The Boy in the Green Suit

by Robert Hillman

  He picks a cigarette from a packet—not an unfiltered Temple Bar but a timid Wills Super Mild. He has trouble lighting it. His hands are unsteady. Finally he gives up and lets his hand, holding the cigarette, drop to his side. He closes his eyes, breaths in rapidly two or three times, small hiccuping gulps. He opens his eyes again only when he has his tears under control.

  ‘Be happy if you can,’ he says, mastering his emotion with an attempt at gruffness. ‘Okay? Will yuh?’

  Butcher Shop

  I left a trail of clothing, books and DNA on the journey from the border to Karachi. A month on the road, and all that remained of me was a blue shirt, the trousers of my green suit, my thongs, skin, bone and about half the normal complement of blood for a boy my age. The other half had been sold in hospitals along the way, always under the supervision of a fiercely scornful Western-trained woman doctor with thick spectacles worn around the neck on a plastic chain. It couldn’t have been the same short-tempered doctor in every blood bank between Lahore and Karachi, but it didn’t seem possible for a half-dozen doctors to look so alike.

  In one of the most modest restaurants of Lahore I met a couple of insanely gregarious high-school students home from Karachi on holidays. After purchasing my striped shirt with the button-down collar, they furnished me with introductions to relatives down south. The translations read out to me were pure subcontinent rococo, ornamented with such phrases as, ‘My tragic friend has met calamity in sundry episodes of ill-fortune.’ It made me soaringly confident of the reception I’d be given by the Karachi rellies. One of the letters was addressed to the editor of a newspaper. Just let me hobble into Karachi, I thought, and I’m a made man.

  Unfortunately, one further sundry episode of ill-fortune was waiting to test me. On the road to Karachi I contracted dysentery (as it was later diagnosed). Nowadays, a mild pain in the tummy is enough to force me to my knees in prayer, but as a boy I possessed (fluctuatingly) a fortitude that would have awed Prometheus. Riding in racks on the roofs of truck cabins (every truck in Pakistan was fitted with one of these devices, to accommodate the poorest of travellers), I writhed like an eel and was forced at ten-minute intervals to bang on the cabin roof for a rest break. The patience of the drivers was astonishing. They might have roared off down the highway while I was whimpering in the roadside shrubbery, but they didn’t. They waited, and helped me remount to the rack when I was done with a sympathetic slap on the tush.

  I came to Karachi, burning, burning. The city seethed. Nobody moved but that they darted, and my vision could barely cope with the crying and carolling forms of hurrying people as they teemed along the streets. In near delirium, I prevailed on a man selling handbags to give me a few coins and a black vinyl satchel in exchange for my suitcase. I went with the coins to a pharmacist and purchased an envelope of yellow powder, together with what looked like a ten-year supply of assorted antibiotics doled out with a ladle into a brown paper bag. Taken together, these medicines, so it was promised, would cure almost anything that affected the human bowel. Lacking water, I washed down the powder and a handful of antibiotics with a bunch of feculent grapes, and almost immediately lost all sensation in my body below my chin—a great relief.

  My legs still did my biding, numbly. I wandered pleasantly, asking directions, until I came across the address of one of the people to whom I had been commended by the high-school students in Lahore. The address was that of a dilapidated hotel.

  The man I was looking for was, as it turned out, a porter. He was unable to read, but carried the letter excitedly down to the street and called to a friend selling boxed sets of kitchen knives on the footpath. The knife seller read the letter aloud, attracting an audience with the shrillness and delight of his delivery. After a period of passionate dispute involving everyone in the audience, it was decided that I would be found a free bed in the hotel. And so I was, except that the bed was a wooden bench on a drooping rear balcony. A number of bald car tyres and perished inner tubes were stored on the balcony, together with heaps of cardboard cartons holding what I eventually discovered were player piano rolls.

  I never saw the porter again. After two days rest and a lot more medication, I headed off with my black vinyl satchel in search of my other mark, the newspaper editor. Not knowing exactly which way to head, I approached a shoe salesman down in the city. I chose the shoe salesman so that I would have something to chat about if he turned out to be the sort of person who liked a chat. I had sold shoes myself in the Myer Emporium, not so long ago. He was very helpful. He drew me a map on the lid of a shoe box. He seemed to be suggesting that my destination was fairly distant from where we stood, but I was undaunted. This might be the break I was waiting for.

  I walked for a very long time. When night fell, I was no longer in the city. The landscape was like an endless vacant lot. Every now and again a traveller going in the opposite direction would pass me and smile. Standing in the darkness and finding only random points of light in the distance to guide me, I was beaten.

  I felt like a character in a novel—made to act the fool, to humiliate himself, to hope when hope was ridiculous, to dance like a trained bear—who had turned on the author and cried out, ‘No! You’re cruel and heartless and I will never serve you again, never!’ But I was coaxed out of my rebellion; I listened to the author’s cynical blandishments. ‘Don’t be so hasty, the editor might really be there, might really be waiting for you, might give you a wonderful job with heaps of prestige, might …’

  The editor was there. He lived in an improbably modern house, one of only four in a pioneer suburb of the Karachi leisured. Lights shone brightly within. I knocked on the door and asked the attractive woman who answered for the man whose name was written in English on the envelope. The man who came to the door—tall, composed, well-dressed—asked courteously if he could be of service to me. He looked up and smiled at me every so often as he read the letter I offered him. ‘Come to this address tomorrow morning,’ he said, writing on the back of the envelope. ‘Wait just a minute.’ He returned to what sounded like the laughter and hub-bub of guests, and came back with three vol-au-vents on a paper plate.

  I slept that night on the grassy bank of what appeared to be a creek, but morning light showed to be an irrigation ditch. I swallowed the remainder of my bag of antibiotics with the last of the grapes, made myself look as beautiful as I could, and went off to find my man, my hoped-for benefactor, my last hope.

  The newspaper office looked exactly as newspaper offices look. Scores of people worked in an attractively frantic way at scores of typewriters at scores of desks. At the largest desk my man sat calmly beckoning me. He had no typewriter. In few words, all of them kind, he told me that there was not the slightest chance that I could become employed at the newspaper. He encouraged me to return to my native land, where I would be likely, very likely, to become employed on an English-language newspaper. ‘What was my city?’ ‘Melbourne,’ I replied. ‘Ah, The Age!’ he said. ‘You will surely find employment at The Age newspaper. The Age newspaper is a very fine newspaper,’ he said. I should go home and speak to the people at The Age newspaper.

  The medication I had been dosing myself with was acting on my body in a peculiar way. The pain and the urgent need to find a dunny had passed, but a weird listlessness took over. If I stalled any forward movement, even briefly, my knees gave way. If I leaned against a wall, I slid down it. The only remaining opening for employment in Karachi—that of living off my own blood, a sale a week at the hospital—was closed off when, for the first time, the woman doctor with the thick spectacles refused to stick the needle in my arm. ‘Young man,’ she said censorially, ‘go to your consulate. I will not attend you here. You are quite ill—quite ill.’

  The mad insistence of the author whose book I seemed to be inhabiting finally relented. Neither the author nor I could think of a feasible alternative to repatriation. And yet I shivered with unease and a sense of appalling fail
ure all the way to the consulate steps. He seemed a creature with a heart like an ice cube, that author. ‘It’s been fun, it really has, but it’s over old pal—over.’ Seduced, abandoned, I walked into the consulate, heart aching, and asked to be sent home.

  Twelve months had passed since I’d left home in search of the island of women. My family was waiting to greet me at the airport. My father and stepmother, my sister, my stepsisters—they all looked past me when I approached them, still waiting for me to emerge from the ruck of arriving passengers. It was my sister who first recognised me. She burst into tears. My father grabbed me by the shoulders, some fierce emotion working in his face. He was more relieved than furious one moment, then more furious than relieved the next. ‘What have you done to yourself? You idiot, you little idiot!’ Day-by-day familiarity with my decline had disguised from me the extent of change. I was extremely thin, and had taken on the colour of the bright yellow powder I’d purchased from the Karachi pharmacist.

  In the car on the way back to my home town, my father reminded me again and again that Bertie would take me back as an apprentice butcher. I said I would accept the offer, but my heart was too sore to add conviction to my voice. It was evening when we reached the house. I was fed, petted, put to bed. I smoked a cigarette in silence, staring up at the ceiling. My father opened the door to stare at me, shake his head and tell me how happy he was to have me back. My sister put her head in, and began crying again.

  Late at night I woke and wept. I couldn’t stop the tears. The only thing on earth I wanted was to be back on the steps of the consulate in Karachi. I would not walk through the door and speak to the startled receptionist. I would not sign the document which would translate itself into an SAS ticket to Bangkok and a Qantas ticket to Melbourne. I would walk back down the steps into the city. I would find a job, any job—I would work with a pick and shovel. Later, I would take a ship to Mombasa, a boat to the Seychelles, a dinghy to the island of women.

  The town cemetery is sited in bushland close to the banks of Honeymoon Creek. Wattles and eucalypts hem it in on three sides. Mourners who plant bulbs on the graves of their loved ones (daffodils, jonquils, irises) have learned over the years that the tender winter shoots attract rabbits. Wallabies have been known to leap the wire fence. One was witnessed eating flowers left in a vase by a visitor.

  Between the cemetery, the creek and the river lies a patch of land on which plum trees, a ragged lemon tree and a pair of hornbeams struggle along in the shade of the yellow box and ironbark. Half-hidden in the tawny phalaris and barley grass beneath the trees you will find, after an earnest search, the red-gum stumps of all old dwelling, together with other fragments—some smothered in blackberry—of the type of house that once stood here, above the Goulburn. A few lengths of weatherboard as fragile as paper lie flattened to the clay. A curved scrap of corrugated iron, all that is left of a water tank, is so brittle that it is possible to poke a stick through it.

  These weather-beaten remains were once part of a grocery shop that my grandfather kept for a time in the ’twenties. The town barely existed in those days, and keeping the shop cannot have afforded my grandfather much profit. Conscientious pursuit of what cannot provide reward seems to have been a hallmark of the male members of my family.

  The cemetery has always been a pleasant place to me. I like to walk amongst the graves and stop whenever a familiar name invites me to recall that woman, that man, that boy, that girl. ‘Pleasant’ is not quite the right word. But I enjoy the brief suspension of anxiety and fret that settles on me when I walk amongst the graves and see so many inalterable conclusions to so many stories. Here, editing is done with. The ending is perfect.

  Vernon died at fifty-two, mourned by his wife and brother, so the headstone says. I happen to know that no children were left behind to grieve. What more can be said? Vern lived and died, and once taught me how to gut a trout. Terry was overtaken by cancer and was only eighteen. He was a boy who loved to brag, but I liked him. Mrs Cooper lived next door to my family, and suffered a great deal from having a husband who made a career of a bad back, so rarely was he employed and so wearingly did she strive to compensate. Her husband misses her, the headstone says, and so do her sons and daughters.

  My father’s grave lies between an anonymous weathered monument and a concrete marker with a small, numbered brass plate attached. The number refers you to a name, should you wish to study the shire records. The inhabitant of the grave died poor and alone, one of many reinterred here by the Americans when the rising waters of the lake drowned an even older cemetery down on the river.

  The wording on my father’s headstone is mine. It was thought proper that I should find the words, since I wrote stories and poems and was attending university at the time of Dad’s death. Recalling that I had once ornamented the restaurant menus of the Parki Saadi with quotations from Chekhov, I opted for brevity. ‘Francis Edward Hillman’ I wrote, on translucent blue air-letter paper, the only blank paper in the house at the time; ‘Dearly loved and sadly missed by his family.’ The sheet of blue paper was handed to the undertaker. The undertaker relayed it to the mason. The mason inscribed the words on the headstone. I had written the conclusion of my father’s life story.

  I often drive up here to the cemetery from the city with a friend—maybe a friend from the town who, like me, hasn’t lived there for many years now, or maybe someone who is simply happy to get out of the city for a day. Some are touched by the visit, feeling, I think, that I am sharing something that I would surely reserve for the people in my life I cared for most. Some think it weird, or boring, or disturbingly sentimental. One of the visitors says, with a laugh, ‘Do me a favour!’

  When I visit the cemetery alone—I am alone now—I attempt a chat with my father. I always glance about warily, terrified of being caught mumbling over a grave. The chats are never successful, because while talking I split in two, and one of me watches the other. The one watching is embarrassed by the one speaking, and eventually starts speaking, too. He says, ‘For God’s sake shut up, the man’s dead.’ And then I become one person again, a person who has shut up, as he should.

  I don’t have anything to say today. I wander through the Catholic section, stopping to stare down at a fresh mound of clay. Bunches of flowers are wilting on the hill of pebbly clay. Looking more closely, I see that a small, gold ring is tied to one of the bunches with a purple ribbon. Is it a wedding ring? It’s too small for a man’s finger. Why, if such a gesture was called for, was the ring not placed in the coffin? Left here, it could be stolen. The ring, exposed to theft, worries me. I place another bunch of flowers over it, to conceal it. I walk away from the grave reluctantly, still troubled.

  It’s a balmy day, a late autumn day, the blue sheet of the sky barely touched by cloud. Wattle birds, ransacking the shore pines outside the fence in search of buds, shout their harsh, tribal, two-note caw.

  I put my hand on my father’s headstone, as I usually do before starting back to the city. But I can’t empty my mind. I stand beside my father’s grave for some time, fretting about the new grave. Finally, I accept that the wedding ring has been left for much the same reason that I would leave a ring on a grave, or book a ticket on an ocean liner. The ring has been left to place its owner in the story of a life—perhaps to be included in some imagined future. I booked a ticket on a ship to install myself in a story that my father had begun in his imagination, and that I had rounded out.

  I leave this place of conclusions just as a car pulls in and parks close to mine, under the pines. I know who this is. It is Madge. I haven’t seen her for maybe twenty years. I know whose grave she will be visiting. It’s in the Catholic section. I stopped at it almost an hour ago, thinking of the boy, Madge’s son, who is buried there. I put him in a novel once, with a cavalier disregard for the feelings of his family. Madge won’t have read that book, I hope. She probably won’t recognise me. She’s carrying a huge bunch of pink c
hrysanthemums.

  ‘Tracy,’ Madge calls to a stout little girl with yellow hair under a red baseball cap on which the words ‘Kylie’ and ‘Fever’ are lettered in sequins.

  ‘Get that vase, love!’

  Madge is carrying a trowel and a small mat, for some weeding. She has just about reached me. I am standing at the gate, prepared to take my medicine if I have to. Madge, about the age of the ancient pines above us, glances at me and seems ready to trudge past. Tracy has found the vase, and is running towards us.

  ‘Bobby!’ says Madge, and her face fills with wonder as she stands staring up at me, chryssies heaped under her chin. ‘You’re Frank Hillman’s boy, aren’t you?’