The Boy in the Green Suit

by Robert Hillman

  As for my pay, I would never see that. I would have preferred my father to say, ‘Can’t pay you anything, sorry.’ It embarrassed me to hear my father make these promises he had no intention of keeping. Of course, he would have hated to admit that the promise was fantasy. He wanted to pay me. It wasn’t miserliness that made it impossible. In any case, I was glad of the money that came into the household from these occasional jobs. The money brought peace.

  The regular arguments of my father and stepmother often made me doubt my sanity. For they despised each other with a hatred that was inexhaustible. Each had a catalogue of grievances so detailed and cross-referenced that any accusation would instantly be countered by an accusation from the same section of a parallel list. They would circle each other in the kitchen like a pair of enraged baboons, leaning forward from the waist with teeth bared. Anything that could wound was used. Neither was capable of restraint when the anger was strong enough—not even the presence of me or my two stepsisters. Listening, I would wince when one of them left an opening for the other, certain of what would happen. A gloating look, the advantage seized, then venomous words would hiss from a crooked mouth.

  My stepmother’s most deadly line of attack had to do with why my mother left my father—his ‘stinking temper’; he ‘couldn’t hold his liquor any better than a kid’. Once on top, she was relentless: ‘What would make a woman do that, run off and leave two kids behind? Jesus, she must have hated you, Frank, you must have made her life a living hell.’ My father would scream that she was a slut, but that only made Gwen laugh.

  At his worst, he would menace her with the story of her younger son’s death in a car crash a few years earlier, telling her that Jeffrey was better off dead than growing up with a mother like her. When he had her on her knees, he would torment her with the sort of cruelty you would normally associate with the torture chamber. Since it was he who had dragged her dead son from the wreck—and me, with just a few cuts—he was in a position to describe the boy’s horrible disfigurement, and threatened to do so, toying with her until she screamed in pain. On most days, my stepmother treated me with affection and humour, but my father’s taunts could so derange her that she would cry out in despair, ‘Why couldn’t it have been Bobby! Why couldn’t it have been him!’ In a fit of melodrama, my father once held a carving knife across my throat, daring my stepmother to repeat what she’d said. ‘I’ll take his fucking head off for you—is that what you want?’ I wasn’t frightened; only ashamed for myself and my father. Later, he would regret his temper, but the regret could only be borne if he was drunk, and that would start a whole new round of arguments.

  I must have decided without quite realising it that six weeks would just about do me at Bertie’s. Once those six weeks were up, the urge to reach the Island harped in my head every hour of the day. My town seemed so exhausted of novelty that it existed as components—as if I had taken it apart and put it back together countless times. There were its ordered rows of houses, the creek, High Street, the shopping centre, the oval, the Progress Hall, the Catholic church on top of the hill, the Presbyterian at the bottom of Eighth Street, the old bridge, the new bridge, the river, the lake, the spillway, the dam wall, the pastured hills, the mountains.

  All were saturated with experience: fishing in the Goulburn, yabbying in ponds with the soft, greyish-yellow mud oozing up through my toes, riding my bike down Skyline Road with my eyes shut, opening a gash in my head when I crashed, persuading an adorably ripe cousin to kiss me open-mouthed in a bush hut we’d made, collecting books and magazines from the tip, swimming languidly a mile or more across the lake, descending abandoned mine shafts with my back against one wall and my feet against the other, watching my father cast a spinner into the seething white water below the power house, walking dazed and wretched in no direction and every direction when my mother left, forming a club with my friends dedicated to communism, murder and the fleecing of the rich. The town could absorb no more of me.

  So it must be the Seychelles. But before the Seychelles, Melbourne. I would need a job, maybe as a steeplejack, maybe as a motor mechanic (I’d seen my father rebuild that clutch, after all), or maybe—yes, maybe this, right here on the sheet of newspaper in which I was wrapping a customer’s order: Situations Vacant, Junior Sales Assistants, Ladies’ Shoes, The Myer Emporium, Bourke Street, Melbourne.

  My abandoned father enjoys a good deal of sympathy from men and women alike. Everywhere he goes, his mates slap a hand on his shoulder and shake their heads. ‘You wouldn’t fucking read about it, Frank. Can’t fathom a woman doing a thing like that.’ And from the women: ‘She’s only kidding herself, Frank. Only kidding herself. Think she’s not going to regret this? Don’t make me laugh.’

  Supported in this way, my father recovers. He finds the money to purchase a small Singer runabout with a fold-down roof, very perky. He begins to make trips to Melbourne, dashing along the twisting road that runs through Taggerty and Narbethong and over the Black Spur. He takes my sister Marion with him. Now that my mother is gone, my sister at fifteen is the prettiest girl in town, adored by everyone, but also the most wretched. She cries herself sick. The trips to Melbourne cheer her up. My father buys her gorgeous dresses in the city shops (with borrowed money) and takes her to shows at Festival Hall. She carries back souvenir programs that flabbergast me. Johnny Ray, Frank Sinatra, Guy Mitchell—legendary people.

  Whenever my father and sister dash off to Melbourne, they make sure they visit the Myer Emporium. My sister cuddles me and whispers in my ear all that she has seen in the wonderful store. One day, she says, I will go with her and Dad. Oh, I won’t believe what I will see! Oh, Bobby, Bobby—the cafeteria has everything, just everything, and you can walk along with a tray and you can just choose whatever you want, I mean whatever you want! And there’s so many departments, which is why it’s called a department store, see, and everything, just absolutely everything is there, you can’t even believe it when you see it, just truly, Bobby, just true true truly!

  I stay with a childless Polish couple while Dad and Marion are away. I have never met them before. I know that they are not amongst my father’s friends. They treat me with a grave and unfailing kindness, but rarely speak to me. I am baffled. I ask myself, in a blurry way, whether this is a normal thing. Mum there one day, gone the next, suitcase, red coat; Dad and Marion disappearing in the little blue Singer and returning with tales of a distant paradise, a store made up of departments; a couple of peculiar old people dressed in humourless grey left weirdly watching over me.

  I am bedded down by the Polish couple in a painstakingly constructed nursery, bunny rabbits running in a frieze around the wall, a strange, foreign-looking cot. The brawny, gentle hand of the Polish wife strokes my hair, tears finding a course down her cheeks. Baffling.

  Back home, an argument breaks out. I’m in my own bedroom without bunny rabbits, without the cot and the snuggly blue blanket. My father and sister are hissing in the passage. The words I pick up alarm me. ‘Yes, but he’ll be lonely, oh he will, Dad, he will, I promise you he’ll be lonely …’

  Twenty years pass before this makes sense. Something jolts a cobwebby old file in my brain’s archives, the papers spill, I stoop to pick them up and find myself studying those words: ‘… oh he will, Dad, he will, I promise you …’ My sister explains, wrongly judging me old enough at twenty-seven to be placed in possession of the facts. It had been intended that the Polish couple would adopt me. I don’t know how. But Marion wouldn’t hear of it, and my father backed down.

  Emporium

  I wore a grey dustcoat at Myers rather than a striped butcher’s apron, but looked no more at home in it. The apron had reached to my ankles; the dustcoat hung on me like a blanket on a famished refugee. And because the department store was full of mirrors, I could not go anywhere without catching sight of myself. I shrank in horror from my appearance. Even for a fantasist, there is a critical point at which convic
tion wilts. I could make myself believe that a slight boy of fifteen without any accomplishment could have a devastating impact on the women of the green island. But I could not believe in the figure reflected in the mirrors of the emporium.

  Perhaps I should think of a more ascetic career, concentrate more on the spirit. The life of a monk, for instance. I had recently read a slender book about a man who approached enlightenment by practising archery under the tutelage of a Zen monk. He had been told to desist from aiming his arrow. The arrow would find the target by itself. Breathing exercises were an important part of learning to strike a target by not aiming. Whenever I caught my reflection and felt my heart wince, I hurried to a secret place I’d located in the upstairs loft of the ladies’ slipper department—to practise my breathing, surrounded by cobwebs and a mist of peppery dust.

  It was not only the mirrors that menaced me. The store itself was so vast, so busy, that I felt as if I were locked in a dangerous machine that might at any moment seize and crush me. I was told by a supervisor to take slippers to a location on the sixth floor, where they would be photographed for a newspaper ad. I searched hopelessly for the lifts, then tried the escalators, and ended up in the kitchen of one of the store’s cafeterias, being shouted at by bad-tempered men pushing trolleys loaded with plates. Finally, a tall, masterful woman in a smart black suit put a hand on my shoulder and guided me to a quiet corner. She took out a handkerchief and dabbed at my eyes.

  ‘What’s wrong, precious puss? What’s the matter?’

  I showed her the slippers and spoke of photographs.

  ‘I’ll take you,’ she said.

  She guided me with what seemed magical ease along corridors and up flights of stairs to a door marked ‘Keep Out’. I never saw the woman again, but pictured her in my mind for weeks afterwards. In one comforting drama, she waited for me in Little Lonsdale Street, once again put her hand on my shoulder, took me home and, after a roast dinner, we agreed to marry.

  The city outside the emporium was even more terrifying than the store itself. I didn’t understand how it worked. The hurtling pedestrians, the rowdy trams, the glowering buildings—how was it that everyone knew what to do, where to go, where to stop, where to turn? I could master only the one, dogged route from Myers to Flinders Street Station. Once on platform 4, I knew to catch the Frankston train, and that was all. If the train were rescheduled and sent to another platform, I became ill with fear. I did not see anyone else who suffered in the way that I did. I believed that a certain code allowed people to negotiate the crush and bustle—something learned in school maybe, on a day that I was wagging. I didn’t have the code. I understood nothing.

  Once I’d reached my tiny flat in the backyard of a silent suburban home in Frankston (the house and flat were owned by Mrs Timms, a tiny, aged woman with a green plastic eye-patch) I would go to bed fully clothed with a tin of Tom Piper Braised Steak and Vegetables, and eat it cold while reading Time and Life and various novels from the library. When I went to the bathroom at the back of the house, Mrs Timms would silently appear behind me and hiss something that it took me months to work out. She was saying, ‘Easy with the left hand’—meaning, use very little of the hot water, the hot water tap being located on the left of the sink. I thought she was telling some sort of insane joke. I would laugh, my mouth full of toothpaste, and wish devoutly that Mrs Timms would die in the night so that I could bury her in the backyard and never have to see her again.

  The ladies’ slipper department was run by a lugubrious alcoholic, Vince, who spent most of the working day down the road at the Kilkenny Inn, appearing now and again to shout at Georgie and Nadia, who were the department’s real managers. Georgie and Nadia took no notice of anything Vince said, refusing even to reply. Vince, needing an ally, would take me out the back and whinge about ‘those two cunts’ who were ruining everything for the rest of us. Then he would sigh and fiddle around with invoices for a few minutes, muttering gloomily, ‘Breaks your heart, breaks your fucking heart!’

  Nadia, a Christian from Delhi, had a particular horror of drunkards, and wondered aloud in a chirping little voice why the laws did not make more of an example of men like Vince. ‘I would have him put through the wringer, my very word, over and over if necessary!’ But I was comfortable with Vince. My home town had been full of drunks.

  Georgie, like Eric back at Bertie’s, took an interest in my unfitness for employment and asked me why I’d left school. Her concern took the form of a worried interview, commenced and deferred and recommenced over my whole six months in ladies’ slippers. She would take me out behind the stock shelves, light up an unfiltered Chesterfield and question me, pausing regularly to pick pieces of tobacco off the tip of her tongue.

  ‘Now, love, what did your mum say when you left school? Wasn’t pleased, was she?’

  ‘She didn’t mind.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ll bet. You shoulda gone on and got a good job. Solicitor. D’you think they don’t make money, solicitors! Or a bank manager. What do you like doing?’

  ‘Reading.’

  ‘See? You coulda been a librarian! Whoops, gotta go, getting busy out there. Put those blue shufflers on the big table near the moccasins.’

  Thudding home on the train through the gloom of winter, I began to feel that something either wonderful or terrible must soon happen to me. This was not life. This was not the green island. My yearning for the marvellous and magical reached such a pitch that I had to bite the collar of my duffle coat to prevent myself weeping before the blank faces of my fellow passengers. Once I reached my station I followed a familiar route through dreary streets and across an ill-tended park, where a pair of desperate lovers regularly wrestled on a bench under struggling black wattles and lilly-pillys. I crept into my flat to avoid the whispery welcome from Mrs Timms, and went to work with oil paints on oblongs of Masonite, creating the sort of portraits that are offered in evidence by doctors seeking certification for a worrying patient.

  One day at work, I thought up a plan. Wandering the out-of-the-way and off-limits areas of the Myer Emporium in a dazed and miserable state, I came upon a huge coil of rope stored behind a door that gave access to the roof. If you walked across the roof, you could gaze down past the huge clock to the hurly-burly of Bourke Street seven floors below. What a lark, I thought, and how famous it would make me if I were to scale down the face of the building on that rope. How the shoppers and pedestrians and office workers would cheer! ‘Look at that bold lad!’ they would cry. ‘By God, they don’t make them like that anymore!’ I imagined women in the crowd folding their hands over their hearts in silent prayer for my safety. Yes, it was the answer. Later, the green island would provide a more complete answer but, just for now, a hike down the front of Myers would act as a tonic, get me into the newspapers, and would certainly delight all my friends back in Eildon.

  I planned the descent carefully. I bought gloves to work with me, to help me grip the rope. I was happy. I made my way to the roof exit, hovered over the rope for a few moments—then the door opened and a man in a very senior-looking blue dustcoat demanded to know what I thought I was doing. ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Well, get back to where you belong!’ he bawled—and I did.

  A week later I bought a typewriter and a cricket bat. The purchase of the cricket bat fulfilled a lifelong dream, but was of no other use to me. I stood it in the corner of the one room that comprised my flat, and stared at it. The typewriter was more useful. I wrote short stories on it. The stories were inspired by my reading of Hemingway and Chekhov. One of the Hemingwayesque stories began, ‘She was beautiful. Johnson had to admit it. She was beautiful and tall and her hair was the gold of sawdust from a freshly sawn log of spruce.’ The Chekhovian stories were more complex. The characters spoke a lot about their disappointments. I set the stories in Russia, usually in Moscow. Not knowing anything about Moscow, I was forced to make up names for streets and local sites of interest. I named th
e main street Raskalnikov Street. The stories all ended with one or more of the main characters attempting suicide.

  Writing the stories was exciting. It seemed obvious that I would one day win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and I began to think about the house I would need to properly accommodate the cup. I had got the idea that the Nobel Prize winner was given a big gold cup. Perhaps I would buy a crystal cabinet to display it. In all the households that I knew intimately, a crystal cabinet stood in one corner of the living room. Items that were ‘too good’ for regular use were stored in the cabinet—china plates, cut-glass salad bowls, matched sets of glasses, and so on. In the crystal cabinet in my home back in Eildon, my father kept more than crockery and glassware items. He was once given a second-hand electric shaver, and it went straight into the crystal cabinet, together with a fountain pen, a Ronson lighter and a pair of leather gloves. These items were not only ‘too good’ for regular use; they were too good for any use at all, and were taken out only to allow special visitors (my grandparents, for example) to briefly handle them.

  Happiness was the elusive thing. I had been a very happy little kid, up to a certain age. The components of that happiness were probably no more remarkable than those of other lives, but the sum overwhelmed me. Trapped in the memory of my senses were fumes, images, sounds and tastes that would jolt me into a trance when sunlight found a certain path through clouds, when shadows of a certain density moved on a ceiling, when the barking of a dog carried over a certain distance on an otherwise soundless afternoon. I wanted Eden again. The cricket bat and the typewriter could provide only brief holidays from desperation.