Johnno

by David Malouf

  The clergyman had finished. He folded his hands and turned forty-five degrees towards the coffin, in deferential expectation. After a moment’s pause that was filled with a tasteful swelling of music, a little panel slid open in the wall, the coffin rose miraculously on its tilt, and Johnno moved slowly away from us. There was nothing to be shocked at. Music spiralled up, the coffin’s pace was dignified but swift, the little panel in the wall closed again, slowly, soundlessly, and it was over. We shuffled out into a solid wall of sunlight. After the coolness of the chapel it was like the edge of an axe.

  Binkie walked with me to the parapet. We didn’t speak. Johnno’s mother had come down the steps into the courtyard and was accepting the handshakes of the other mourners. Under the Roman columns of the arcade a group was gathering for the next service, and I could see the bus making its way zig-zag up the valley, its metal flashing as it turned between the hills.

  “We’d better speak to Johnno’s mother,” I said.

  Binkie looked bewildered. “Oh — it’s no good me going, Dante. She wouldn’t even know who I am. I’ll — just wait for you in the car.” She made a vague gesture towards the carpark at the end of the terrace. “It’s a Holden station-wagon. Blue.”

  I waited till the last of the mourners had left.

  “Dante!” Johnno’s mother exclaimed when I approached at last. “Oh Dante!” She clutched my arm and nodded speechlessly. Then after a moment recovered and said: “You haven’t changed a bit. You look — exactly the same —”

  She looked at me hard, thinking of Johnno perhaps; and I realised suddenly how she must hardly have known him when he reappeared at last after all those years, can hardly have believed that the fair, coltish boy who had gone off and remained just like that in her memory, had grown huge and sodden, every stone a proof of how far he had outgrown her knowledge of him, how far he had moved away Her gaze flickered and she put her hand to her mouth.

  “But I’m not sad,” she insisted when she had recovered a little. “I refuse to be sad. He’s happy. I know he is! He’s with Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. You must come and see me, Dante. There’s a book with addresses in it. He had friends all over you know — Paris, London, Athens. I want to write and tell them — what’s — happened to him …”

  She covered her mouth again, and a woman in a straw hat, who might have been a sister-in-law, took her arm and made a little sign to me to leave. I hurried towards Binkie’s car. Thinking what some of those “friends” of Johnno’s (girls whose address he had been given, a dealer who could get him hash) would make of a letter announcing that Edward Athol Johnson was dead, drowned, in Australia. Lifting their shoulders in puzzlement.

  Binkie drove without speaking, hunched forward over the wheel and frowning against the glare. She had slipped her shoes off and was wearing beaded driving-slippers. The hat had been tossed carelessly onto the back seat.

  “It must be seven years,” she said at last. And her eyes flicked sideways to examine me a moment, then away. “You haven’t changed a scrap, you know that, Dante?” She smiled, and put her hand affectionately on my knee. “I’ve changed like hell! — Oh, there’s no need to pretend I haven’t. Did you know I’ve got two kids? I’ve settled down, just the way they said I would. It’s not so bad.”

  She smiled again. She was plumper than she used to be, had more freckles. The skin had begun to break up round her eyes, and thicken, in a way that I thought of as Irish. What hadn’t changed was her voice. Low and dark like warm molasses. The rum-and-Coke girl.

  “Do you think he did it deliberately?” she asked after a little silence.

  I didn’t know. He could have. I just didn’t know.

  Binkie shook her head, peering hard ahead at the intersection, where we were about to join the main stream of traffic into town.

  “I never understood him, not from the beginning, never at all,” she said. “I used to think about him a lot after he went. I was crazy about some of the boys I knew, and now I can hardly even remember their names. Isn’t that awful?” She gave one of her bubbly little laughs. “But Johnno was —” She shook her head again, and whatever it was she was going to say went underground, into silence, while she watched a red light up ahead tick slowly towards green. Suddenly as she changed gears and moved forward: “Did you ever read A Hero of our Time, Dante? He gave it to me once and I picked it up — oh, just a few months ago and read it for the first time. I suppose he was trying to make me see something in it. About him, I mean. But I still don’t know what.” She gave me a sharp look, as if her mind had moved off quickly elsewhere. “Are you going to stay this time, Dante, or will you go again?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I’m going to stay,” — and realised immediately that it was a decision I hadn’t known was made.

  She dropped me in the Valley and I promised to ring.

  “Please do, Dante,” she said, holding my hand through the window. Tears began to shine in her eyes and she made a little gesture of impatience with herself and shoved the car savagely into gear. “I wish I understood things,” she said, half to herself “I’ve always been so bloody dumb!” She laughed. “They always told me that too.” She put her foot down and trailed her hand from the window in a last wave.

  That wasn’t quite the last of it. Two nights later I had a phone call. It was Johnno’s friend Bill Mahoney. He had recognised me at the funeral and wondered, after all this time, if we mightn’t meet. He was an intern at the Mater Hospital. Maybe we could have drinks together on Saturday morning.

  Bill Mahoney! The exterminating angel! The young Nachaev!

  The Criterion at eleven o’clock on Saturday morning was almost empty, the long marble bar had no more than a dozen drinkers, there were two more at tables in the gallery, and I had no difficulty in recognising one of them as Bill. A plump impressive-looking man who might have been forty, round-faced and bald as a baby, he was raising his hand to catch my eye.

  “I think we were supposed to meet,” he said, coming down the two marble steps. He began to stutter. “I-I-I’ll get you a drink.” He motioned me to a table under the stained-glass window at the rails of the gallery and went on down to the bar. Rebel, spy, terrorist, I told myself. And was surprised by his mildness (though of course I oughtn’t to have been) and by his babylike softness, that was due, perhaps, to nothing more than the limpness of the damp, hairy hand he had offered me and the glow of fuzz around his skull.

  “Johnno told me a good deal about you,” he said when we were both settled and had had time to regard one another for a moment over the tops of our glasses. His mouth dimpled. “I-I was rather scared of you,” he admitted. “You’re n-n-not what I expected.”

  “You were scared?”

  He looked up quickly, and I think we both realised at the same moment what Johnno’s game had been, and felt guilty, sitting here, of the same disloyalty. We were survivors of a sort, Bill and I. Mildly sipping our beer on a warm Saturday morning. Slightly shamefaced. With nothing between us but our unfinished drinks, and the shadow in each of our thoughts of the picture Johnno had created for us, out of impatience, perhaps, with the reality. Spy, terrorist, our very own Rimbaud. Is that how Bill had thought of me?

  He took out a pipe and began to fill it from a leather pouch. He had seen a good deal of Johnno, one way and another, over the last couple of months. He’d been up to the camp and they’d swum at the very place where it happened: a pool below the weir, where the river widened under a screen of basket willows. The local schoolkids had rigged up swinging ropes and a plank for diving. It was all perfectly safe. A suburban swimming pool. No rocks, no snags, no currents.

  “So what happened then?”

  Bill pushed tobacco down with his thumb, took out his matches, pushed again, lit a match, and got the thing alight and smoking. His slowness, I thought, was a form of protection. Against what? The stutter? Or was there after all something in him that his silence, his caution, was keeping at bay? He was too subdued.

  “An a
ccident,” he said at last, frowning. And then, with another appearance of the dimple at the corners of his mouth, “Whatever that means.”

  “You’re satisfied it was an accident?”

  He stared ahead as if he hadn’t heard my question. Sucking at the pipe. “Of course,” he said after what seemed an age, “it’s what the inquest decided. I was there, I gave evidence. An open and shut case. It’s also, incidentally, where the medical evidence points. So there you are.”

  He looked at me, smiling, and I suspected him, ungenerously perhaps, of playing with me.

  “And that’s all?”

  “N-no, it’s not all. It was also an accident that couldn’t have happened. Impossible, in that particular place.”

  So there we were again.

  As for the night before my meeting with Johnno, when they had, as Johnno had put it, “destroyed the myth”, there was nothing to tell. Or nothing he would tell. Johnno had been pretty drunk. But then he was always pretty drunk these days. They had picked up a couple of girls and driven out to a crossing to swim. There was an argument, Johnno had hit one of the girls, Bill had some trouble calming her down — the usual thing. They’d dropped the girls off in the Valley and he’d driven Johnno home. He’d had some harebrained scheme about their burning a church down, and had spent most of the journey going through the details of how they’d do it — getting the petrol from Barnes Auto, in a drum, finding a likely place, some little weatherboard out in the sticks, lighting it up from underneath …

  “You know how he could get himself worked up.” Bill looked at me with his innocuous smile.

  “And that was all?”

  I remembered Johnno’s bandaged hand and his story about the primus stove.

  “It’s all I know,” Bill said, firmly.

  And in the end, perhaps, it doesn’t matter. A suicide with some of the shocking randomness of accident — an accident so aesthetically apt as to have all the elements of a humorous choice. Johnno’s death would have to confound us. It would have to be a mystery, and of his own making. It would have also to defy the powers of medicine and the law to establish their narrow certainties. It would need to be explicable, at last, only as some crooked version of art.

  For what else was his life aiming at but some dimension in which the hundred possibilities a situation contains may be more significant than the occurrence of any one of them, and metaphor truer in the long run than mere fact. How many alternative fates, I asked myself, lurking there under the surface of things, is a man’s life as we know it intended to violate?

  Epilogue

  ✧✧✧

  Among the last of my father’s belongings to be cleared away were the only two books I had ever seen him consult, the only books, I believe, that he ever owned.

  One was a big old-fashioned ledger, the sort of ledger — imitation leather boards, marbled endpapers — that a young man of ambition might acquire to record three decades of prospective credits and debits, the day by day progress of a phenomenal career. It was empty, save for a curious chart that had been traced on tissue and pasted neatly between the leaves. All jagged peaks dipping sharply towards plateaux, and then deeper still into level valleys and troughs, it looked like the Himalayas in cross-section, or one of the voice-charts we used to make in the language laboratory by shouting nonsense into a tube. It was in fact, as my father had often explained, a graph of the boom years and the years of depression between 1913 when he acquired it and 1994.

  My father believed in this sheet of flimsy, yellowing paper as he believed in the Holy Ghost. The neatly ruled lines and small, perfectly formed figures were in his own hand, and every deal he had ever made, every property he had ever bought or sold, every turning his life had taken in the world of public triumphs and disasters, was charted there on its peaks and lows. It was the record, crudely projected, of his life, and at the same time the map of an era. I had spent long hours of my childhood poring over it, fitting my own birth date to one of its most insistent lows and asking the oracle what the world would be like when I was twenty-one, twenty-nine, thirty. It wouldn’t matter much after that. Turning back to the old chart now I felt as close as I ever would feel to the forces that had guided my father’s life and given it shape. That line on the page was what he had tuned his soul to, taking, as the graph did, the shocks of history.

  The other book, which was wide and flat with a royal blue cover, had been one of the most treasured objects of my childhood. It was called A Young Man with an Oil-Can, and it celebrated the genius of a young Scot, James MacRobertson, who, beginning with just an oil-can (which appeared on the frontispiece and was a little like the boiler in which Mrs. Allen did our wash), had gone on to found the biggest chocolate factory in the Commonwealth. The factory building, many-windowed and square, loomed up in double exposure — a solid future already branded with his name, Pty. Ltd. — behind a snapshot of James MacRobertson himself, a wide-mouthed young man with shoulder-length black hair, who stood with his sleeves rolled up beside a can in which he was boiling, perhaps, his first sticky confection. I thought this effect quite magical, and only less impressive in my young experience than the colourplates which followed. They, of course, were incomparable, and seemed as beautiful to me then as anything I had ever seen or could imagine, a sort of colonial Book of Hours.

  They represented the full range of the MacRobertson products: Columbines, Cherry Ripe, Old Gold, etc., and you got your first glimpse of them through a layer of the finest tissue — it was like peering through the frosted glass of a sweetshop window. Lift the tissue, take a deep breath, and there they were. Ajar of boiled lollies, glistening pink and yellow, and in every conceivable shape: scallop-shells, ovals, little barber-pole cylinders with pinched ends, medallions with roses in their depths, even some bite-sized candy-striped pillows that smelled (I could actually smell them) of a medicinal spice like the ambulance tent at Scarborough. Most evocative of all, since it spoke so directly of solid riches, was the MacRobertson Special Old Gold Selection that we bought for my mother’s birthdays; with dubloons, ropes of pearl and other precious stones spilling from a pirate’s chest, and beside it, the open gold box with its own pile of treasure, the delicious hard and soft centres in their jewel-like wraps.

  It was a book, I suppose, that my father turned to as other men in other places have turned to Homer or The Pilgrim’s Progress, the palpable record of a great national mythology. You began like James MacRobertson with an oil-can and you ended up with a book like this. Or you started like T.C. Beirne and James McWhirter with rival barrows on opposite sides of a street and you ended up with the huge department stores, one firmly Catholic, the other staunchly Protestant, that faced one another across Brunswick Street in the Valley. Success of the golden sort is possible to anyone with the energy and vision to go out for it — that was what the Young Man with the Oil-Can taught; and my father, at least, believed it. His oil-can had been a horse and dray. His equivalent to James MacRobertson’s factory was our heavy, over-furnished house in Arran Avenue and my mother’s collection of Venetian glass, Dresden figurines, Noritaki, a whole teaset of which she had miraculously saved (while the rest of Brisbane were smashing their Japanese dinner-plates) on the grounds that it was a wedding present from her favourite brother — a twenty-one piece gilded white lie. This was life as it is lived on the peaks of the famous graph, a real success story. But then, any story that matters here is a success story. The others are just literature.

  Still, those troughs at the bottom of the graph are also part of the story The most impressive fact of my early childhood was the Depression. I can remember the men, worn, shy-looking men in felt hats and threadbare waistcoats, who came to our door for work, misled perhaps by our huge, overgrown garden, and were given food at the bottom of the stairs. There were swaggies on the road and under the trees in Musgrave Park. Like other children in those days we were warned to keep away from them. Otherwise we might disappear and be discovered headless one morning in a dirty sack.
When, later in the decade, they themselves disappeared, it was I suppose into the A.I.F. There were boom years then, and 1942, when we were all in imminent danger of destruction, is one of the dizziest peaks on my father’s graph. But even then there were old-timers, like Peg-leg, who had not been drafted into prosperity and still came hat in hand for something to help him through the week. My father had a dozen old mates like Peg-leg, who had fallen on hard times, or had never fallen on good ones. Some of them he knew from his fighting days, they were old fans. Others from the early years when he had carried from the markets. He never failed to stop when they hailed him, and never refused the few bob that they would immediately, my mother assured us, drink away in one of the Valley wineshops, whose panelled half-doors only the “lowest” ever went through. My father had kept out of the troughs. After all, he had the graph. But he knew they existed, and he had come often enough to the edge, and looked over, to know just what the troughs were like.

  I put the heavy books aside. Someone else could deal with them. I hadn’t the heart to burn the Young Man with an Oil-Can, it would have been like putting a match to the National Gallery. And who knows, my father’s graph might still be of use to someone. 1994 is a long way off. The years between are not all lows.

  Beside such weighty objects, the picture of a cocky twelve-year-old in glasses that never belonged to him is a very small affair, a private joke illustrating nothing but itself.

  “It’s all lies,” Johnno would say. And in the end, perhaps, it is. Johnno’s false disguise is the one image of him that has lasted, and the only one that could have jumped out from the page and demanded of me these few hours of my attention. Maybe, in the end, even the lies we tell define us. And better, some of them, than our most earnest attempts at the truth.