‘What did ’e say ter youse?’
‘He told me to get out, that there had been shots from the pub across the road.’
‘That was a month ago, and Gary git who ’e was after.’
Here, clustered in the dark hall, among those people who had been trodden like sea-snails on shadowed rocks, Persia was prepared to admit the law was not grand ideals of justice and honesty, but a sordid grappling of substandard principles.
‘Yer wanna hide from Will ternight,’ they told the blonde girl, who had mentioned his name in front of the police. ‘He’ll be after yer. Yer oughta go away til all this dies down.’
‘I’ll just keep outa his way.’
‘That’s no good. ’E’ll bash down yer door.’
‘Then I’ll hide in me wardrobe. I’ve got me rights.’
Inside Persia slides changed. ‘Will he really git you?’ Persia asked.
‘His girlfriend’ll tell ’im I told on ’im.’
‘Did he take the money?’
Nobody answered.
‘When does he get home from work?’
‘Soon now.’
So that Persia did not want to be in the dark warren of rooms and recriminations. At worst she had only known feuds in the form of solicitors’ polite letters. She did not wish to see opened flesh.
They swung in the hallway a bit longer, repeating the various statements that cops were pigs. Abercrombie began to grizzle, and Persia told them she would take him for a walk.
It did occur to her that her conversation with the detectives behind closed doors could bring her recriminations too. They had told her how easily the lock could be opened with a playing card. She wanted to be home in a safe sterile house of large bright rooms and bright furnishings. She wanted to make the short journey between slums and high society, which would ensure immediately the safe isolation which comes with wealth.
In a public phone box outside the greengrocer, with children knocking down the newspaper stands propped against the rubbish tin outside, and with a dusky youth leering through the glass from his leaning position against the delicatessen window, she rang Adrian.
Abercrombie, sitting on the shelf beside the phone reminded her of the tenuous connection when he almost cut them off. The coins, which rattled down into the depths of dialling and wire, brought distant office sounds of typewriters and lush secretaries into the black circle of reception.
‘Adrian, I’m in a public phone,’ Persia said, when she was put through to him. ‘I think I want to come home.’
‘Are you alright? What’s the matter? I told you it would be dangerous. Do you want me to come and get you now?’
And because they were so separate, and in such opposite living, and because he had shown concern which was against his nature, Persia had a great love for this man who was prepared to tolerate her extravagance of personality, although he could not understand it.
She told him the whole story, like young babbling girls of no past and no future, marooned in a public box, confessing all wilfulness at the first sign of challenge, grovelling and wrestling with her own discoveries like a child who sees her mother kiss a stranger.
So that now she had inflicted her fear on Adrian, and he was grave behind his desk, and she could imagine how he bent his lips to the phone, and sorted absent papers with absent fingers, and now that it had been handed to him and was his possession, it left Persia, and she did not fear any more the hysterical meanderings of some poverty-stricken tenants in a collapsing house.
But Adrian took up the concern, and was afraid for what he had never seen, and had never asked to see, but what had been passed to him against his will. And he held the fear like a warm ball in his hand and did not know where to put it, for it had no relationship to files, or papers, or figures and sums.
‘You are coming home,’ he said eventually.
‘Tomorrow I will come,’ Persia said.
‘I shall come and collect you now.’
‘I wish I hadn’t told you all those things. Because it sounds worse than it is. They won’t do anything to me, because I’m separate.’
‘All you need to do is get in the line of fire.’
‘But I’ll stay in my room and just listen.’
‘I won’t be able to do any work now for worrying. Imagine if something happened to Abercrombie.’
‘Well it won’t because they love kids, and touch them with their hands.’
‘Why do you want to stay?’
‘Because all my life I have lived the wrong way. Perhaps I could help.’
‘How would you help?’
‘I don’t want to be rich anymore. I don’t need all those things. I want to live in the most simple house, among simple people, without pretensions.’
‘It’s no good helping other people and neglecting your own family.’
‘There’s more to learning than a good school.’
‘If he doesn’t go to a good school he won’t get a good job.’
‘And we are merely perpetuating the prejudice if we are beaten by it.’
‘It doesn’t achieve anything by lowering yourself to their standard.’
‘If I could be among them, there would be an opening. I know something would come. In any way, if only I could give myself. I don’t know why, or if my motives are out of selfishness, or guilt, or if I am right. I only know it would make me happy to give them all my bank account and all I own.’
‘That would be a drop in the ocean. You won’t ever change anything.’
‘I know.’
‘I don’t understand what you’re trying to say.’
‘I am trying to say I want to live like the Bible, in poverty.’
‘You were the one who wanted to buy the house, the big car.’
‘I know, I was trying to find. But I learnt they led us nowhere.’
‘I must mean nothing to you then, if you can want to go from everything.’
‘But we could come together here. And you could learn too.’
‘I’ve worked hard to achieve what I have.’
‘You are very influential. You could do so much good among people who can’t speak for themselves.’
‘There doesn’t have to be any poverty.’
‘But there is. As long as they are the way they are.’
‘You’re not going to do them any good.’
‘If I could do one good, once, then I would be happy.’
‘And how will you do that?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You’re not the only person to discover poverty.’
‘Does that mean I should just go away and forget about it?’
‘It’s just another one of your fads.’
‘It has been brewing all my life.’
‘You’re being very melodramatic, Persia.’
‘I wish I had never confided in you.’
‘Where’s Abercrombie?’
‘Threatening to disconnect us.’
‘Let me speak to him.’
So Persia held up the receiever to the child, who clutched it, upside-down, and cooed mistaken offcuts of words down the line of governmental arrangement, and when they had exchanged platitudes for a suitable length of time, Persia retrieved the phone, and said, ‘I don’t suppose you would come and visit us, would you?’
‘Not unless you’re coming home.’
‘Then I’ll say goodbye.’
‘Wait a minute.’
‘What?’
‘You refuse to return?’
‘There’s no reason. You can’t love me very much if you won’t even come and visit us.’
‘Alright,’ Adrian said, and was cold and gone, floating away.
‘Goodbye then,’ Persia said.
‘Goodbye,’ he said, and was choked, and went.
So that she stood, and was ashamed for burdening and shedding her alarm for somebody else to bear.
Chapter 9
There was a disused church which had become where social worke
rs operated. You went up wooden steps which were dusty with flaked paint on wooden shelving, almost in the ceiling, among the beams worn smooth and mellow by many sermons, where now were practical desks of phones and propaganda.
Once Persia had come to see the social worker and volunteered usefulness. But she had nothing which she could give. She had fallen between her own inexperience and his prejudice of the rich. For he had been a thick, dark-bearded man with slow speech and a permanent frown which might have harboured immense disapproval thinly disguised as confusion.
But she remembered this man, although her visit had been made almost a year ago, because of the way he had listened with his eyes, which were most gentle, and softened by the suffering he had witnessed, and the compassion he held inside himself, secretly and heavily.
So she went to him, not knowing why she was going, hoisting Abercrombie up the stairway, in much the same manner as costumed women had journeyed to learn from Christ. And the social worker came from behind a screen in old faded shorts and a stretched cotton shirt with a hole near the shoulder, and sat himself in a worn leather chair, not in the proper sitting place, but on an arm, because he was most comfortable in unaccepted positions.
He was just the same as she could remember he might have been, and she went most immediately right to him so that it was a struggle to remain an impassive stranger.
‘You came to live here, then,’ he said. ‘You mentioned that you might.’
‘Yes, I have come,’ Persia said. ‘But I don’t know if I should stay. You can’t break up marriages with good husbands, just because you want different ends in life.’
So she told the story of how she had come to learn, and how it had made her know a whole new opening, and how she could see there was injustice, and other people had known all along, but she had just discovered. And she told the story of how they did not want to know, and said it was dangerous to stay, and how she did not understand anything anymore. And the man listened with the frown and from under his beard, and his eyes were most soft, but most brilliant, and she could tell that he knew so many things which he hid inside himself and did not divulge. And she wished that she could have been how he was, having found his right way, and now to be going along it towards a rightful end.
And after he had listened, and after she had almost cried, and after he had pretended not to notice, and after he had asked a few questions because her speech had not come in consecutive order, but in jumbled mistakes which had to be untangled and numbered, he said some things.
The things which he said were difficult for Persia to interpret, partly because he talked so softly and his lips hardly opened at all. But more than that, he did not give any simple answer, because he had learnt to understand there were no simple answers, only actions, which might or might not lead to results.
But afterwards it became apparent that his advice, if it could be labelled as such, had been sound. For he mumbled something about sub-ethnic groups, which, if you thought about on the way home, you understood to mean, there were different ways which were acceptable to different people. And if you were doing what your own group thought was wrong, it might not necessarily have been altogether a mistake, simply because they did not condone it.
And that night, when Abercrombie was just falling asleep, and Persia had to turn out the light so that he would in fact fulfil this necessity, and when she was sitting in the gloom, in despair, and the phone outside kept ringing, and trucks kept roaring past, and drunken men from the pub across the road swore under her open window, and when she was most extremely lonely in the musty, dirty room, the social worker came, and was standing on the footpath, in the light of many city lights, and was real, and had come.
‘What happened about the girl who was going to get it?’ he said.
‘She was alright, and nothing happened at all. Because she held her ground.’
‘I thought I could look at this place anyway, and see if it was alright,’ the social worker said. When he put himself in your presence, you were not afraid of anything because of his competence. And he was worked out inside himself, and more or less resolved, as much as any person could be, so that he knew how to deal with any woman, or man, or child, and would never condemn, nor judge, nor conclude.
So Persia showed him the house, how there were cockroaches scuttling over corners of the carpet, and flies swarming the open bins, and the toilet paper in its own rim of urine, and the handmarks of a thousand paltry lives smeared over faded paint. And none of the filth made any sign on him because he had seen filth before, and filth did not matter to him, and he looked and noticed all things, but was unaffected, because he knew surroundings were merely temporary dwellings, and not of import.
Then after he had examined all situations, and seen the sour milk in the unwashed bottle, and heeded it, but accepted it like numbers on calendars, to be lived and not to be questioned, he said that he thought the place was alright, although it was probably the lowest in the whole of Sydney.
And when he said it was low, he was not proud of its lowliness, nor was he disgusted. He came in, and sat on the bed, and did not even look at the filthy blankets, which were smeared with other people’s food, and semen, and discharge. And they drank beer together with Abercrombie with his smooth clean limbs between them, asleep on the gritty blanket, while they talked of the most ideals that there were, and of his work.
It was hard to make him talk of himself, for he was, primarily, interested in the way that others talked, and preferred to listen observing from behind his impregnable emotions his own secret thoughts. But he would tell of other injustices, and how he was fighting councils and governments.
And when it was time for him to go, he went, and was gone, and the room, which had been inhabited by him, was still strong with the breathing he had left behind. So that Persia lay awake the whole night, and did not sleep for one moment, thinking of the way his shoulders had been solid, and thinking of the way he had been strong, and formed, and full of chest and build and strength, which he would have hidden, if he had known how.
*
They went to the Empress one night. It was the pub where whites did not drink, except in scattered exceptions. There were broken bottles and glasses over the floor. There was thinned vomit, and black grime on woodwork. And there were the people, of wood, of bark, of trees and plains, of the desert past, now invaded with drink, and split open, lolling against wall benches, sinking into filthy corners, their heads falling on their chests, degraded, their hair tangled with booze.
For they had come to drink away their past and their future, and live in a few hours of pleasure, which would last only as long as their money. And although to others they were decayed perhaps, this was their only moment of power in a place which had deprived them, and ground them, and pushed them in gutters and sod.
They shook hands with Persia, and she was introduced to the cracked parched old woman with the crumbling teeth and fallen lips, to nephews, and brothers, and sons, and they shook her hand, and gave real smiles, and real trust, and were of love and forgiveness, and would not hold a past.
And they were hugging each other, and cursing each other, and mothers kissed sons, and daughters, fathers, and they were grovelled and smeared, and the barman cleaned glasses without watching. But they still had the knowledge of a grand past, their arms still bent to the boomerang, their eyes deep, turned behind listening for the voices of spirits and trees. And the social worker lay with his elbow on the bar, and watched impassive, for he had seen before beyond the immediate drunkenness which had been guttered and screwed, and thrown away.
But it was true also that the air was explosive, and might have caught fire at any moment. Because not everyone of them loved, and there were no other whites. And although they bought beers, and although they shook hands, from the walls of sullen stares anything might have errupted.
So that when the dark bouncer came, and told the social worker that they should leave, the social worker said that they shoul
d, and they did. And they stood on the pavement outside, and Persia did not understand why they had left, and had no fear because she had never seen violence, and could not be persuaded to believe in danger.
And that night, when she was walking home beside the social worker and there were two drunken gins pushing a man in a wheelchair, they could stop, and help him across the gutter, and laugh, and be of equal person. And when the dark man in the wheelchair said he had fallen from a bridge and crushed his legs and was paralysed for life, and even when you pushed him through the door of his hovel, and he went in, strong in torso, but decayed in his lower body, you could find any words you wanted to be simple, and direct and true.
And they asked you to come back and drink with them, and there was a chance to walk through into a new place, so that they had taught you, and put you at ease, and were ready to continue it at any time.
And that night, when Persia was lying beside Abercrombie, who had been minded by the girl in the next room, and when the social worker had gone back into the dark, again she lay awake the whole night and was not tired.
Because although she had not touched his body in any way, and although she had wanted to do so, she was now grown, and knew that wishes and ideals are luxuries you cannot afford. And when the morning came, it was grey with soot, and she packed her suitcase, and rang Adrian to take her home, and she went with him, in his big car, on the clean seats, with Abercrombie bound in his safety harness.
And she went from the poor streets and the packed living and the packed lives and knew that it was not her privilege to ever be able to do anything about it.
About Christine Townend
Christine Townend is an artist and writer whose life and talents have been devoted to the cause of animal care and liberation.
First published by Macmillan Australia in 1974
This edition published in 2012 by Momentum
Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd
1 Market Street, Sydney 2000
Copyright © Christine Townend 1974
The Beginning of Everything and the End of Everything Else Page 13