The Watcher on the Cast - Iron Balcony - an Australian Autobiography

by Hal Porter

  There, say the half-a-dozen young female junior teachers to whom I attempt to show off, she has had her hair dyed. There, they say, soaking ginger-nuts in their playtime tea, she has had her face lifted. Without being sure, I can nevertheless almost believe them. Miss Hart’s face has an unlimber pink and white blandness, and her hair crowds down in inflexible undulations on forehead and temples, hair the colour of flower-pots, and of that one colour only with no gradations of it. Her pale blue eyes, like doll’s eyes, do not ever seem to move sideways.

  I perceive that she likes me, and think it is because my line is playing the wordy jester. She smiles at me, as it were wholly for me and secretly, in the middle of staff conferences when everyone else is looking at their own toecaps or the creases and caught threads of their own or others’ skirts and trousers. She’s a bold one, I think, smiling back in a way I consider charming, trying out a lop-sided one practised in my shaving-mirror. I do not like her, nor the rigid intensity of her smile, a sustained grimace, but am flattered that she projects this at me rather than at the most handsome of the male junior teachers, an almost-larrikin in pink Oxford bags and cracked black patent leather shoes.

  Because she lives at the Rifle Club Hotel, once Grandfather Porter’s haunt, which is just through the railway gates from school, at the shopping end of Victoria Street and on my way home to Aunt Rosa Bona and Uncle Martini-Henry, and because she seems always to be leaving just as I leave, we fall into the pattern of leaving school together and—how patiently and skilfully older women make young fools tick over—into making me seem to have inspired in her an affection for the parts of Williamstown that most entrance me. See us walking to the time-ball tower and loose-planked jetties built by the convicts, to the graves of convict-murdered guards and warders, to the bluestone taverns and ramshackle markets of The Front and the empty follies of The Strand. It never enters my head to suspect this honest huntress, this patient huntress, when she refuses my invitations to afternoon tea with Aunt Rosa Bona who would, I now know, have read her like a book. How many miles she must walk in her black-and-white shoes, her ears rattling with my romantic enthusiasms, her muscular legs quivering with ennui, to get what she wants! The Devil knows how many hints she drops of what she wants. Perhaps none, perhaps none at all, but, if any, I miss them all. She buys me rolls of Michelet paper, an autograph album with suede covers, and pages of pastel pinks and mauves and lemons, a box of handkerchiefs, a pair of goldish-brown silk socks the niggardly pattern of which I remember to this day. Delighted and grateful, I continue to miss the point. I give her a water-colour of the cemetery fountain about which I have painted delphiniums, antirrhinums and lavender bushes in place of the actual docks. Yet, recalling my sincere obtuseness, I recall also that I most carefully say nothing to Aunt Bona or anyone at school of Miss Hart’s largesse, not a word. Why? Who has warned whom? In my weekly Sunday letter to Mother, however, I do, at least in the beginning, mention these gifts. Mother writes back to say that young men do not, and should never, accept presents from women. She repeats this in several letters, with underlinings by the obviously well-licked indelible pencil Mother uses. I take it to mean that I am making, not errors of discretion, merely errors in taste; that I am being ungentlemanly and Bohemian. Neither does she, so far as I know, write to Aunt Bona. Why? Because she knows that women, anyway, with their magnificently small aims, almost always get what they want and, with it, what they scarcely deserve but certainly earn?

  Miss Hart, finally, bored to madness by crumbling stone and weedy lanes and cracked tombstones, gets what she wants: the use of my untrained, unsympathetic but nature-geared young body. She pays for it. At this moment, I am still uncertain whether to feel compassion or serves-you-right for Miss Hart. I am not sure if the score be settled or if one of us owes the other.

  In what may well be a last desperate throw for the horn of an imperceptive idiot, she makes me think I want to learn to play Bridge, and offers to teach me, eight o’clock, Tuesday night, Room 12, Rifle Club Hotel.

  I still do not know if these sorts of doors are really the sorts of doors for seventeen-year-olds to knock on: for other Miss Harts and other Hal Porters, maybe, maybe. Had her perspicacity been greater she needs not have learned what she learned from me; what I had to learn I already knew of myself and did not wish to know.

  Punctual as always, at eight o’clock exactly, combing his hair, he walks the carpeted corridor smelling of the hotel’s Mulligatawny Soup. His shoes are newly polished, he is freshly showered, his finger-nails are particularly speckless so that he may learn Bridge without shame. His underpants are innocently—tattered—there is no other word. He reaches Room 12. He knocks.

  ‘Who’s there?’ says Miss Hart.

  ‘It is I,’ he says, nominative after all parts of the verb to be.

  ‘Oh,’ says Miss Hart, ‘I’m not quite ready. Is it eight o’clock yet? Not quite ready, but. . . .’ She pauses. The pause, the position and nature of the pause, that does it. Too late now he realizes the sex-stained colour of her voice: Alex Macalister’s colour, the colour of Francesco Floriani’s voice lassooing down from his own incomplete and painted Purgatory.

  ‘Not quite ready, but. . . .’ Pause. ‘. . . come in,’ says Alex, says the Dago, says Miss Hart turning the key of the door of Room 12. In his torn underpants the erection begins. The door opens. The door closes. The key is turned.

  Just as a mother, perpetually anxious for her children’s safety, can never make herself independent, so women like Miss Hart, perpetually anxious for their lust’s safety can never make themselves independent. Miss Hart has therefore lost her head and, after several weeks of doubtless scarifying patience, has gone too far. Beneath a Japanese kimono patterned with wistaria, white on black, she is, he thinks, palpably naked. Palpably, he thinks, palpably.

  Self-possession overcomes him. His eyes strike straight at hers.

  Her eyes are slightly skew-whiff, a cant he is often enough, later in life, to observe in the eyes of women on heat. It is as though they look somewhere to fear of refusal, somewhere for a bitter weapon to strike at him who refuses, somewhere with modest surprise into the recesses of their own nerve-ridden bodies, somewhere in pitiless pity for the stern flesh they are driven to chew to nothing, mostly—witchlike and unrelenting—in the direction of their desire, to assess him and compel him.

  She could instantly drag him to the bed but goes on with horrifying conversation, horrifying because its tone is conventional, and her squashed and corn-set toes are nude and tragic: ‘You see, I’m not quite ready.’

  Quite!

  ‘I was changing after dinner. You know. Freshening up. I knowyou won’t mind, dear boy.’

  ‘I don’t mind, Miss Hart,’ he says, ruthless now that the avalanche is upon him. And more ruthless: ‘Shall I wait outside?’

  ‘No need. Unless you’d rather. But I thought you wouldn’t be shocked if I dressed in front of you.’

  He knows that answer.

  ‘I don’t care,’ he says, and feels her eyes flash like an X-ray to the front of his trousers. Palpable, he thinks, a palpable horn.

  Miss Hart has certainly lost her head. She drops her kimono which hides her toes while revealing other mysteries. She is not palpably naked. She is merely as naked as life and pain and stupidity except for pink celanese bloomers, like Aunt Rosa Bona’s, like Mother’s, like those of any Summer Sale, and those on any backyard clothes-line. There are smeared dashes of talcum powder on her painful flushed bulges and floppings. It is a ludicrous and pathetic nudity, older and squatter than the nakedness of nymphs of marble, than of the lamp-holding women on the staircase of the Bijou Theatre, than of Greuze’s La Source, than of the cream-curd Griffenhagen bucolic he bought at thirteen with his first prize money. It has none of the taunting beauty of art, of marble, of paint, of what he has been trying to teach himself is beauty and truth. It is a lie seamed by the marks of stays, and padded with an age of flesh. It is a body older than Mother’s, maybe older
than Aunt Rosa Bona’s. It is an unfair gift, uncompromising, unleashed, unrefusable. Madame Bovary, he thinks, Anna Karenina, Tess of the d’Urbervilles. He feels like crying. His erection agonizingly persists.

  I do not know what other simpletons of seventeen, thus seduced by women two-and-a-half times their own age, do after they have been used, or what they think, or remember. I remember that he walks the beach, under a moon, backwards and forwards at the water’s final edge, up and down, not striding but bowed into rumination by an experience as necessary as unnecessary, bowed like an older man, like an old youth, like a dead boy, and saying to the water’s final edge, ‘I’ve done it. My fingers smell of woman. Was she a woman? I’m no longer a virgin. I’m a man. Am I a man?’ I can smile—a little—at him in the moonlight whispering that. Is he a man? What is a man?

  Walking in th; moonlight, he feels that the wistaria pattern of the kimono has somehow been imprinted on his body from hers; that this pattern is smudged on the backs of his thighs where her legs, to his surprise, have hooked and gripped. His mouth still feels plugged by her unexpected tongue, and the amazement of its rape of his mouth, its slime and power. He spits on the iridescent sand where he played before the time for playing was over. He sees the wad of stiff greying hairs, not the colour of flower-pots at all, forced up towards what she wants from him, or life, forced up by the pillow she has dragged under herself. He sees in many directions at the one time: the orange-coloured roof of her mouth of false teeth, his shameful ragged underpants lying on the kimono on the bedside mat, the deck of cards set like a centuries-old lie on the fake oak dressing-table, his own bare legs in shoes and fallen-down socks, his crumpled shirt-tail, he hears some other he moaning and shocked and enraged and exultant, uprooted from his designed self and buried in the wet muscles of woman, of the woman—of Miss Hart.

  Having moved, the avalanche keeps on moving, inexorably, with speed, admonishing and punishing, and edging him not only to the other world beyond his desired one but to his own other world beyond the one he thought was his alone.

  Within two weeks he borrows fifteen pounds from Miss Hart. I am a prostitute, he says to himself, but I’m working hard for it. Or does he say gigolo? I cannot recall if gigolo were an Australian word in 1928. Prostitute then. Why? He has not the slightest intention of paying back the fifteen pounds: that is all Miss Hart learns from him apart from the disposition of Williamstown’s older buildings and headstones. He never walks home from school with her again. He taps on Room 12 wearing new underpants. With the fifteen pounds he buys dancing pumps; and is measured for a black suit at Buckley and Nunn’s where Father bought the black silk poplin tie, and the mourning band that helped prove Grandfather Porter’s death.

  Black, as Mother has said, breeds black.

  I do not believe this, have never really believed Mother’s enchanting and nerve-chilling superstitions. I buy the black suit to make entrances—blond hair, black suit—at the Cafe Latin, at the Tennis Dances I am wanting to go to with one of the pretty junior teachers, at anywhere. But black does breed black, and the avalanche will keep on moving, and will push me farther and farther to the very heart of blackness. The stages are graded with a nicety that, for several years, at this time, leaves me uncertain of the value of goodness, the value of evil. It is fortunately an uncertainty that is dazzled out of existence by more enriching certainties.

  Avalanche on the move, Stage Two.

  One of my pupils, Wock . . . Wock Somebody, and two boys from another school, find or steal, I forget which, some detonators and, accidentally, blow themselves up. I think everyone else must be shocked. They say so. I am to learn that shock does not mean to them what it means to me. I am certainly shocked, and not only because this is the first time that someone dear to my vanity, and part of my pride, has been erased from my little scene. When Grandfather Porter, until then my only known and remembered dead one, disappears from the scene, I have no feelings except disappointment that Father and Mother let me down in the matter of what books have displayed to me as the correct behaviour for the bereaved, no cries of, ‘Vex not his ghost! Oh, let him pasr, you who would upon the rack of this cruel world stretch him out longer!’

  When Wock is destroyed, my pupil—mine—I am lacerated doubly. He is a grubby boy with warty hands, and a voice of angelic transparency as he sings ‘Strawberry Fair’ or my old haunter ‘Row, brothers, row’ during singing lessons, a boy whose handwriting and spelling I have compelled him to improve, labouring perfervidly for the future he is not to have. I have convinced myself that he seems happier for this improvement as I am both selfishly and selflessly happier. He grins at my praise and grows younger, as at my rantings he grows frowning and wrinkled and older. Sometimes I wink at him in class, and he winks back, the return wink meaning, I hope, ‘Oi don’ moind you bein’ crabby, sir, and sometoimes strappin’ me. Oi understand it’s all for moi benefit.’

  It may mean, of course, ‘Oo the bloody hell you think you are? Just you wait. Just you wait.’

  On the day he is blown up, after school is over, I have strapped him. Lacerated doubly, indeed, is the energetic junior teacher. Wock can improve his spelling no further, will never accomplish embarrass and harass, symmetry and cemetery, not in words. No copperplate for Wock. I have wasted my time and his. He can never wink his lidded-down or blown-out or smashed-in eye at me to forgive, or appear to forgive, the blow of the leather strap on his grime-lined palm, now as tattered as my virgin’s underpants or as positively incapable, rain or shine forever, of holding itself horizontal at my command.

  For his death, as for the death of my younger and wiser self between the powerful embrace of Miss Hart’s thick legs, I drift along the beach at night, whimpering and whispering, ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Please God, let Wock Somebody hear that I’m sorry.’ Sorry that he can learn to write no more legibly; sorry that time has wasted him; sorry because, forgiving or polite or trapped into response, he can no longer wink.

  After my death (and I am to have many deaths after, and many yet, many deaths of uninnocence) in Miss Hart’s anxiously volted body, comes my resurrection as a money-grubbing prostitute, a stinking Lazarus doomed, thank Life, as all the resurrected are, to a better and final death. After Wock’s death I am to be shocked into a death-like trance from which there can never be a full resurrection, the realization that people are merely what they are and not what I fervently, at this hopeful-hopeless very moment, desire they will be.

  Listen.

  On the morning after the explosion, the newspapers already black with headlines, the school is invaded by press photographers. Comedies take place. These comedies are fascinating and nauseating to me. In fleeing from the world of The Bairnsdale Advertiser where I earned money by writing of some dollop grotesquely over-dressed that ‘the bride looked charming in et cetera’ or of some local, well-disliked skinflint that ‘the deceased, who was a well-known and respected et cetera’, I am not expecting to be, just because of Wock’s death, brought face to face with a version of my own small-town, boyishly raw cadet-reporter’s lies exaggerated into a brisk and faultless nightmare. The Headmaster, as though bringing in Socrates, brings in a photographer to my classroom, a man whose face is lean and lined like the face of a handsome dissipated hound, with over-wise sunken eyes, lens-like and too dark, all pupil. This, I think to myself, is from photographing, as much by the mechanism of his own body as by his camera, such things as the Old Age Pensioner ejected from his bed-sitter, the steeplechase spill, the train smash, the spot marked X, the accused entering the Criminal Court, the no-armed artist who paints with his brush in his mouth, the murdered child’s parents, Wock’s desk—The Desk of the Dead Boy. But the photographer in his crumpled cocoa-brown suit does not photograph Wock’s desk, which is near the front of the room. He decides on a desk more centrally placed, more suitably disposed to illustrate Wock’s Classmates Mourn Him. He rearranges the pupils in the surrounding desks. As I watch—‘with horror and contempt’, I te
ll myself—but really with scandalized curiosity, I see what he is about. I can almost enthusiastically commend his choice: this pretty, fair-haired girl wearing a pale dress in the desk behind the empty one, this dark boy with the neat tie in the desk beside hers, this curly-headed one here, that good-looking one there. There, a little to the right, you! And, you there, with white jumper, move just a teeny fraction that way! His pictorial falsehood arranged, ‘Now, bow your heads,’ says the liar with the camera. The actors and actresses bow their heads.

  Next day, the funeral. The school reeks of wreaths. The funeral is to move along past the school. The children, the hundreds of them, are to line the roadway on both sides. Since the photographer’s performance of the day before my mind has badly played shuttlecock and battledore with itself:

  It’s all lies. The photograph was a lie. It wasn’t Wock’s desk. The children weren’t mourning.

  All right, it was lies, You yourself tell polite lies. They were lies for the father and mother, who will be comforted and proud.

  Why should they be?

  They’re simple, ordinary human beings who will snatch at any comfort.

  A photograph in a newspaper?

  A photograph in a newspaper.

  God! How do you know?

  I don’t know. Even if it were a true photograph it wouldn’t comfort me. But people of that sort. . . .

  Which sort?

  Simple, normal, ordinary. . . .

  How do you know they’re simple, normal, ordinary?

  I don’t know. It’s what newspapers and books say they are. It’s what they imagine they are. I don’t believe anyone is.

  If they no longer have Wock, at least they’ll have the cut-out references of his notoriety, prettied-up photographs, prettied-up lies.

  You’re cheap and hard.

  No.

  Sentimental and hard, then.

  Oh, no, no, no.