Johnno

by David Malouf

  The library had its own people. You never saw them anywhere else in the city, except there, or on the buttoned-leather couches at the School of Arts: old men with watery red-rimmed eyes and no collar to their shirt, who settled somewhere as soon as the library opened at ten in the morning and stayed put till it was time to queue at the Salvation Army Refuge or the St. Vincent de Paul, about an hour before dusk. They slept mostly, and had to be prodded when they snored. One or two of them were such powerful presences that they belonged to the place as completely, almost, as the Chief Librarian himself. They had their own tables, received visitors there, and their name, and some version of their story, was known to every one of us.

  There was Old Moscow for instance. He was a White Russian, and was supposed to have been Professor of Law at Moscow University — before the revolution, of course. A huge man, amiable, inarticulate, with a flat face and wiry grey hairs sprouting above his flannel vest, he sat in state at the very centre of the hall and no one ever disturbed him. Sometimes a new librarian, hoping to make an impression and ignorant of the traditions of the place, would decide to move him on or to keep him quiet, and there would be a noisy affray. Moscow was immovable. And the poor girl, repenting of her officiousness, would soon be as fond of him — as frightened of him — as the rest. When aroused he had a big booming voice that filled the whole building from floor to iron ceiling, and the flow of his Russian (if that is what it was) was terrifying. But left to his own devices he was entirely harmless. He occupied his table at the centre and beamed upon us, as if we were all somehow under his watchful but benign scrutiny. I thought of some senior officer of the Russian Civil Service (I had been reading Gogol), complacently dreaming of birch forests and dead souls while we slaved over our ninety-seven cases of Constitutional Law.

  Old Moscow and the other vagrant people haunted me, I was fascinated by them. They shuffled into the library from nowhere. From the Domain, with its cluster of broken-down army huts; from Musgrave Park where I had watched them as a child, in pools of darkness under the Moreton Bay figs; from Albert Park above Roma Street Station and the arcades of the old markets in Turbot Street, where they were still to be seen sometimes, in the early morning, wrapped up in newspapers like old parcels, or in dirty vegetable sacks. And when the rest of us were packing up at nightfall to go home to our warm roast dinners, they went back again. To nowhere. To sleep in suburban tramsheds and ferry shelters, or on the waste ground under Grey Street Bridge.

  How, I wondered, had they fallen out of that safe and regular world that the rest of us took for granted as if it was the only world there could be? Success wasn’t inevitable after all. Sitting among us, as we struggled with Kant’s categorical imperative and the Elizabethan love lyric, were some who had already been chosen, perhaps, to be the failures, and might have seen in Old Moscow and the rest, if they had had the eyes of prophecy, their own terrible old age in this slatternly town, sleeping in gutters outside the Valley wine bars, following Abo women up Fish Lane near the bridge, beating someone to death in the marshes along Victoria Park golf-links for half a bottle of metho. Life suddenly seemed utterly mysterious to me. What were the mechanics of survival? What did you have to do to stay afloat?

  VI

  ✧✧✧

  Johnno and I did have our meeting at last, one cold dry night in July, as I was on my way home from a lecture.

  A westerly was blowing. It came straight in off the river, and the few late travellers like myself battled across the open space in front of the Treasury, heads down, coats flapping, and disappeared into doorways along the Quay to be out of it. The shadow of palm trees flared on the pavement as the big overhead lamps swung and rattled. Brisbane westerlies have an edge of ice to them. The shaggy frost of Stanthorpe orchards and the cold of miles on miles of open Downs comes hurling in through the Gap, and makes vicious eddies at every street corner, a whirlwind of little sharp grits. Even here, deep in the entrance to a fruitshop, the wind still cut my face and smarted in my eyes. Slipping out again, I got round the corner into George Street. I wouldn’t be able to see my tram from here, but if I stood close to the pavement and kept my ears cocked I would hear the clash of the sparking-pole as it rattled in across the bridge.

  Suddenly I was aware of a slithering in the darkness behind me. Someone was down there on the floor, against the door to the shop. A wino, or a metho-drinker. I prepared to dive out again into the shop next door.

  “Hullo Dante,” a voice said, as the green neon opposite washed in over us.

  I recognised him immediately. He was sprawled out on the dirty floor, his hair a birds’ nest. Grinning.

  “It’s all right,” he said, reassuringly. “I’m only drunk. Haven’t you seen anyone pissed before? No, no — don’t bother. I can manage.”

  He struggled upright in the darkness, and when the green light flooded into the deep entrance again he was half-standing against the door.

  “See?”

  The light drained out, and in the darkness I heard him slip. Cursing.

  “As a matter of fac’, Dante,” he admitted, “I do need a bit of a hand. I just haven’t got a clue where I bloody am.”

  I got him up off the floor (he made heavy weather of it — deliberately, I thought) and out into the street.

  “Really Dante, this is bloody good of you. It is! I want to be frank with you, I’ve been drinking. In fac’, I am absolutely — bloody — PISSED.”

  I took his arm. “You told me that before.”

  “Oh, did I? Well it’s th’ truth. I’m pissed as a newt!”

  Ten minutes later, sitting opposite in the cabin of a tram, he regarded me with serious amusement. He had seemed so drunk at the tramstop that I’d decided to take him home. Now, mysteriously, he was almost sober. The tram was empty and it travelled fast. Shut up in the lighted cabin it was like flying through the dark; the tram bucked and swayed, the street lamps dipped away downhill, a line of palms on Red Hill tossed wildly against ragged cloud that streamed away faster even than ourselves, flickering across the face of the moon. Even if we had wanted to, what with the wheels clashing underneath and the rush of air, we couldn’t have heard each other speak.

  We rode all the way to the terminus. I knew the way from there, and had no trouble till we reached the lawn of his house, which was in a gully out of the wind. A plaster heron stood on one leg in front of an empty bird-bath, and there were two frogs on the grass, one as big as a spaniel.

  “Pets,” Johnno explained, squatting on the lawn between them. “China ones, that don’t do you-know-what.” He grinned up at me, then stretched out full length with his arms folded on his chest and the big frog at his feet.

  “Dead.”

  “I’d better be going,” I told him shortly. I had been led a good hour out of my way and was fed up with him.

  He sat up. “Well just ring that bell first, will you?” He directed me in the dark. “Beside the lattice. No, no — on the left. That’s it.” A light bloomed in the depths of the house and the lattice fell in shadow across the lawn. Johnno’s mother on the other side peered at me apprehensively.

  “It’s alright,” Johnno called, “I’m pissed again and someone’s brought me home. You remember Dante. He’s coming in for some coffee.”

  Inside he flopped full length into one of the genoa velvet armchairs and closed his eyes. His mother, in a knitted cardigan that might have been his father’s, stood with her arms folded and regarded him.

  “Don’t you take any notice of him,” she told me, “he’s got no manners. No sense either!” She gave him a sharp kick with her woolly slipper and Johnno opened one eye and swore. “Do you have your coffee made of milk, or black like him?”

  “Black,” I admitted.

  “See!” Johnno said, and she turned on her heel and disappeared. Almost immediately there was the sound of drumming water and the hiss of gas. I let my eye travel round the room: yellowing silk lampshade with tassels; strings of beads in the doorway leading to the ver
andah; some lumpish examples of night-school pottery. Sunk between the arms of his chair Johnno followed my gaze.

  “Hideous, isn’t it?”

  The coffee arrived.

  “And don’t knock it over,” she told him as she set the tray down at his elbow, “it’s just behind you.” Johnno hauled himself up and sipped his coffee noisily.

  “I’ve just finished that book,” she announced.

  Johnno grunted.

  She turned to me.

  “Do you know Voltaire?” she enquired, poised on the very edge of her seat and ready for conversation.

  “Oh Jesus,” Johnno exploded. “Why do you jump on people the moment they get into the house?”

  She made a prim line with her lips. Ignoring him. “He’s drunk,” she said, “take no notice of him. You’d think he’d be pleased I’m not one of these silly women who are out playing bridge all day and read nothing but the Women’s Weekly. In fact he’s the one who gave me Voltaire. Yes you did! Now he’s mad because I’ve actually read it. We can ignore him, he’s not in a fit state.”

  I made a feeble attempt to formulate some thoughts on Candide — the earthquake at Lisbon — and Johnno groaned.

  “You see,” he told her fiercely, “he’s embarrassed. You embarrass people.”

  “I do not. You’re the one who embarrasses them. Have I embarrassed you?” she demanded. “Have I?”

  “Well go on Dante. Are you embarrassed?” Johnno was enjoying himself now. “Of course he’s embarrassed!”

  She turned her back on him. “Do go on Dante, that was very interesting,” she told me sweetly. “He can’t discuss anything in a normal, civilised way.”

  “That,” Johnno said, “is because you haven’t the smallest understanding of anything you read.”

  “I do so too.”

  “You don’t. It might just as well be the Women’s Weekly.”

  “You’re drunk,” she said. And to me: “He’s just being difficult. Go to bed,” she snapped, “if you can’t be decent.”

  “Poor Dante, he’s so embarrassed,” Johnno said again. “Can’t you see that? He’s not used to it. Not everyone carries on the way you do.”

  “The way you do, you mean.”

  They both looked at me.

  “You must come again,” Johnno’s mother insisted at the verandah. “Come and have tea. It’s a pleasure to meet someone sober for a change. Instead of his usual rowdies.”

  “G’night, Dante,” Johnno called from the depths of his chair.

  One Friday night, two or three weeks later, there was a telephone call.

  “Hullo, hullo. Is this Dante?”

  The voice sounded far off as if it might be a trunk call from overseas. There was a lot of crackling and a roar like ocean waves crashing and sucking away.

  “This is Johnno.”

  I put my hand over the receiver and told my sister, who had come to the top of the stairs and was listening, to go away.

  “Hullo. Hullo! Dante! Are you still there?”

  “Yes, I’m here. I was just talking to someone.”

  “Oh, I thought we’d been cut off.” There was silence filled with the same hissing and crackling as before. Rain seeping into the cables perhaps. “Look, I’m in town. Could you come in and meet me?”

  “Now?”

  “Of course now!”

  “Well — what time is it?”

  “Oh Jesus. I don’t know what time it is. What do you want to know the time for? About half-past nine I think. The point is, will you come?”

  “Well, I —”

  “Alright then, forget it!”

  “No, no, listen —”

  I extended the phone to the length of its cord and leaned back to see the time on our hall clock. It was twenty past nine. What excuse could I possibly give for getting dressed at this hour and going all the way into town? In the dead of night, my mother would call it.

  “Listen, Johnno. I mean, is it important?”

  “Of course it’s important. Why can’t you ever do anything without asking questions? I’m pissed as a matter of fact. I need to sit down somewhere and sober up. I need someone to talk to. Otherwise I’ll just fall down in the rain and the coppers’ll get me …”

  “Where are you then?”

  “Post Office. Can’t you hear the wind? Here, have a listen.” And he must have held the receiver out of the half-cabinet because the swirling sound filled my ears again. It was a westerly howling through the post office arcade.

  “OK then. Where will I find you?”

  “Criterion. You know where it is?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Well, then. George Street entrance. I’ll be on the right as you come in.”

  I was about to put the receiver down when he was suddenly calling again from the other end of the line.

  “Listen,” he said. “Do you know this?”

  He began to whistle, twenty bars of something shrill and tuneless that I could make no sense of. The notes, coming and going on the sea sounds as the wind sucked and sighed, were indescribably eerie. There were gaps as he paused to take breath.

  “Well,” he asked, “did you recognise it?”

  I had to admit I didn’t.

  “Oh.” He sounded disappointed. “I thought you might know it. It’s Mozart’s something or other. Well never mind. I’ll see you in half an hour.”

  After that he rang regularly, and we began to spend Friday nights together in one of the three or four city pubs where they never asked your age. One of them was always the Criterion. Others were the Lands Office in George Street, the Prince Consort in the Valley, a big old-fashioned pub with two cast-iron balconies, and best of all, the Grand Central.

  The Grand Central had been the scene during the war of a famous brawl, when Australian and American servicemen had fought the whole of one Saturday night all up and down the inner city. In the morning there were seven dead. Or three. Or five. It was an important episode in Brisbane’s wartime legend. Now the Grand Central was the drinking place of “Nashos”; it had a queer bar, a plush and cut-glass ladies lounge on the second floor, and at the very back (with its own entrance in the street behind) an open air beer garden, all green-stained concrete and wrought-iron tables, that was known as the Sex Pit, since it was the special preserve of Brisbane’s most flamboyant tarts. They occupied a table apiece, wore glossy patent-leather shoes, carried glossy patent-leather handbags, had their hair lacquered and piled up in sculptured jet-black, peroxide, or chestnut curls, pencilled eyebrows, vivid scarlet mouths — they were the real thing. Potted palms gave the Sex Pit an air of the jungle. The pavement was creviced and discoloured, and occasionally a big elephant beetle with curved horns emerged from one of the cracks and caused consternation as it waddled across the floor or barged about in the heavy air.

  “Just look at them,” Johnno would hiss delightedly, “the whores.”

  They sat with their legs crossed, looking bored, and one of them might take an emery stick from her handbag, snapping it shut with an audible click, and saw away at her nails.

  “Aren’t they marvellous!”

  It was, I think, their theatricality that appealed to him, the high gloss of their finish, their perfect approximation to the idea of “whore” that he had derived from his reading. We struck up an acquaintance with one or two of them and got to know their names.

  “DULcie,” Johnno would intone in a sort of rapturous daze. “Le-ON-a. VAL-may. Dor-EEN.”

  But mostly we were too late for the Grand Central.

  I had started going to the Stadium on Friday nights with my father. He had always wanted me to be an athlete of some sort. Years ago, when I was a small boy, he had taken me to see an old boxing mate who was attempting a ball-punching record, and I had watched fascinated and horrified while the man, half dead on his feet, jabbed doggedly at the ball, hissing weakly through his nostrils, then collapsed at the hour break into the arms of his supporters, his whole body shaken and streaming
with sweat. For my next birthday I had a pair of boxing gloves, but every effort to teach me to hiss through my nose and jab and poke and put up a guard proved hopeless. I didn’t have the spirit for it. One whole summer when I was ten he had me get up at five-thirty and stroke up and down the Valley pool, while he timed me with a stopwatch, and when winter came and the pool was closed I performed exercises with a machine he had rigged up in our spare room, a plank with weights on leather straps that I hauled at for ten minutes at a time. But that was the end of it. No more! I refused absolutely to have anything to do with it: swimming, boxing, football, the lot. It was a terrible disappointment to him. Now, at twenty, I felt some need to make reparations. We went together to the Fights, sitting high up in the “bleachers”, and my father began to teach me the fine points of the game.

  He had an eye for the “particular fault” in a boxer that made every fight for him an Aristotelian tragedy, though he would never have recognised it as such.

  “The left,” he would say, sadly, the moment a boxer shaped up. Or “Watch the belly” — And sure enough, later, the tough self-confident boy in black shorts who had come bouncing into the ring and done his little dance of triumph for the crowd, a clear winner, would be spread-eagled on the canvas while the referee counted over him, eight, nine, and the crowd rose to its feet in the smoky hall, shouting, whistling, banging on their stalls.

  I hated the Fights and couldn’t leave them alone. They had a brutal simplicity. There was always a winner; there was always somebody, hunch-shouldered, dancing out bloody-nosed to shake hands, whose final weakness had been exposed to us all — the loser. And there was always a reason why he lost. “The left,” my father would murmur. He could see it all from the beginning. The fight itself was a ritual in which the loser fought heroically against his own weakness, against a fate that was already decided, and to the expert, visible from the start: a weak limb, bad training, too much grog, too many women, or the sheer arrogance and folly of not knowing your own limits. “He’s a good lad,” my father would say as the trainer cuffed the ear of a loser. “He put up a good show.” It was the losers he kept his eye on. The quick, sure-footed champions bored him, he could see their qualities too clearly. There was nothing at stake as they backed off hissing and waited on springy tiptoe to be allowed in for the kill. That is, till they too started downhill: slowed up, put on weight, got careless, over-confident.