The Boy in the Green Suit

by Robert Hillman

  Persisting with Flaubert, I started on Sentimental Education, but it was over my head. I took out a couple of William books instead, and enjoyed them as much as anything I’d ever read. Whatever I opened, I imagined myself getting to know the author, usually delighting him or her with my conversation. It wasn’t only writers that I believed would welcome me into their homes and hearts. I also made myself the great friend and advisor to pop stars. Back in Eildon I would cast a spinner into the waters of the lake and, while I reeled it slowly back in, contemplate the sort of buddy I would make for Bob Dylan if he should come wandering down the shoreline. I wouldn’t gush, and Bob would appreciate that. He would have had his fill of fans and lackeys. No, I wouldn’t even acknowledge that I knew who he was, at first. ‘So, how are they biting?’ Bob might ask. ‘Oh, so so,’ I’d answer.

  But if I was to survive, I had to make plans of a plain and practical sort. I was dim, but I was not without some of the normal and useful resources of other people. I decided to save some of my remaining money for Greece. My remaining money amounted to seven pounds. Okay, so that’s five pounds for dry martinis for the rest of the voyage and two pounds to help me along when I left the ship. Braced by this new commitment to sense and responsibility, I relaxed completely. In the lovely library, I sipped the martinis and read my way steadily into the Suez Canal.

  I didn’t know we were in the Suez Canal until I wandered hazily up on deck and found myself staring at Egypt, at the fawn sand, at date palms, at camels. I was flabbergasted. Lightheaded on gin and vermouth, the added delight of Suez produced one of those episodes of happiness so finely wrought that you become a work of art. Everyone enjoys maybe a half-dozen such experiences in a lifetime. At any other time you endure the collapsing possibility of ever knowing that woman standing only the length of your shadow away with arms bare to the shoulders. But at those moments when you become art, you narrate the next few moments of your life.

  Or not. Because there was, in fact, a woman with arms bare to the shoulders standing close by as I gazed at Egypt. She glanced at me; I glanced at her. She was beautiful. She wore a skirt that the breeze lifted softly.

  ‘Isn’t it wonderful,’ she said, speaking of the sand and the date palms and camels.

  ‘Wonderful,’ I agreed.

  ‘You feel you’d like to run barefoot to Cairo, don’t you?’

  ‘Yep.’

  She moved closer to me, and without another word, put her arm around my shoulders and squeezed. She was, I suppose, a little over twenty. The honey-beige colour of her skin seemed more a product of ripening than of tanning.

  ‘I don’t know whether I should say this, but I wanted to tell you something. You drink a bit too much.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘It’s not my business, I know, but I do think you drink too much. I see you up here quite a lot. You nearly always have a drink in your hand.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘You’re a nice boy. You shouldn’t spoil yourself. Do your mum and dad know you come up here drinking? I won’t tell them. I just wondered.’

  Back in my cabin, I fought back tears. If a messenger from heaven had offered me fifteen minutes of being kissed and fondled by the woman with the bare arms, and my throat cut in the sixteenth minute, I would have accepted the deal without a second’s hesitation.

  On the morning of the ship’s arrival at Piraeus, all the Greeks wept. They threw their hands towards the sky, shook their heads, dashed the tears from their cheeks. The boy who’d offered me his girlfriend’s girlfriend (and I had not forgotten about that) grabbed me by my waist and lifted me off the deck. ‘Ellas!’ he cried. ‘Ho boy!’

  The Purser called me to his office and returned my passport. He produced a tatty map of Athens and described the route I should take to the Australian Consulate. ‘They will look after you,’ he said. ‘We have informed them. They talk to your mummy and father. Two weeks, back you go to Australia. Okay? You understand?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said.

  It is winter and I am nine years old. I am at work on a terraced slope in the Cathedral Ranges, digging small holes in the earth and spreading black topsoil evenly around each hole. The holes are dug in a contoured line following the undulations of the mountain and spaced at intervals of four yards. Fifty other people, men and boys, are at work in the same way. Each has a line to follow.

  A further fifty people, all adults, shuffle along the line of small holes and plant a tiny pine sapling in each excavation. Then the planters push the black soil in around the sapling and pat it flat with their hands. If you pause from your work for a minute, you can hear from all over the mountain the dull tom-toms of men flattening the black soil.

  The ranges have a modelled shape. From a certain vantage point, they look like a cathedral. But this depends. You might see the shape as a great ship, an ocean liner, the bow pushing west into the turbulent grey clouds and the bridge rearing behind. Or as a walled fortress erected to guard the bounty of the even taller mountains beyond.

  This is my first formal employment. I will be paid four pounds for the day’s work. I feel enormously privileged to be employed. The happiness inside me jingles like a tambourine. There’s nothing I would not do to prove myself as a worker on this plantation project. If the foreman, Gary Yates, a friend of my father’s, asked me to work barefoot in my undies, I would, despite the cruel, blue winter wind that bullies its way down the slopes, pushing my hair to one side. My father is watching me. He’s working three rows above me. It is of the greatest importance to me that the planter of my row doesn’t catch up with me. That’s the test—to stay ahead of the planter. If the planter catches you, you’re done for.

  I am still ahead of the planter at lunchtime, and pleased about it. I sit with my father to eat my sandwiches. My hands and bare legs are painfully cold, but I am unconcerned. My father sits with his elbows resting on his knees. He has finished his sandwiches and is now holding a mug of tea from a thermos and dragging on a cigarette, an unfiltered Temple Bar. He sniffs twice and then hunches his head into his shoulders a little. It’s a way he has of preparing himself when he has something important to say.

  ‘Miss your family?’ he asks.

  ‘No,’ I say, shocked.

  ‘What, you don’t miss your family?’

  ‘Nope.’

  I’m already on fire with embarrassment. My father never mentions my mother to me. I only ever hear of her when one of his mates brings her up. That hasn’t happened for a couple of years now. I don’t want my father to talk about her anymore. I am wrenched about by shame and fear. My happiness of a little while ago is smashed to pieces.

  ‘I think you do,’ my father says after a minute or so. ‘I think you miss your family.’

  I wait for the blow.

  ‘Boy your age needs a mum,’ he says—and there it is, like being thumped in the stomach and left sick.

  ‘And Bobby, listen old pal, I need a family, too. Okay? Mightn’t look like it, but a grown-up bloke can get good and proper sick of things. Y’ know?’

  He pauses again. Waiting, my prayer is Make him stop.

  My father sniffs twice. He is happy. I can see that.

  ‘Now, you won’t remember your mum much, I suppose …’

  I know that what I am about to do will seem mad, but I have to do it. I run away. I run down the hill to the muddy clay road where the six trucks that brought all of us to the mountain are waiting. I sit on the ground beside the trucks and stay there the whole afternoon. My father can probably see where I am from up on the mountain. He leaves me be. Throughout the afternoon, my distress lapses and returns. The huge bowl of the valley brims with angry cloud. Rain falls briefly, then flies off over the summit of the mountain.

  The evening dark has begun to settle by the time the workers come down from the mountain. As the boys pass me, they roll their eyes or snort in disgust or simply glance
with curiosity. The men don’t look at me at all. My father kneels down in front of me and takes my ears in his fingers and wiggles them. He doesn’t hold it against me that I am insane.

  A week later, a woman I have never seen before moves into our house on Ninth Street with her three children. I could not be more surprised if a tribe of Zulus in full battle dress had appeared in the kitchen.

  My father introduces me. He calls the blond woman ‘Gwen’. The children are Jenny, Sharon and little Jeffrey. I shake hands and smile as if I understand something that I don’t understand at all.

  I call the blond woman ‘Gwen’ for the rest of the day. Her expression is odd whenever I talk to her. That night, my father takes me down to the woodshed and lights the Tilley lamp. He produces a sixpence and asks me to put out my hand.

  ‘This is for you,’ he says. ‘I want you to call Gwen ‘Mum’ from now on. Will you call her ‘Mum’?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘You’ll make your dad very, very happy if you call her ‘Mum’. Will you call her mum from now on?’

  ‘Okay.’

  When we return to the house, I go to the kitchen where Gwen is stirring a cauldron of pea and ham soup.

  ‘Hello, Mum,’ I say, as awkwardly as you would expect.

  Gwen looks at me and lifts her chin, and her lips curl satirically.

  ‘Uh huh,’ she says. She knows what has gone on.

  ‘What is it?’ she says, not quite letting me off the hook.

  ‘Nothing,’ I say. I leave the kitchen and head back down to the woodshed, and sit there in the dark for half an hour, sick with shame.

  Highway

  My suitcase was packed. I’d had my green suit pressed by the cabin steward. I walked down the gang-plank and kept walking. The town was old and ramshackle, and almost everyone I saw looked vaguely demoralised. The air was full of the noxious fumes of the disorderly traffic. The Purser, acting on orders or from the goodness of his heart, had given me a handful of drachma notes—the first foreign money I’d ever seen. It seemed a lot to me. I had no intention of following the route to the Australian Consulate, and was instead intending to hitch my way to Germany. I’d earn a lot of money there, then head off to the Seychelles.

  I thought it might be wise to buy a packet of biscuits and a bottle of Coke for the long road ahead. In a roughly cobbled street I stepped into a gloomy shop, which turned out not to be a shop but a bar. A number of women in short skirts and tight tops were sprawled on chairs, looking ill with boredom. I put down my suitcase, smiled in what I hoped was a winning way and asked the barman, who seemed as bored as the women, for a bottle of Coke to take away. I was not so stupid as to ask for a packet of biscuits. The barman placed an opened bottle of what was surely beer in front of me. I offered the handful of drachma notes and the barman took all but one. The oldest and least attractive of the bored women put her hip against my groin and lifted one of her breasts out of her blouse for a moment. She wobbled her tongue between her lips, then asked me something I didn’t understand. Another woman, more attractive than the first, roused herself from her chair, took my hand and tugged me upstairs to a small room with lace curtains and a hand basin in the corner. I took my suitcase with me.

  What I was thinking was this: perhaps I should put in some practice here in order to prepare myself for the more desirable women of the Seychelles. It was not destined to work out, however, because the woman wanted money. I showed her what I had—my two-pound note and my only remaining drachma note—and she lost all interest. I stood silently beside her while she went to sleep on a rickety chaise lounge. A monopoly board was open on the bed. Little wooden houses and hotels were set up on most of the properties. I apologised to the woman’s sleeping form, picked up my suitcase and left.

  I was a competent hitch-hiker; back home, I’d hitched all the time. I realised I was an easy person to pick up, for nothing about me looked menacing. Quite the contrary. I’d also realised that it was pointless to walk while hitching. If you were walking, drivers could persuade themselves that it was within your power to reach your destination on foot. Also, it was difficult for drivers to get a look at your unthreatening face and form if your back was to them. I stood erect on the roadside with my face to the oncoming traffic, attempting to look polite and also pitiable.

  One ride and another and another took me from Piraeus to Athens (which looked as if it had been built, badly, about two hours before my arrival) and through Athens to a leafy suburb of big, attractive houses surrounded by tall walls. Left standing on the roadside in this silent and pleasant suburb, I thought I would read for a while. Before long, a Mercedes rolled gracefully out of a nearby driveway. The driver, a flawlessly groomed woman in white, asked if I was a student. I thought it best to say that I was. She asked me where I would like to go. I said, to Germany.

  Cruising along towards somewhere, the woman asked a long series of questions about conditions for students in various European countries. I answered all of her questions. Suddenly, the woman brought the car to a halt and put one hand over her face. She was weeping. I thought she must have fallen in love with me. Her weeping made hardly any sound at all. After a few minutes, she shook off her tears, looked straight ahead and told me I would have to get out of the car. I asked if there were anything I could do. She laughed mirthlessly and patted my cheek. ‘When you grow up, be a good boy, you understand? Be a good boy.’ No sooner had I closed the boot after retrieving my suitcase than the Mercedes ground out a furious U-turn and sped off.

  I puzzled over the woman’s behaviour as I waited for my next lift. I could only make sense of it by thinking of the woman as Chekhovian. She had probably just lost a large estate. Possibly she was married to some decrepit old idiot and was dying of unfulfilment. When she saw me on the side of the road, reading my book, she maybe thought she could begin a new life with me in Germany, but then realised that we would have to live on next to nothing and didn’t have the strength of character to give up her pampered existence for the sake of love, no matter how much she wanted to. As I fashioned the story that I thought I might write about the woman, I found myself thrilled with the line, ‘The tears she shed as she farewelled the young man were as bitter as olives.’ I knew about olives, having eventually nibbled on one only, from a shipboard dry martini. The woman I would write of was more beautiful and thirty years younger, and naked from the waist up.

  Further rides north took me through the dreary cities of Lamia and Larisa. It had been dark for some hours when I was dropped off in the middle of nowhere by a furiously bickering carload of Bulgarians. They were heading for Sofia, not for Germany. I sat on my suitcase, staring futilely into the dark for some indication of the direction I should now take. It was late November, almost winter, and the night was cold.

  I had to give up on waiting in one place for a lift. The highway was deserted of traffic of any sort. I headed down the road towards nothing with tears as bitter as olives welling in my eyes. I wished I were home and still working in Bertie’s and had some food and money. I was terribly tired and Greece seemed such a barren place, no trees, no paddocks, the cities a mess. And my suitcase could not have been heavier if it had been full of house bricks. A terrible fear was curdling into panic. I feared that I might be completely mad, and that everybody knew except me. The Chekhovian woman in the car—she might have noticed it. Maybe that was why she had suddenly abandoned me. But as I trudged on, I decided that I would refuse to believe that I was mad. Even if it were true, it would be better not to believe it. Sometime in the future, when I was warm and secure, I would examine my behaviour and come to some balanced assessment of my sanity.

  After a lot of walking I saw a roadhouse standing forlorn in the silence of the night, as if abandoned there. It was an unadorned roadhouse—it didn’t seem to take itself seriously. I trudged inside, barely able to keep my suitcase from dragging.

  Two men were playing cards at a for
mica-topped table and, behind a glass-fronted refrigerated cabinet, a women was guarding the only fare on display—a single doughnut. The card players looked up briefly from the table; the woman paid no attention to me at all. I negotiated the purchase of the doughnut with my last drachma note, then headed back out into the night.

  Further along the road, I made out a few dim lights that suggested a camp rather than a township. I came to a tiny shack, a kiosk, with a young man and two older men sitting outside on canvas stools. By this time, I was crying. The two older men looked both surprised and a bit offended—offended perhaps by my sookiness and my appearance. I blubbered out that I had no home, no money, no food, no nothing—in effect, throwing myself on their mercy. The two older men bestirred themselves slowly from their stools and held a candle to my face, chatting back and forth. One threw his arm around my shoulders, the other made small clucking sounds of sympathy. The young man, who seemed to be the proprietor of the kiosk—pistachios and pumpkin seeds were all it offered—put two hands to the side of his head and made the universal sleepy-time gesture. He gathered the three canvas stools, locked up the kiosk and signalled for me to follow him.

  As we approached his home, he whistled twice. A girl opened the door for us, greeting me shyly after listening to an explanation from the young man. He made me understand, by pointing to the ring on his finger and the ring on the woman’s finger, that they were married. Within, the house was furnished in the simplest way, nothing but the necessities. Out of the darkness an old woman appeared, made the sign of the cross, then vanished. The young man and I sat in silence at the kitchen table, he opening and closing his hands and shrugging to cover the awkwardness, me smiling in the most ingratiating way I could summon.

  I didn’t know what was being offered, but probably a place to sleep for the night, for the young woman was busy with blankets and sheets. The young man would want money, I thought, and wretchedly, fearing the cold and dark outside, I made him understand that I had no money, could not pay. He threw up his hands, making, so it seemed, embarrassed denials, then laughing as he explained it to his wife. She came at last and sat with us at the table, smiling and pretty, her dark hair tied at the back of her head. After more awkward smiles and embarrassed laughter, the young man showed me to the makeshift bed that had been set up on the floor beside an old iron double bed on the far side of the kitchen. Beneath the sheets and blankets, I gloried in the relief of rest for a time, but then felt ashamed. My loneliness and neediness had brought me all the way across the world to cadge hospitality from people who could not afford such luxuries as loneliness.