homework done as soon as you got in from school, and lately it had come to seem a marvellously liberating alternative to my own wishy-washy and hypocritical niceness. Now all that was changed. I didn’t know where I was. What made me most resentful, I think, was his refusal to stay still. I had found for Johnno a place in what I thought of as my world and he refused to stay there or to play the minor role I had assigned him. He had suddenly developed qualities of his own, complexities I hadn’t allowed for. I had to admit with something like panic that he might even be as sensitive, in his own way, as myself! I began to wonder if Johnno’s old daring hadn’t been an atonement for our cowardice; an attempt to shame us out of timidity. Everything I had ever seen of him in these last years began to shift and change its ground. Maybe, after all, it was Johnno who was the deep one.

  I was surprised, given what had happened over the holidays, that he showed so little animosity towards me. We didn’t become friends exactly, but there was an understanding between us just the same. It was sporadic, unstated, but it existed, and came out in his occasional teasing of me. Once, years ago, he had called me “The Prof”. Now, after the appearance in the school magazine of a poem “To Beatrice” (its real subject, in fact, was a sleepy, chestnut-headed sixth-former), he dubbed me “Dante”. I hated it but the name stuck. At the very moment when I was most in doubt about who I was, or where I stood, I had developed a new identity and now not even the name sewn into my gym things was true …

  Arran Avenue, Hamilton, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, the World. That is the address that appears in my schoolbooks. But what does it mean? Where do I really stand?

  The house at Arran Avenue is the grim, three-storeyed brick house my father built for us in one of the best suburbs in Brisbane. Arran Avenue is a narrow dead-end street that runs straight into the hillside, with houses piled steeply one above the other on either side and bush beginning where the bitumen peters out into a track. The traffic of Kingsford Smith Drive is less than fifty yards away but cannot be heard. The river, visible from the terrace outside my parents’ bedroom, widens here to a broad stream, low mudflats on one bank, with a colony of pelicans, and on the other steep hills covered with native pine, across which the switchback streets climb between gullies of morning glory and high creeper-covered walls.

  It is a house I have never got used to. Waking sometimes in the night I am still momentarily alarmed to find that I am not back in my bedroom at Edmond-stone Street, listening to the shunting and clashing of trains at Kyogle Station and watching the shadow of staghorns and ferns on the wax-papered window. Arran Avenue Hamilton, as an address, seems slightly false. My loyalties remain where my feelings are, at the old house, with the corrugated-iron fence at the bottom of the yard leaning uneasily into the next street, and Musgrave Park with its insect-swarming darkness under the Moreton Bay figs still crowded with metho drinkers — disreputable, certainly, but warmer, more mysterious than Arran Avenue Hamilton, where everything is glossy and modern: electric stove, washing machine, built-in cupboards instead of the old pantry, a tiled niche for the refrigerator.

  I sit in my room at the back of the house and let my mind drift away from Cicero’s Pro Ligario or a problem in perms and corns. Outside little treefrogs are clinking away under a wall — clink, clink, the sound that stars might make. Behind me my parents are sitting up in bed reading the Telegraph, which is full of aggravated assaults and traffic offences, sipping tea which my father makes from his “galley” at the top of the stairs, listening to an all-night radio station. What do I have to do with all this, I wonder? I feel odd and independent. There is nothing in what I think or feel these days that relates to my parents, to what they know or might have taught me, nothing at all. Or so I believe. I have left their influence far behind me: having learned at last to drink beer (though my father is a fanatical teetotaller), and to have left-wing opinions and despise the world of business. We have nothing in common now. Sometimes, seeing a light under the door, my father will step in and say: “I think you’d better get to bed son. You don’t want to read too much.” He picks up one of my books and weighs it on the palm of his hand. What he means is that books are useless (certainly he’s never found any use for them) and might even be a bit effeminate. He distrusts their influence on me. In weighing them on his palm like that he is testing the enemy Proud as he is of any success I might have at school, he would prefer me to get out into the world and start on my own account, as he did, instead of experiencing everything second hand, through books. This is a matter on which he and my mother disagree. She would like me to be a doctor, or to go in for the law. How little they understand me! What I am, what I will be, can have nothing to do with them. I feel like a stranger in the house. And what irritates me most of all, is that there is absolutely no hostility between us — they are ideal parents, I have nothing to complain of, they leave me no room to rebel.

  As for Brisbane, the city I have been born in — well, what can anyone say about that? I have been reading Dante. His love for his city is immense, it fills his whole life, its streets, its gardens, its people; it is a force that has shaped his whole being. Have I been shaped in any way — fearful prospect! — by Brisbane? Our big country town that is still mostly weatherboard and one-storeyed, so little a city that on Friday morning the C.W.A. ladies set their stalls up in Queen Street and sell home-made cakes and jam, and the farmers come in with day-old chicks in wire baskets. Brisbane is so sleepy, so slatternly, so sprawlingly unlovely! I have taken to wandering about after school looking for one simple object in it that might be romantic, or appalling even, but there is nothing. It is simply the most ordinary place in the world.

  Arran Avenue, Hamilton, Brisbane, Queensland …

  Queensland, of course, is a joke. The Moonshine State. Nothing to be said about Queensland. Half of it is still wild (there are tigers as yet undiscovered in Cape York Peninsula according to some authorities), the rest detained in a sort of perpetual nineteenth century. In the main streets of towns not a hundred miles from where I am sitting they still have hitching-posts. Aborigines are herded on to reservations. Kids, even in this well-to-do suburb, go to school all the year round with bare feet.

  What an extraordinary thing it is, that I should be here rather than somewhere else. If my father’s father hadn’t packed up one day to escape military service under the Turks; if my mother’s people, for God knows what reason, hadn’t decided to leave their comfortable middle class house at New Cross for the goldfields of Mount Morgan, I wouldn’t be an Australian at all. It is practically an accident, an entirely unnecessary fate.

  Arran Avenue, Hamilton, Brisbane, Australia … Why Australia? What is Australia anyway?

  The continent itself is clear enough, burned into my mind on long hot afternoons in Third Grade, when I learned to sketch in its irregular coastline: the half-circle of the Great Australian Bight, the little booted foot of Eyre’s Peninsula, Spencer’s Gulf down to Port Phillip, up the easy east coast, with its slight belly at Brisbane, towards Sandy Cape and Cape York; round the Gulf of Carpentaria and Arnhem Land to the difficulties of King Sound and the scoop towards North West Cape where I always go wrong, leaving the spurred heel of Cape Leeuwin so far out in the Indian Ocean that it would wreck every liner afloat, or so close in to the Bight that far-off Western Australia looks as if it’s been stricken with polio. I know the outline; I know the names (learned painfully for homework) of several dozen capes, bays, promontories; and can trace in with a dotted line the hopeless journeys across it of all the great explorers, Sturt, Leichhardt, Burke and Wills. But what it is beyond that is a mystery. It is what begins with the darkness at our back door. Too big to hold in the mind! I think my way out a few steps into it and give up
on the slopes of a Mount Hopeless that is just over the fence in the vacant allotment next door. Australia is impossible! Hardly worth thinking about.

  And the World?

  The World, as the headmaster tells us severely at his weekly “peptalks”, is what we are about to be tested against. He has recently come to us from the Royal Military College at Duntroon and is much impressed with the amount of gold lettering on our honour-boards — a whole generation lost but not forgotten: Baptism of Fire, Glory of Young Manhood, Corner of a Forgotten Field. The Korean War has recently burst upon us and shows no sign of abating before we will be old enough to go. The headmaster regards us tragically and sticks out his shaven jaw: Spirit of Anzac still alive among us, Everlasting Flame, Fine Old Tradition, Challenge of Battle — Not Forgetting the Wives and Mothers. Out into Life with Courage and a Firm Tread, in two lines, and without talking …

  Meanwhile, we prepared:

  Moss’s Dancing Academy was a gloomy, refined establishment in the basement of an insurance building, where boys and girls of the better schools (non-Catholic) learned dancing, made innocent or not so innocent assignations, and planned the week’s social round of barbecues, coming-out dances, end-of-term hops, tennis parties, swimming parties, picnics, and Sunday excursions to the coast. Moss’s was eminently respectable and stiflingly genteel. We learned the quickstep, the jazz waltz, the Pride of Erin, the Gipsy Tap — and as a gesture towards the late forties, the Samba, whose respectability was guaranteed by its being the favourite modern dance of Princess Margaret. Tall, blank-faced, utterly unsexy, Mr. Moss’s “ladies” were to be seen each week pushing new boys a good head shorter than themselves round the boraxed floor while Victor Silvester oozed sweetly from a radiogram. Those of us who had graduated danced with real girls (Test of Manhood) who sat in rows along the wall opposite and waited demurely to be asked. At a clap of Mr. Moss’s plump, hairy hands, we crossed the floor in a mob, some of us actually sliding, and did not actually grab the girls, which was barbarous (“Barbarous” Mr. Moss would shout above the melee), but surged and jostled around the most popular of them, insisting breathlessly: “Excuse me — I was here first! — could I have the pleasure? — get lost! — would you care to dance?” If the young lady said: “No thank you, I think I’ll sit this one out”, you asked someone else (never of course anyone close enough to see that she hadn’t been your first choice), or slouched off crestfallen to the boys’ side of the room, where a group of the shy, the rejected, the frankly uninterested would be gathered around the Coke-box, engaged in a noisy argument about motorbikes or the selection of a team.

  Johnno was a conspicuous figure at Moss’s, lounging against a pillar in what was considered to be a bold manner as he eyed up the prospects, or coltishly jerking at his collar while he prepared to join the rush. He was known to be experienced, and this gave him an aura of dangerous charm. Girls flustered at his approach. He had been on weekends to the Coast, only sixty miles from staid, old-fashioned Brisbane, but already in those days the centre of a wickedly alternative life. Among its harlequin motels, Florida, El Dorado, Las Vegas, call-girls had begun to operate, and a fast crowd from the South was continuously at play. Johnno brought back fabulous tales of his exploits among the wives of Melbourne bookmakers and nurses up in groups for the winter. He had spent a whole weekend once with a tart and her protector who were travelling round Australia in a caravan. Two queers had offered to take him to Hong Kong. When pressed for details Johnno shrugged, looked inscrutable, then gave one of his big, open grins. Were his stories true? Who could tell? They were probable enough, given Johnno, given the place. He had even been, it seems, to one of the brothels in Albert Street, which we had all driven past at one time or another, hoping for an eyeful of one of the girls in high-heeled shoes and evening dress tucked up in front like Betty Grable; but Johnno had actually been in. The corrugated-iron wall, with its little gate, exerted a fascination over us that Johnno’s shrugs, his looks of bored insouciance, did nothing to dispel. Lolling against a pillar on the boys’ side of the room, or against the verandah rails at a Boatshed dance, Johnno was devastatingly cool and in control. Almost, in fact, a “golden boy”. And one of the things we now had to admit about him was that this too was one of the possibilities that had brushed his shoulder and was waiting invitingly to be taken up, the possibility of his joining the little group of the elect among us, the handsome, the athletic, the socially assured, who had been marked out for success. But, for some reason, it was a possibility he had already determined to reject. His parody of the Golden Boys was relentless. He hated them with a deadly hatred that could only have its origin, I decided, in something he had discovered in himself. Faced with their clean lines, their glowing good health, their poise, he turned surly; he slouched, he jerked at his collar, he moved his shoulders about, gangster-fashion, under their pads, he was brutally frank. “I’m just here for the sex,” he’d announce to the stiff-shirted, black-tie brigade, “what are you here for?” Or at Moss’s dreamily, through ground teeth: “Jesus! Just look at those tits!” But in mixed company, I noticed, some of his coolness deserted him. He looked oddly ill-at-ease. He didn’t know what to do with his hands.

  Test of Manhood …

  I had fallen heavily in my last year for a Somerville House girl called Roseanne Staples, who wore nylon stockings that shifted their lights like mother of pearl and was a G.P.S. diving champion. All one Wednesday at Moss’s, and again the next, we danced dreamily under the rafters and I took her afterwards for mint juleps or malteds at the Pig ’n Whistle, a milk bar at the top of town that had been a favourite pick-up place for American soldiers and retained something of its wartime glamour and notoriety. It was regarded as daring and I was out to impress. When the waitress, who looked as if she might remember the place in the old days, slid our milk-shakes down the glass-topped counter, she winked in the direction of the innocent Roseanne and whispered: “There y’are love. That’ll put lead in yer pencil.” I could hardly wait for the week to pass. But on the third Wednesday, as we went whirling across the floor in what seemed to be a most accomplished manner, Roseanne, with a casualness that astonishes me even today, it was so low-keyed, so undramatic, pronounced the words that put an end to our affair, pfft! just like that, and changed the course of my life. Looking straight over my shoulder, in the most neutral tones: “If there’s one thing I can’t stand,” said Roseanne Staples, slowly, “it’s boys who don’t pivot.”

  I was thunderstruck. The pivot — that little sidestep and pass at the corner of the floor that I had never quite got the knack of, it seemed so silly, hardly worth worrying about. I smiled wanly and guided her through the rest of the set, closing my eyes and swallowing hard as we approached the corners and wishing Moss’s was triangular. Four corners was suddenly more than I could bear. Back safe among the boys I waited for something less subtle, like a Gipsy Tap.

  So much then for the test of manhood. There were things they hadn’t warned us of, pitfalls in the corners of rooms, girls who would expect you to pivot and perform God knows what prodigies. There was also the Cold War, the Cobalt Bomb, pre-marital intercourse, the death of God — it was a battlefield, as the headmaster had warned us, and I thought with envy of all those old boys whose names were picked out in gold on the honour-boards, lying safe in some corner of a foreign field that would be forever Wynnum or Coor-paroo. Ours was to be a quiet generation. It was the little tests that would break us (not forgetting the wives and mothers) and there was no one to help us through.

  V

  ✧✧✧

  I saw very little of Johnno in our first months at university. He was reading geology, and we had no occasion to meet except briefly in one of the crowded refectories, or on one of the even more crowded buses. Later I began to run into him at the Public Library, where he was regularly installed behind a tower of books in one of the corners under the stairs; but the library wasn’t a place where you could talk. He would give me a wink, or nod uncommittally as I turne
d past him up one of the iron stairways, and sometimes I would catch him looking up through the railings of the gallery to where I sat chewing the end of a pencil or staring out across the muddy river. We seldom did more than pass the time of day. On one occasion I remember he came to where I was sitting and pushed a book across the table. “Here,” he said gruffly, “see what you think of this”, then slouched off. It was The Birth of Tragedy. I saw him again a week or so later, and after a good deal of hesitation, went across. “I read the book,” I told him. In fact it had excited me enormously, and I had thought, reading between the lines, that I could see why he had given it to me, what it was he wanted me to see. Now he looked up vaguely, and blinked his china-blue eyes. “Oh?” When I began to tell him how much I was interested by it he looked put out, cut me off short, and damn him! I thought, drifting back to my place. But he was always there, large and hunch-shouldered in his niche under the stairs, and I knew that we would eventually come together, though neither of us was in a hurry about it.

  The Public Library in those days was its own strange hermetic world. I could have written an anthropological study of its inhabitants, I spent so much time there (and so much of it staring up from my Latin proses), or an ecological treatise on the peppery dust that itched in your nostrils, and the colourless mites that crawled out of its woodwork and tumbled from the pages of its crumbly books; or provided a guidebook to the corners, behind a staircase or in the bays of its upper galleries, that were all but invisible, and the places from which a view could be had of everyone who came and went in the hall. In winter, draughts got in under the floorboards, and the dingy brown linoleum lifted under your feet, it was like walking on the muddy waves of the river whose mangroves and sluggish grey-brown waters lapped beyond the sill. On real scorchers in summer the heat would set off an alarm at the local fire station, and a dozen burly firemen, with asbestos suits and burnished helmets, would burst into the silence, stand about looking foolish for a while in sweaty clumps, then creep off down the stairs.