Johnno

by David Malouf

  “Honestly, Dante, I just don’t know what to do. It’s getting me down. It’s so —” she gave one of her dark little chuckles, that was like sudden bubbles in a vat, it was so rich and dark with suggestion, “— so silly! I mean, I’m not altogether stupid you know.”

  She sat in a window-seat amid a scatter of stockings, clothespegs, old copies of Harpers and Vogue. I was suddenly swept by a familiar emotion.

  “You’re lovely, Binkie,” I said, and reached out for her fingers.

  She made a wry face.

  “Oh, don’t you start, Dante!”

  And it was enough, at that moment, to turn away the brief possibility. She looked out at the gathering dusk.

  “Do you see that jacaranda down there? Well he stands there sometimes, all night. I have to go right past him on my way to the tram in the morning. If someone takes me out he suddenly turns up at the next table and just sits there. The boys I go out with must think I’m an absolute nut. We get to a place, sit down, order, and the next minute I want to go somewhere else. He’s driving me crazy! He really is!” She got up and started to pick stockings up off the carpet and roll them ready to wash. Then she stopped, thought a moment, and collected one by one the magazines. “I suppose in the end,” she said, as if she had already started to pack, “I’ll have to go home for a while. Till he leaves.”

  Johnno was leaving in February for the Congo. He had a job there and had already signed the contract and applied for a passport. But if Binkie, who wasn’t entirely displeased I thought to be the centre of all this, had decided it was love that was driving him out of the country, she would have been sadly disappointed. Love was only part of it. This, for Johnno, was to be the great escape. His break at last into perfect freedom.

  “I’m going to shit this bitch of a country right out of my system,” he told me fiercely. “Twenty fucking years! How long will it take me, do you think, to shit out every last trace of it? At the end of every seven years you’re completely new — did you know that? New fingernails, new hair, new cells. There’ll be nothing left in me of bloody Australia. I’ll be transmuted. I’ll say to myself every morning as I squat on the dunny, there goes another bit of Australia. That was Wilson’s Promontory. That was Toowong. Whoosh, down the plughole! And at the end of seven years I’ll have squeezed the whole fucking continent out through my arsehole. I’ll have got rid of it for ever. All this.” His wild glance took in Queen Street at four in the afternoon, with the newsboys innocently shouting the racing results, and women shoppers, with no conception of the fate Johnno had in store for them, shifting wearily from foot to foot in the islands between the traffic. It seemed a large task for one man to accomplish. Even in a lifetime. Let alone seven years.

  IX

  ✧✧✧

  All that month before Johnno left for the Congo it rained. Not the ordinary rains of February, the sharp midsummer thunderstorms that gather punctually at four, roll their bruise-coloured clouds across the range, explode, bubble for an hour or so in gutters, then vanish. This was rain:slow, steady, interminable. The city’s vegetation stirred and swayed like seaweed, and we sweated in our plastic raincoats, wetter inside than out. Brisbane had seen nothing like it since the ’93 flood, when old Victoria Bridge, a substantial iron affair, had broken up under the pressure of the debris and been swept down-stream, and the Queensland Navy’s only gunboat was left high and dry in the Botanical Gardens.

  Nothing quite so historic happened this time. But each night after work, with the bridge lamps casting their yellow glare far into the sky, crowds gathered on the footwalks of the bridge and on the high embankment along North Quay to see the river come swirling down between the iron pylons of the bridge and to point out to one another the strange cargo it carried: huge tree-trunks, that strained and splintered where they struck, chicken-coops, water tanks, butter-boxes, even sometimes an odd piece of furniture, a genoa-velvet lounge-chair, for example, that bucked about on the surface of the water like the Tilt-a-Whirl at the National Show. And other things even more wonderful to city eyes: dead cattle with their feet in the air; great islands of waterlilies where the field creatures, bushrats and lizards, swarmed as on a raft. And leaving the river swollen and brown for days afterwards, whole acres of rich Brisbane Valley topsoil. A farmer standing here might have seen two or three of his best paddocks go past. The river, usually placid enough with its rainbow-slick of oil and its bubbles of ferment popping in the heat, boiled up now into lighted peaks like the sea, and its roar could be heard from tramstops half a block away. Twice daily, with the tides, it rose up through the drains into low-lying suburbs and left its ripple mark on the walls. People went out in rowing boats to see a dressing-table drawer full of stinking mud or a dozen catfish gasping in a bath. It was a month of wonders.

  For Johnno it was time out of life — a three-week no-man’s-land. His papers were signed, he had his air ticket, the vaccination scratch on his arm had swelled and scabbed. All he had to do now was sit it out till his plane left.

  He was sentimental and bad tempered. “Let’s go and visit the Dutchman,” he’d say. Till I reminded him that he had already told the Dutchman he was a bastard, and always had been, and that he was glad to see the last of him. Too late for the Dutchman!

  And for everyone else he knew. With a whole week to go he had insulted most of his friends, made himself persona non grata at all the places he wanted to keep fond memories of, and was reduced to sitting damply in the Long Bar at the Criterion, while rain played on the lead-light windows over his shoulder and I — the last companion — sipped my shandy and pretended that the silences between us were filled with deep emotion, or at any rate, deep thoughts.

  We must have done something in those weeks. Gone to the pictures or poked about the bookshops. But all I remember at this distance is the bluish gloom of the Long Bar and Johnno’s rages, round four o’clock, when it began to fill with sober-suited lawmen from the Inns of Court. Occasionally, if we survived the hour when the bar was dense and noisy with intruders, we would still be there at half past six or seven; Johnno a bit low by then, and inclined to be sulky rather than boisterous, I (a good half-dozen long drinks behind) at an indeterminate point between light-headedness and the queasy suspicion that I might, before the night was out, be sick.

  On one such occasion, when the flood was at its peak, we walked up Queen Street with the crowd and made our way, slipping and sliding on the wet tracks, down the steep embankment north of the bridge. A wooden ramp ran down to the water, one of the Grammar School rowing pontoons, and we sat there for a while and watched the lights of the Blue Moon Skating Rink on the far bank play red and green across the waves. It was just after eight. Behind us was the verandah of the O’Connor Boathouse where we had sometimes gone to dances. On the footwalk of the bridge, immediately above, I could see rows of umbrellas gleaming under the lamps. Though it was barely drizzling now; just a fine silver mist that made the neons, TIGER BATTERIES, EAT MORE FISH, swim a little in the air.

  Suddenly, without warning, Johnno had staggered to his feet and was hauling off his shirt.

  “What are you doing?” I asked foolishly.

  His shirt fell on the boards beside me, his shoes were off, he was slipping his trousers down over his knees.

  “I’m going in.”

  He rolled his socks off and went to the edge of the ramp in his sagging underpants.

  “Are you coming?” He stood there, impatient. “Well, are you?”

  Silhouetted for a moment against the play of lights on the water, he shivered at the first touch of coldness at his heels, then jack-knifed neatly and was gone.

  I was stunned. It had all happened so quickly. I got to my feet and peered into the darkness. He was nowhere to be seen. Of course I should call for help, he would probably be drowned. Struck on the head by a tree-trunk or dragged down by weeds. Only I felt so silly. I stood peering and the river thundered. There was absolutely no sign of him. I cleared my throat, preparing to call. Then
about ten yards offshore, his head appeared, bobbing about in a kaleidoscope of scarlet and green.

  “It’s great,” he shouted, waving a white arm. “Come on in. Piker!” He struck out into midstream, turning skilfully to avoid the debris, and was carried down towards the pylons of the bridge. Then began to swim strongly back again. “Come on in!” he yelled, his voice high against the roaring of the waves. “Piker, Dante! Piker!”

  Obviously he was in no danger. I sat with my knees drawn up at the edge of the ramp while he tumbled about in the lights, and began to feel resentful. People up on the bridge had picked him out now. I could see them pointing. Maybe they would call for help, it would serve him right! He was showing off. I sat and sulked. It was too late now to get myself out of my clothes and follow. It would be too deliberate, nothing at all like his free, unselfconscious plunge. And besides, I would have to appear in an hour or so at my aunt’s house, where the family were at dinner. How could I turn up stinking of riverwater, having dried off on my shirt, and with mud in my hair?

  “Piker,” Johnno taunted in the darkness.

  Sullenly, I waited on the sidelines for him to come out.

  It would be fitting, I suppose, if that were my last memory of Johnno in those early years. But it is not. There was a whole week left before his flight, and when the weather cleared at last we moved out of the Criterion to the garden of the Lands Office, and even, once, took a trip to Lone Pine, where Johnno had himself photographed with a koala. Our final meeting (we both thought of it as that) was at Littleboys Coffee Lounge above King George Square, a cosy old-fashioned place not much bigger than a suburban living-room, from which there was a view of fountains that never played, an equestrian statue of King George V, and the sparking-poles of passing trams. You could sit all afternoon over a single coffee at Littleboys, till the waitress appeared at five-thirty with the evening menu (cover charge two shillings) and it was time to leave.

  We were heavily aware, both of us, that this was the end of something and we wanted it to go well. But for once, curiously, we had nothing to say. Johnno presented me with a going-away gift, a book of translations from Rimbaud, which he assured me he had not “organised”, and we watched a shower skitter over the rooftops, making them gleam for a moment in the sun. Johnno tried to liven things up a bit by producing a rage: against Brisbane, against Australia; but his denunciation of the city, delivered from that modest elevation, had about as much effect on the crowds below as the passing sunshower.

  “You’d need a fucking bomb,” he hissed bitterly. “And even then they wouldn’t notice. They’d decide someone had let off a particularly thunderous fart and pretend they hadn’t heard.”

  A long silence. It was just after three. Johnno threw one leg heavily over the other and stared out the window. He narrowed his eyes, and might have been flicking idle pebbles across a pool, far away in the centre of himself, the hard pebbles skipping over the surface of the afternoon, faster, more spiteful, closer to the passing heads. He swung his leg back again, sighed, and announced abruptly: “I’d better be getting home, Dante. I really had. I’ve still got my packing to do.” He paused. “And I’ve got one or two — aunts to visit.” He included other activities in a vague, unfinished gesture that appropriately enough caught the eye of the waitress, who came up swiftly with the bill.

  Outside in the street we walked uncomfortably towards Johnno’s tramstop. I tried to think of something to say, or do, that would be adequate to the occasion, adequate to what I would want later to recall. But what? We were almost at the corner. Suddenly I was caught in a Dostoevskian bearhug. “Goodbye Dante,” Johnno sobbed, close to my ear, and he was gone — dodging off through the crowd to where his tram was pulling in on the far side of the lights.

  He left me in a daze. It had all happened so quickly. People were staring. And his tram had rattled past before I even thought to wave!

  Awful! Awful! Awful! I burned with embarrassment. I had just stood there, stiff and unresponsive. Maybe in the shock of the moment I had even pushed him away. That would be typical! I tried to recall the moment. What was the last thing I had been thinking before it happened? But it was all a blur. If only it could happen over again! Only slowly, so that I wouldn’t be caught unprepared. I saw clearly how Johnno, on his journey home, would be reliving his half of the experience. Awful! I had never been so ashamed in my life.

  Still suffering, I wandered along Queen Street, trying to play it over in my memory so that I could be sure of how it had been. Maybe I hadn’t pushed him away after all.

  It must have been at the Black Cat corner that I looked up briefly out of my misery and saw — my God! it was Johnno, five yards off, coming right past me. He must have seen me at the same moment. Grinning sheepishly, making a little ducking movement with his head, he passed in the crowd, and in less than a minute there were a hundred strangers between us.

  Unwilling to risk yet another ghostly encounter, I took the first tram to the Valley and spent the hours till tea-time at the Civic, watching an ancient western and four episodes of an even more ancient serial.

  X

  ✧✧✧

  Africa was a long way off. Johnno went to work at a copper mine on the borders of the Congo and messages from him, apocalyptic announcements on a postcard, were few and far between, the outcome of drunken weekends in Salisbury or Johannesburg when he might have felt a twinge of nostalgia for our nights out, or tragic moments on the morning after when he would be bothered again with the “soul”.

  Scrawled across a postcard in his big loose hand, these messages were too cryptic, too infrequent, to tell me much of what he was feeling. “Truth is blue, the colour of all hangovers,” they might announce. Or “Wer, wenn ich schriee, hoerte mich denn aus den Engel Ordnungen?” The moments they sprang from were all extreme. He felt the need to reach out only when he was either desperately miserable or in some sort of ecstasy, and I knew, as he must have, that by the time his words reached me, five thousand miles away, as I was rushing out of the house for a tram, his mood would already be gone — replaced by whatever it was his silences represented: long stretches of sitting alone in a tent at the end of nowhere, with nothing but his native boys and his books, or weeks of tramping across country in the sun.

  About that he had nothing to tell. Though he did write sometimes about the books.

  He had them crated out to camp headquarters every six months, from Blackwells in Oxford: Schopenhauer, Berdiaev, Wittgenstein, Bonhöffer, Sartre — not to mention the novelists old and new, from Madame de Lafayette to Musil and Kazantzakis. Since he never, so far as I knew, kept a book (as objects he despised them, they were just receptacles to be emptied of their contents and thrown away), I used to imagine him sitting in a pair of faded khaki shorts on a camp stool, somewhere on Lake Victoria; flamingoes would be flocking away into the sun and big game animals swaying across the horizon; Johnno, swatting insects with one hand, thumbing pages with the other, would be hunched over one of his newly arrived consignments, and as he turned the last page of each crisp, new volume he would toss it lightly over his shoulder, where it would sink, with a few gobbling sounds, into primeval African mud. When his three-year contract was up he was off to Europe. What he was acquiring in Africa (and disposing of in its torpid lakes) was “civilisation”. No longer a barbarian, he would arrive in Europe with six thousand pounds in his pocket and the capacity for living at last among civilised men. He urged me to give up shadow boxing in the suburbs of limbo and follow him before it was too late.

  For some reason I declined to take his advice. Though almost everyone I knew had left Brisbane now, I stubbornly hung on. Binkie passed through on her way to the National Library in Canberra, and the next I heard she was engaged again — this time to a doctor whom she would marry “almost absolutely immediately, before he gets away”. People took jobs with the Public Service and were sent interstate. Or they got scholarships and went to Europe. I went to B.P. as a statistics clerk, sinking week by week
into a despondency deeper than anything I had ever known or thought possible.

  It wasn’t the job. I had found that by instinct. It was the only one I could have lasted in. It suited my mood. I spent eight hours a day checking dockets from service stations in the remotest parts of the state against their monthly sales-sheets; processing countless gallons of B.P. super and standard, 30 oil, 40 oil, and Viscostatic, and balancing sales against returns to see that the empty drums were all accounted for and hadn’t gone loose somewhere in the paddocks beyond Roma, where they might be used illegally as a water-butt or split in two to make feeding-bins, or be rusting away in the stomachs of omnivorous goats. When I had done a good-sized pile of stocksheets I made a “bundle”, by skewering the corner with a slotted knife, inserting a pin, and then beating the points down with the knife handle. Half a dozen hard, vicious blows that set every tack and bottle on my desk jumping and shaking like the devil was in them. The devil, in fact, was in me. “Making a bundle” was one way of driving him out and I could imagine the look on my own face from the looks I observed on the faces of my fellow workers — mouths set hard, eyes glinting, as they clasped the knife-end of their “bundler” and hammered hard with the wood. At the end of the accounting month I collected the files I had been working on over the past thirty days, loaded them on a trolley, took them to the roof in a special lift, and tipped the whole hundredweight or more down a chute that dropped them seven storeys into a basement incinerator.

  I went from B.P. to a coaching college.

  All one scorching summer I blazed from suburb to suburb on a Fanny Barnet two-stroke to coach failed students in English, Latin, and what I could remember (or swot up overnight) of my pure maths.

  And still I hung on. I was determined, for some reason, to make life reveal whatever it had to reveal here, on home ground, where I would recognise the terms. In Europe, I thought, some false glamour might dazzle me out of any recognition of what was common and ordinary.