Whipbird

by Robert Drewe

  ‘Short version,’ he told them sternly and self-consciously. ‘Adolescent bodies need meat.’

  ‘Dad!’ they said, in unison, shaking their heads in wonderment. ‘Chill!’ And took no notice.

  An eye-rolling Christine closed ranks and supported them, as always, declaring that as these vegetarian girls were forever eating sushi and drinking banana-and-mango smoothies on their way home from school, had been wearing bras since they were eleven, and already topped five-eight at fourteen (already three inches taller than their mother), maturing and developing didn’t seem a problem.

  They weren’t drinking smoothies today. Nor was their maturation level at all problematical to the boys present, two of whom, distant cousins Lachlan O’Donnell and Max Donaldson, eighteen-year-olds from Sydney, were covertly plying the twins with champagne they’d sleight-of-handed from the Opie table and that, after a couple of mouthfuls, was already producing giggles, nudges and hair-tosses.

  Lachlan pointed at the blistered kale ribs, feta and quinoa pancake on Olivia’s plate. ‘What’s that gruesome crap you’re eating?’

  ‘It looks delicious,’ Max contradicted smoothly.

  ‘It’s really good,’ the girls answered together. These older boys were talking to them!

  ‘In a dog-turdy sort of way,’ Lachlan said.

  ‘Easy, dude,’ said Max, winking at the girls.

  Olivia giggled uncertainly at this good-cop, bad-cop banter but Zoe boldly announced, ‘We’re vegetarians.’ Then burped and blushed. Olivia elbowed her and they both giggled.

  ‘So you’re hippie chicks?’ Lachlan asked. ‘Vego hippie twins, yeah? I can’t tell you apart.’

  Zoe tried the icy look that her mother specialised in, and flipped her hair once more.

  ‘Awesome. I’m thinking of becoming a vego,’ Max grovelled, topping up Zoe’s glass and eyeing her breasts. ‘Vego footballers have really low body fat. Great BMI. Their skin-fold tests average around fifty millimetres.’

  Still the bad cop, Lachlan frowned and smiled simultaneously. ‘One thing that really shits me is their hypocrisy. Like, vegos go on about eating animals but they still wear leather shoes and belts.’

  ‘Chill,’ said nice, easygoing Max. ‘Everyone to his own.’

  Zoe shrugged, endeavoured to persevere with the icy look, gave up, and nudged her sister.

  ‘We’re not vegans,’ said Olivia. ‘We’re not lacto nerds. We eat fish and, like, drink milk and wear leather. We just choose not to eat meat. It’s healthier.’

  ‘And, like, less animals get slaughtered,’ Zoe added.

  ‘Totally. None of us want that,’ Max said smoothly. ‘I manage a good six-pack in football season, playing in the Firsts, but becoming a vego would make it easier.’

  ‘Cutting back on the brewskis would make it easier,’ Lachlan said.

  ‘So right. But a dude’s got to party, eh? Have the odd quarter-pounder. Smoke a little weed. You do the jogathon, the pool laps, lift a few weights and deal with it.’

  ‘Totally!’

  The boys exchanged winks. ‘How old are you guys?’ asked Max.

  ‘Very fit. Sixteen’s my guess.’

  ‘Yes,’ lied Zoe.

  ‘And a half,’ Olivia said.

  ‘Awesome,’ said Max.

  ‘Hot or what?’ Lachlan whispered.

  The twins frowned, giggled again, tossed their hair, pretended to study their phones, and protested as their glasses were refilled. How frighteningly cool were these boys? Not like cousins at all.

  11

  The sudden glint in Doug’s eye as he spoke just now. God, it reminded Mick of his father’s eyes after he’d had a few beers too many with the public-bar denizens during the day and then gone on to the Black Label in the saloon bar after closing time. Then sunk a few more palate-cleansing beers in the back parlour after lock-up with the local cops, Labor councillors and favoured regulars.

  Eventually he’d stomp upstairs to bed like a thunderstorm about to break, lightning cracking off him, simmering about some imagined insult or other, threatening that so-and-so was now barred from the pub forever, and everyone would feign sleep.

  ‘Let’s hope there are no other Muslims here today then,’ Doug said. ‘OK, not your niece – there are probably some exceptions. I mean those bastards with the fluffy chin beards. The Sunnis and Shiites and whatevers – I get them mixed up.’

  For a few seconds Doug looked to Mick more like Dad than he did himself. More resemblance in the nephew than the son. The familiar glimmer in his cousin’s pale-blue eyes: the glint that preceded his father’s cold smile.

  Even in the old days of the six o’clock swill, his father would be picking sporting and political arguments by mid-afternoon. Dan Cleary was famous for it, a local legend for his publican’s cantankerousness. Witty irritability was by no means regarded as a bad thing in Richmond. To always manage the last word, the bitter joke, the sarcastic rejoinder, was evidence of neighbourhood loyalty and conformity, of being both a Richmond ‘character’ and a ‘real Australian’. Important in a publican.

  It was considered right and honourable that Dan Cleary acknowledged no football code other than Australian Rules, no team except Richmond, and no sports other than football (though cricket was granted dispensation as a bar-room discussion subject during Test matches against England), no political parties other than Labor, no suburb except Richmond, no cities apart from Melbourne, no states other than Victoria, no countries but Australia – except for a huge dollop of sentiment for Ireland, where he had never been. And no musical instrument but the piano accordion, which he’d play, unasked, at Christmas and whenever the Tigers were victorious – but only ‘Peg o’ My Heart’, ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’ and ‘Funiculi Funicula’. And the Tigers club song.

  When ten o’clock pub closing became law, meaning in his case another four hours of on-the-job drinking, he’d be longingly fingering his special cricket bat under the bar by 9.30, the bat signed by Archie Jackson, the youngest cricketer ever to score a Test century. Archie, who made his Test debut at nineteen and was dead of TB at twenty-three.

  He’d often publicly recall the afternoon when Archie came into the pub with his teammates, brandishing an official letter from the Australian Cricket Board saying please relax the age-of-entry rules in this case and allow the teetotal bearer to drink a lemonade. As if a Test cricketer would ever be refused hotel service, regardless of age. People said he would’ve been better than Bradman but no one remembered baby-faced Archie now. Dad had probably used Archie’s bat more times than Archie did.

  The bat came in useful back when the Riverbank was the roughest hotel in Richmond, and in a municipality of grim pubs that was saying something.

  ‘Mind you kids stay upstairs,’ Moira Cleary would rule on Friday and Saturday nights, and on the first Tuesdays of the month, too, after the lively Labor branch meeting up the road. And these days the former bloodhouse was heritage-listed and praised by the Good Food Guide for its ‘unpretentious food, solid wine list and edgy urban ambience’.

  Out of curiosity, Mick had finally returned to his old home last winter for the first time in, what, sixty years? He’d sworn he’d never go back, but age was making him more and more nostalgic. How peculiar that places and people he’d given up on years ago suddenly made him feel wistful about their good points.

  Chalked in copperplate on a blackboard outside, the pub’s lunch menu looked safely basic for him and a few football mates. His choice: potato and leek soup and a porterhouse and salad. He specified well done, hoping the steak would therefore turn out medium like he preferred. It didn’t of course, but then meat never did now that chefs were on a messianic mission to serve up raw food. It was so resentfully underdone it might have recovered from its wounds.

  Apart from the suppurating steak the meal’s ambience didn’t seem particularly edgy. The salad was four or five shades of green, just leaves and stalks and grassy, lettucey stuff; no other colours whatsoever – no toma
toes or beetroot or carrot to break it up. Mick liked a range of colours in a salad. If you wanted an edgy urban ambience, this meal wasn’t it.

  For edgy, he thought, you couldn’t go past the counter lunches Dad used to serve up for a dollar, slapped together in the pub kitchen by Mavis Hassell, possessor of certain airs stemming from her former position in the Melbourne Grammar boarding-house scullery: heavily gravied pie-and-chips, sausages-and-chips and burger-and-chips. Two slabs of white bread to soak up Mavis’s gravy, gravy being a twice-daily foodstuff back then, so prevalent that its odour, mingling with those of stale beer and tobacco, was etched into the pub’s walls and furniture.

  Beer back then, of course, never wine. The occasional black and tan or stout in winter. If any sophisticate wanted wine he was loudly dismissed to the plonk shop in Swan Street, ‘where you can drink sweet sherry with the derros and poofters’.

  Oh, nostalgia. But not all of the melancholy kind. On the current drinks list, Mick noticed a cocktail called a Captain Blood. A Captain Blood! His hero! He strongly doubted that football’s real Captain Blood, Jack Dyer, the rugged Tiger ruckman and forward of the ’30s and ’40s, had in his entire eighty-nine years ever drunk anything containing syrup and aromatic bitters.

  Mick treasured an astute obituary appraisal in The Sun of Dyer’s football talents: ‘Jack Dyer would have been a creditable performer even without the embellishment of brutality.’

  As a kid he’d asked him for his autograph at the old Punt Road Oval after Jack won his fourth club Best and Fairest. With sausage fingers that were bandaged together (he’d continued to play with two broken digits) he’d grabbed the pen, bluffly dismissed the plaudits for him and scrawled, ‘Decorations are for Xmas trees’.

  Years later he asked him for another autograph, this time at a club celebration for the great man’s seventieth birthday. A gentler soul by then, Jack wrote, ‘Good lad. Train hard, play hard, and don’t smoke marinara.’

  Of course not, not marijuana either. And it was nice being called a lad when you were forty-eight.

  Of the hotel where he’d grown up, there wasn’t much to recognise now. No daily vomit to be hosed off the asphalt outside, and no stench of phenol lingering afterwards. No swampy flooring, the public-bar lino sucking at your shoes like quicksand. No wire security grille around the bar’s cash register. No blood and butts in the drip tray.

  In place of shrewd and bony Fay, goitred Beryl and maroon-faced Cyril with his personal miasma of Brylcreem, tobacco and ill-digested spirits, a pair of bouncy blondes, ponytailed student types, served behind the bar, while two elegantly tattooed and sloe-eyed dark beauties in miniskirts waited on the tables. The customers had changed as well. No wizened and nicotined old alcoholics trembling over their pots and cigarettes and racing guides, their elbows on the soggy beer towels, threadbare fox terriers slumped at their feet. Dogs allowed but not women.

  A Richmond pub with no old geezers! Apart from him and his football mates, he realised, whom the exotic beauties had strategically seated at the insignificant end of the dining room. Theirs was the only table drinking beer. The customers at the better tables were Melbourne semi-celebrities: loud, spruce business types and ruddy exfootballers with bantering sports-show voices, all swigging red wine. And chic females with knowing, former-model looks, who sipped white wine while their nails danced over their phones.

  Middle-class women in the Riverbank! Their gossipy laughs tinkled and their high heels rang on the rosy jarrah floorboards and the men’s eyes twinkled at them with increasing assurance as the afternoon progressed, a confidence eventually culminating in the bottle of champagne sent to the women’s table.

  Under the guise of tottery age, just a vague elderly customer looking for the toilet, he’d ventured upstairs, curious to revisit the old family quarters, and discovered his own and his brothers’ and parents’ bedrooms had been renovated into a business centre and an Ashtanga yoga studio. No hint of his childhood remained. No sense of his mother’s strained face at the top of the stairs, of her look of exhausted distaste as she gathered the wherewithal to venture down into the boozy male mayhem.

  No lingering strains of the piano accordion either. No ‘Funiculi Funicula’ and ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’. All the drunk old working-class ghosts had been subdued by time and fashion.

  Just as amazing: in the actual toilet – no longer called GENTS but represented by a subtle lower-case m – hygiene now prevailed. No stink. No more pungent orange biscuit things fizzing in the urinal. No more damp old roller-towel.

  He dried his fingers reluctantly under a blast from the hand dryer, and Jesus, a prominent silver plate proudly announced it was a Zephyr HOT-Air. A product of Campbell Engineering. His daughter-in-law’s family had even invaded the old pub shithouse!

  Thinking about all this here at Whipbird made Mick feel a bit light-headed. Sometimes it was hard to relate the past to the present. To join them up and make sense of them. Especially when you were surrounded by loudly excitable relatives with familiar childhood faces peeping out from beneath flesh and wrinkles, and with a drink in your hand.

  Meanwhile Cousin Doug was still steamed up. The strange half-smile. ‘When you think about it, this weekend’s got everything that gets terrorists excited. Look around. A soft target – a big gathering of Christians. Pork on the barbecue. Boozy Western fun. The same combo that got the Bali bombers so worked up about us.’

  Mick took a deep breath and sipped his drink.

  ‘Funny how they don’t mind a bit of alcohol and sex hypocrisy,’ Doug went on. ‘Where’s their criticism when the Saudi rich boys are overseas on their nightclub grog, drugs and callgirl run?’

  Don’t get riled up during a big family celebration, Mick told himself. One with gallons of alcohol involved and the weekend just beginning. He should pace himself or Thea would be on his case.

  ‘A couple of homemade bombs could do the job,’ said Doug.

  ‘Let’s hope not.’

  Doug still had the glint. But his eyes had lost their bags. They looked wider and rounder. And his skin was rosy and smooth.

  ‘You’re looking very well, Doug. Had some work done?’

  ‘Of course not.’ He frowned and blushed even pinker. ‘The skincancer doc gave me a facial peel to get rid of a few basal-cell nasties. Out in the sun up north you’ve got to watch they don’t turn into melanomas. Made my face one huge blister.’

  ‘I bet.’

  Suddenly Doug’s eyes weren’t glinting any more. Mick’s shinyfaced cousin was deflating by the second.

  ‘Well, whatever cosmetic surgery you’ve had done, it was worth it. You’re looking much younger.’

  That stopped him in his tracks. The vain bastard had gone under the knife, no doubt about it. Mick sipped his beer, cheered for the moment by his cousin’s embarrassment. Doug was staring listlessly off into the grapevines, as if he badly wanted to find the exit but was too tired to look for it.

  But with his next mouthful of beer, Mick felt slightly guilty. That was bad form. Put aside the bitter stuff between them. Water under the Sydney Harbour Bridge. You had to expect different behaviour from non-Victorians, especially Sydneysiders. So what if they preferred rugby to AFL. Their loss.

  ‘Next season looks our most promising for years,’ he muttered, his mind turning to his beloved Tigers.

  Doug didn’t bite. ‘Great.’

  An odd thing, Mick thought, from a few offhand digs from other male cousins regarding the Richmond colours of the marquee and the banner and the Cleary T-shirts, the celebration apparently contained supporters of teams other than the Tigers. How could this be? He’d even heard someone yell provocatively, ‘Go the Bombers!’

  He could feel himself becoming agitated again. Lately this was happening more often. He’d lie in bed feeling his brain seem to swell and contract inside his head, painlessly, as if it was filling with air and then emptying. It reminded him of pumping up his football when he was a boy. A heavy old Sherrin so regularly
and relentlessly drop-kicked on the wet and wintry Richmond streets that it became waterlogged and as round as a soccer ball. It had a slow leak and he had to keep pumping against the leak. Maybe it was a blood-pressure thing.

  His hip and his bladder and his pumping head made sleep an increasing problem. Not even a night of drinking guaranteed a sound sleep. On the contrary, it gave him even wilder dreams than usual.

  Going to bed fairly sober most weeknights induced hyperrealistic dreams of such blandness and frustration that they exhausted him. (He was back in class, sitting for his final school exams. He was waiting – while dressed only in leopard-skin underpants – for a tram/bus/taxi that never turned up.) It was a relief to wake, which because of his hip and his bladder he did several times a night.

  Weekend alcohol quantities, however: too much footy-club beer or dinner-party shiraz or merlot or cab sav, occasionally produced dreams of intimate friendships with famous people. Over the years Jackie Kennedy, the Queen and Margaret Thatcher had all put in appearances. As had, once, Brigitte Bardot.

  Although Nelson Mandela and Prince Philip had also appeared in bit parts as foul-tongued Essendon and Collingwood football coaches, the dream celebrities were overwhelmingly women, and always women from yesteryear. His heyday.

  His relationships with these famous females were uniformly chummy and confiding. Interestingly, it was they who sought his company. They came looking for him and were delighted to finally meet. Jackie clapped her hands like a six-year-old; Maggie whistled through her fingers like a navvy. He was pleased to find them not the least highfalutin, nothing like their public images. Much younger for a start, and grateful for his counsel and friendship. ‘Don’t go to Dallas,’ he advised Jackie.