by Alex Miller
The idea of the university was remote and exotic, something Robert had never even dreamed about. But there it was, a glimmer of possibility in this man’s words. He looked up and met John Morris’s gaze. Despite his visceral dislike of John Morris, Robert trusted his judgement. There was no doubt about it: loathsome and condescending as he was, he was nevertheless authentic. Robert said, ‘Have you done any writing yourself?’
‘I’ve published three books. All economics, I’m afraid. I’m working on a fourth.’
‘What’s it about, the one you’re working on?’ Robert was thinking that if he were to go to the university he would no longer have to stand in line with the helpless people on the margins and might step across that line from ignorance and poverty and become a fully real person. He might even become a writer who would tell the world about Frankie and his mob and the disgusting way they were being treated by people who thought themselves civilised and superior. Robert looked at his exercise book and he knew the power of that truth wasn’t in what he’d written. John Morris was right. He knew that. It hurt to know it. But still he knew it.
‘Well, it’s actually about my first love,’ John Morris said. ‘Which is probably why it’s going so slowly. I’m writing a double history of Venice and Sydney. They’re both great cities on the water. They have a lot in common.’
‘And it’s not going so well?’
‘Slowly,’ John Morris said and laughed. He was relaxed now and he stepped back and looked around the room. ‘So that’s your stuff there?’ He was looking at Robert’s gear hanging on the back of the door. ‘Mind if I have a look?’ Again he didn’t wait for the okay from Robert but walked over to the door and took Frankie’s hat off the hook.
Robert watched John Morris with a mixture of disgust and disbelief as he put Frankie’s hat on his head and walked across and looked at his reflection in the mirror door of the wardrobe, putting his head on one side, adopting a pose. ‘The Marlboro Man,’ John Morris said, and he looked around at Robert and laughed, delighted with himself, ready to be admired.
‘Keep it,’ Robert said coldly, a snarl in his voice. He hated himself for saying it, but he said it all the same, then he repeated it for good measure, pressing the blade into his own flesh. ‘Keep it!’ It wasn’t an offer but an order.
John Morris whipped the hat off at once and looked at it as if it had burned his head. ‘No, no. Don’t be silly. You can’t give me your hat. I’m sure it’s precious to you.’
Robert scraped his chair back and stood up so he was facing John Morris. Slowly, articulating each word separately so as not to lose control, he said, ‘I told you to keep it.’
John Morris stood with the hat in his hands, helpless suddenly.
‘It’s yours.’ Contempt, self-loathing, anger, the sinister presence of violence in Robert’s voice. His heart beating fast, shortening his breathing, a thickening in his chest.
‘Don’t be silly.’ John Morris spoke gently, softly, almost pleading, cowed now, afraid and at a loss for his confidence. ‘You don’t have to give it to me. It means far too much to you, I can see that.’
Robert stepped up to him and John Morris stepped away, the backs of his legs coming up against the edge of the bed. ‘Take the fucking hat!’ Robert said. His father’s old post-war rage rising in him. He heard it; it rose in him and he was dismayed. But there wasn’t anything he could do to stop the fury coming out of him at the sight of this man with Frankie’s hat. That was it for him. John Morris playing at cowboys, mixing the smell of his sweat with Frankie’s sacred smell. There was no way now for Robert to take back the hat without knowing himself defeated by this miserable situation. There was no reason in him about it, just a terrible disorder and fury. His father’s antique values. That’s what this was, according to which Frankie’s hat now belonged to John Morris, a precious thing enriched by the faltering story Robert had written about it, the story John Morris had read and discarded. Something of the predator in his presence in the room. Robert felt pillaged by him. The violence of it surging in him as he watched John Morris turn around and place the hat gingerly on the bed. He straightened and stepped away from the bed. ‘You must keep it,’ he said, moving away from Robert, fear in his eyes.
Robert picked up the hat and thrust it at him, crushing the crown against John Morris’s chest, dislodging Frankie’s plaited band, John Morris’s back colliding with the mirror door of the wardrobe. Robert grabbed him and spun him around and pushed him hard, driving him towards the door. ‘Fuck off,’ he yelled. ‘I gave it to you! It’s fucking yours, you cunt!’ He was choking on his fury now. ‘Just fuck off!’ If John Morris resisted, Robert knew he would smash him. He might even kill him. His heart was pounding. He couldn’t get enough air into his lungs. He was set to go off. Sweat breaking out between his shoulder blades. He pushed John Morris out the door and slammed it shut, then he leaned against the door breathing hard, an image in his head of John Morris’s terror.
When Robert had recovered his breath he straightened up and lit a cigarette and went over and sat on the bed. He held his hands out in front of him and watched them trembling. He was afraid he might become his father. He was seeing his dad sitting in his armchair by the coal fire reading the poems of Robert Burns that evening soon after he was home from the front, the sound of Robert’s mother in the kitchen preparing the evening meal, the hiss and creak of the coals. And his father looking up from his book and asking in the menacing voice that commanded his father at times then, ‘Are you going to clean up the mess you’ve made?’ What had Robert been doing, sitting at the table in the centre of the room? Drawing or writing? Crumpled balls of paper lying on the floor. There was nothing unreasonable in his father’s question. Just that tone of voice. Robert got up off his chair and collected the pieces of paper and took them out through the kitchen to the dustbin on the back balcony. His mother reached and touched his arm as he went past her, warning him, cautioning him, her beautiful black eyes on him, the faint smell of her, her divine mother smell, the smell of love. He came back into the front room and stood by his father and looked into the fire. His father was reading Burns again—his poet hero whose name he had given to his son. But everything had changed. The clock on the sideboard ticked. Then the question: ‘Have you finished cleaning up?’ His father’s voice quiet, the menace in the peculiar rhythm of its silence, its waiting moment, the step between each word. ‘I’ve done it,’ Robert said, a dumbness settling in him. And his father looked up from his book of poems and stared at him. Robert met his gaze. Father and son looking at each other in the terrible silence, from the kitchen the cautious click of a plate set down carefully on the stone sink by the mother, her anxiety in that small sound, a door closing in the flat below, Mrs Snee coming home from the pub. ‘What about that piece under the sofa by your feet?’ His father’s voice from a long way off now. Robert said nothing, his eyes fixed now on the red coals of the fire, committed to the playing out of the ritual. There was no way back. What was it that prevented him from picking up that last piece of paper and taking it out and putting it in the dustbin with the others? Why was he unable to obey his father on this one small point? Why was he unable to speak? Was he determined to bring it on? Did he sense, in some awful way, that he must offer his father his chance to express the fury that was devouring him? Who else would offer his father this terrible freedom? ‘Come here!’ his father said quietly. And in his eyes the control was failing him now. He closed his precious book and set it aside on the table next to his chair. That book, his old Burns, a first Glasgow edition, quarter calf and deeply worn from several lifetimes of loving use. It had belonged to his own grandfather and his father, and was probably picked up for a song in a secondhand bookshop in Glasgow by the grandfather in the first place, a book already old even then, a thing from the eighteenth century, loved, cherished, its lamentations ringing out for all men to hear. Its spine broken. Its endpapers detached. A book of verse. The songs of his father’s people. The war was over. Robe
rt almost a man in his own eyes; his father, going back to the front from a twenty-four-hour leave, instructing him: ‘Look after your mother and sister. You’re the man in charge now.’ He stood between his father’s knees, gripped by his father’s thighs, and father and son looked into each other’s eyes. ‘Are you going to answer me?’ his father said. The clock ticked. His father struck him on the cheek with the flat of his hand. Robert regained his balance after the blow and waited and was ready for it when he was struck again, harder this time, his father adjusting his shoulders to get the force of the swing into it, more fierce now, more brutal. His father had boxed in his regiment and knew how to strike a blow. Robert saw the tears in his father’s eyes. Before he could regain his balance his father struck him again, and then again, and again, the frenzy taking him, depriving him of his breath, his sobs tearing at his throat. Robert didn’t cry out. He rode each blow as it came. He made no sound. At last his mother came in from the kitchen and took Robert’s arm and dragged him away from the furious beating. She took him into his bedroom and sat him on the bed and she wiped the blood from his face with her handkerchief and hugged him to her chest and she wept, holding his head to her breast, the smell of his mother’s hair. ‘He doesn’t mean it, darling,’ she sobbed. ‘It’s the war.’ She didn’t have to tell him that. He knew his father didn’t mean it. He knew, without knowing, that his father’s suffering, his despair, was beyond him and he loved his father to distraction and was glad he could take the beating from him. Knowing silence to be the only response to the murder and horror of it. And Robert was proud to join his father in his pain, father and son locked in a loss of belief in the race of beings to which they belonged. Robert knew even then there was nothing to be said. They were like dead men. He knew, as a boy, that language was not up to it but was for lesser things than these dark horrors.
His violent reaction to John Morris frightened Robert and he lay in bed wide awake for hours worrying about his future. He feared that loss of control and hated to know that such a force was in him, waiting to be provoked by the likes of John Morris. But he owed John Morris something for acknowledging his intelligence. That meant something to him and he was encouraged. For, more than anything else, Robert dreaded that he might come to share in the pointless existence of the men downstairs in the common room. The chance of such a fate haunted him.
10
By morning he had decided to take the challenge of his life in the city seriously. The first thing he did when he got out of bed was to put his exercise book in the bottom of the wardrobe. He wanted to tell Wendy about his decision at once but it was only Friday and he wouldn’t be seeing her until Tuesday. She had become strict about rationing their meetings and insisted on keeping them to once a week. ‘We’ll stay hungry for each other,’ she said. ‘We won’t be tempted to start nagging.’ He wanted to see her every day and to share his thoughts and ideas with her, but he didn’t push it. He saw that his demand for a greater commitment only made her uneasy. There were other things going on in her life. She kept them to herself, but he could sense her preoccupation with them.
At lunchtime he went to Taylor’s Coaching College and asked them if he could enrol in the course for university entrance studies. They gave him an English test and told him he should begin at a lower grade and work his way up from there year by year. The woman was motherly and encouraging. ‘I can catch up in the year. I know I can,’ he said. ‘Give me the chance, will you?’ She shook her head and touched his arm and let him enrol. ‘You wouldn’t be the first,’ she said.
On the way back to work he stopped off at Hall’s Book Store in Bourke Street. He handed the reading list to the young man behind the counter. Buying the books, Robert knew he was making the connection real. There would be no going back from here. He watched with a feeling of anxious excitement as the young man pulled the volumes from the shelves and set them on the counter in front of him. Robert took the first book in his hands and opened it. The heavy green cloth-bound volume of Carlton J.H. Hayes’ Modern Europe to 1870. There was an ornate woodcut frontispiece of the emperor Maximilian Augustus. Standing at the counter in the bookstore looking at that old woodcut, it seemed to Robert to be an enchanted emblem of all that was desirable and mysterious in his own future. For the first time in his life he believed he could be part of such things and have a place among them. Something serious and grown-up, Wendy had said. Well, that’s what he was doing. Walking back to Myer with his bag of books he was happy.
He was almost an hour late. The foreman was standing in the passage outside the locker room, his arms folded over his gut, smoking a cigarette, waiting to give him a telling-off. Robert felt invulnerable to him and in no mood to accept the humiliation the foreman was ready to dish out. So he got in first. ‘I’ll pick up my pay and get out of your way,’ Robert said.
The foreman said, ‘Now, look here, Robert, there’s no need for that.’
Robert gave the foreman a smile and shook his fat hand and wished him luck and he went to the office and picked up what was owing to him. There were plenty of other desperadoes lined up ready to take his place with the broom on the lolly floor. He was done with it. He walked out into the street feeling like a free man again for the first time since he’d arrived in the city. He was himself. And the sun was shining.
At the employment agency the clerk took a look at his new status as a student enrolled for university matriculation and asked him why he didn’t join the state public service. He was put on as a temporary clerical assistant grade four in the Department of Immigration. The offices were on the corner of Spring Street. Grade four was not four grades from the bottom, but was the bottom. He was to begin work on Monday. He had a weekend of reading to himself. Before he caught the tram home he bought a new pair of grey slacks and a brown jacket and two white shirts and a brick-red woollen tie and a pair of black brogues, and he bought a soft leather briefcase for his textbooks and notepads.
11
On Monday morning he started work at a desk in a vast open office on the ground floor of the green-tiled Commonwealth Offices in Spring Street. He was stamping his daily quota of Form 40s between the hours of nine and five, and reading history and literature the rest of the time. The grade four clerical assistants were a collection of driftwood from all over the world. People like himself. Debris. Out of touch with the mainstream, hanging between failure and hope, migrants and refugees, would-be poets and misunderstood geniuses, actors and female impersonators. Loners with dreams. They were all there, temporary till the good times came along. They recognised each other at once and might have had their status tattooed on their foreheads. Each one had a story. They were all doing their private work at their desks besides attending to the tedious routine clerical work. Reading alone in his room at night, attending the evening classes and daydreaming about Wendy, these were Robert’s precious realities.
On Tuesday he didn’t go home first after work but went straight to the Greek cafe. It was a hot day with a wild gusty north wind ripping between the buildings, dust and grit in the air, the tram wheels screaming on the rails with an extra pitch of distress as they dragged themselves around the corner from St Kilda Road into Glenferrie Road, people nervous and tense and in a hurry to get to where they were going, giving that extra push to things, looking around at each other, irritated. Since Wendy had started working for the union three days a week, the Greek cafe had become their regular meeting place. They usually ate a meal at the cafe then went back to his room and made love and talked. Later they went down to Nigel’s wine bar for a drink. She asked him a couple more times to go to the Swanston Family Hotel and meet her friends, and when he didn’t go she stopped asking. There was a stubborn hold-out in him about this and he did not try to reason it away.
She was sitting in their regular booth. He saw her before he went through the door of the cafe. He felt a thrill of excitement, he always did, seeing this beautiful woman who was more than half a mystery sitting there waiting for him. Today he wa
s a little self-conscious and nervous about how she was going to react to his new outfit. She could be moody and was always fiercely independent. He was careful with her.
There had been a midweek meeting at the Caulfield track and the cafe was crowded and noisy and full of smoke and heat. Two men from the boarding house were sitting in the booth behind Wendy. Robert nodded to them and they nodded back. Wendy was reading. She was always reading. Usually pamphlets or free news sheets about workers and their conditions, making notes and rearranging things. He didn’t know if maybe she and her comrades had a revolution in mind, but it would not have surprised him if they had. Today she was looking alone and vulnerable and his heart went out to her and he wanted to protect her from life and harm and disappointments. She was wearing a yellow sleeveless summer dress and was looking older and more lovely than ever.
He leaned down and she lifted her face to him and they kissed. The touch of her soft lips sent a pulse of lightning into his groin. She shifted across and he sat beside her. ‘I’ve got some great news,’ he said. He set his satchel of books on the table. She was looking at him with that critical air she sometimes put on, looking from him to the books as he pulled them from his satchel, her own reading set aside.