Mug Shots

by Barry Oakley

  To avoid temptation we took rooms at a chaste distance. The Education Department solved the problem by declaring Carmel ‘surplus to requirements’ and exiled her temporarily to a place even more remote—Manangatang, where the big event, she told me, after coping with the culture shock, was the arrival of the weekly Melbourne train.

  In the May term holidays we married, at St Mary’s East St Kilda, with my old school friend Gerrard Briglia the celebrant. There was giggling amongst some of Carmel’s relations at the little gong the altar boy bonged at the Nuptial Mass’s consecration. We still have a brief colour movie of the couple leaving the church afterwards, in which Carmel looks dazedly beautiful and the groom is pulling strange faces—perhaps because we were both sedated on Oblivon, the unswallowable calmative that had got me through my Diploma of Education year.

  The reception was to be at swish 9 Darling Street, but financial stringencies forced us to cross this out on the wedding invitation and replace it with the less-fashionable Esplanade Hotel. As we arrived, Ted, the man who used to deliver butter to my grandmother and whom she inexplicably married (her second time), broke away from the welcoming guests, produced a ten-shilling note with a conjurer’s flourish and put it in my hand. ‘Keep it,’ he said loudly. (Ted was as mean as he was ugly. When we visited them later with little children, he’d take off the tops of the garden taps so they wouldn’t waste water.)

  Bride and groom, sedated by the primitive tranquilliser Oblivon. May, 1957.

  My brother drove us afterwards to a Warburton guesthouse, where we lasted only one night. The bed was uncomfortable and kids ran up and down the corridors too excited to go to sleep. The following morning, I complained to the manager. He was a rural humourist, accustomed to mocking honeymoon couples.

  ‘Sleep?’ he said. ‘You’re on your honeymoon, and you got no sleep?’

  ‘That’s right. We didn’t get any.’

  ‘You didn’t get any, and you’re complaining?’

  ‘You’re not getting any either. We’re leaving.’

  ‘You booked in for a week.’

  ‘You’ve got the deposit, and that’s all you’re getting—though there might be more—on the sheets.’

  We moved to a nearby hotel, where our trials continued. After our second night, Carmel broke out in giant hives. When I appeared at the highly public breakfast, and naively gave the reason for her absence, the news went round the tables and caused general merriment. ‘Bad news, son,’ said one bucolic wit. ‘Looks like she’s allergic to it.’ Like mothers-in-law, honey­moon couples were comic figures. Ripostes were impossible.

  Dutiful Catholics

  We began married life in a flat in Thirteenth Street. Presumably the Chaffey brothers brought the idea of numbered streets from America, with the irrigation system on which Mildura is based. Every morning I’d ride my bike along Deakin Avenue to the Technical College, and Carmel would ride hers to Mildura Central.

  Snob that I was, I’d hide in my little office at lunchtime and read copies of Current Affairs Bulletin on Wittgenstein or The Modern Novel. We’d both get home tired—so many kids, so much heat. On Friday night this would escalate to an argument over the shopping and washing, after which we’d go to the Rendez Vous, the town’s only restaurant, enjoy freshly caught Murray cod and Mildara riesling, and share the latest schoolboy howlers with our friends Geoff Richards and Jack Thomas: ‘After the Romans had defeated all the countries they grew lazy and ate about a six-course meal and were defeated so their Empire fell.’ Gibbon in a sentence.

  We seemed to exert a powerful attraction upon lonely bachelors. The first of what would prove to be many was James McGrath, with whom I taught. James’s only company, apart from us, were adolescent boys. Here was a man who could transfix a school assembly, yet who spent his spare time taking favourites to the movies, or leading one gang against another. We came to live in fear of him. In drink he’d lie on the floor, mouth agape, lips furled like a donkey’s, declaring his great love for Carmel, and taking umbrage when finally asked to leave. ‘But I live here.’

  We were dutiful Catholics at the time. Every Sunday we endured the pulpit polemics of Father Carroll, tall, bony and intense. ‘Get this into your Catholic heads,’ he’d bellow. ‘While we fish and we swim and we go on drives, the Communists are taking over the unions.’

  He came to the school to give Religious Instruction, and locked onto me. He called on us one night, dispensed with the civilities, and said he wanted to form a study group for the professional men of the town. I knew what was coming. ‘A united front, that’s what we need.’ Calling on my years of dialectical experience with the Campion Society, I told him I was against united fronts.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘you’re one of these individualists.’

  ‘And intend to remain so.’

  ‘I’m disappointed. You could be a great help to us.’ I knew what he meant by that ‘us’. It was a Movement word, a Santamaria word. For us or against us. He refused another beer and left. Never one to waste an experience, I based a piece of fiction on it later which went, via Southerly, into The Oxford Book of Australian Short Stories.

  Teaching was closing in on me. The principal, the egregiously misnamed Mr Witty, decided it was time I took some responsibility and put me in charge of the bike racks, and I had to address the assembly regularly on the state of them. There were also staff meetings, to thrash out such matters as whether teachers should have to shut the windows after school, and whether qualifications should be added to names of staff listed in the school magazine.

  Newly married, at Mildura Technical College, 1957. (I’m the happy one in the middle, top row.)

  Escape! Attempts to do so by applying for positions in Manila and Japan failed. My first novel—inevitably about a teacher in a country town—was rejected, with red wine stains on some of my purplest passages. It was sent off twice more, and back it came each time, by now on the point of disintegration.

  With pathways to literature and travel blocked, I applied to return to Melbourne. The Education Department had a way of dealing with those desperate to get back to the city. They’d be sent to the toughest schools: Collingwood, South Melbourne, Richmond. I was given Richmond, and the hardest year of my life.

  Don’t be nice

  On my first day at Richmond Technical School, as we came down the stairs to the quadrangle, the kids booed. ‘You can forget about your Diploma of Education,’ said the head of the English Department. ‘It’s war, and you have to win it. Have you got a strap?’ I said I hadn’t. ‘Get one from the office,’ he said, as we lined up in front of the still-booing kids. ‘Don’t be nice.’

  I hadn’t mastered not being nice, and had to use other means. The toughest class was 3CD—forty leather-jacketed adolescents who didn’t want to be there. They didn’t want Dickens or Wordsworth, so I read from John O’Grady’s They’re a Weird Mob. If this was English literature they liked it, revelling in Jeez and bludge and ‘flat as Aunt Maude’s chest’. Things were okay as long as they were entertained, so in the football season I told them to buy the Sporting Globe. They were all Richmond supporters. Every Monday we’d read and discuss the prose of the hacks who described Richmond’s match. They soon learned what clichés meant, and developed a skill in spotting them. Language badly used can be as instructive as its opposite.

  In the classroom across the corridor, the war was being lost. The teacher, Livio, a gloomy Italian with an unwise moustache, spent the time either shouting at the class or riding the waves of noise that followed, with the noise eventually winning. ‘I cannot go on like this,’ he said. He didn’t, and left.

  Further along the corridor was the opposite: a totally silent class, ruled by a Mr Trevaskis. Mr Trevaskis was short but solid, and gave off a whispery menace, to such effect that he’d sometimes walk out and leave the class, and still there’d be quiet. I once witnessed a strapping when passing his room. He ran at his victims, to gain extra momentum. It happened only rarely.

 
; My classes veered between order and chaos, with occasional recourse to the strap. Like the offender, I found this deeply unpleasant, but the problem was eventually solved for me. Someone had used their break-and-enter skills to get into my locked desk. The strap, each time I used it, seemed slightly shorter—it was done subtly, a couple of centimetres at a time. After a few weeks, my defensive armament was a harmless little leather flap.

  There was only one strategy left. I collected a stack of Walkabout travel magazines from the library, and at difficult times gave them out. Suddenly, they’d go quiet. The search was on, I soon realised, for tribal articles that showed bare-breasted women. If erotica couldn’t be found, the kids were happy to supply it. I thought they were busy taking notes, but what they were in fact doing was decorating almost every photograph—of man, woman, kangaroo, even aeroplane—with outsize male genitalia.

  At Richmond I met my first genuine bohemian (if that’s not a contradiction in terms). Jason Gurney taught art at the school, and he’d throw lumps of wet plaster at troublemakers instead of using the strap. Gurney was a large man who wore a shabby corduroy jacket and matching trousers. He had long greying hair, a goatee, a black beret and purple bags under his eyes. In profile he looked like Paul Gauguin.

  I used to have morning tea with Gurney in his little office (he despised the other teachers) until I grew tired of being told that Melbourne was a provincial outpost, and that next year, as soon as he’d saved the money, he’d be back in Paris, London or New York. But if he’d had successful exhibitions in these places, if he knew Dylan Thomas and Ezra Pound, what was he doing here, under the plaster apples, with his Gauloises and airmailed copies of New Statesman? The answer, I eventually realised, was that he needed insularity, it was where he showed up best—where would he be in Paris with his beret and beard?

  I went to one of his parties, in his studio, a converted stable behind St Kilda Road. He greeted guests in a red roar of a waistcoat and paint-flecked pants. He’d assembled a crowd of painters, phonies and poseurs, and looking down on them were his paintings, vacuous abstracts, blank and banal.

  Jason Gurney wasn’t very good, and this was why I witnessed one of the greatest snubs of all time. One afternoon, when I was having a drink with him after school, he noticed someone, a dark, handsome, bearded man, across the counter in the saloon bar. ‘That’s Clem Meadmore,’ he said, ‘you must meet him.’ He called out to him, in a voice more and more plaintive—‘Clem—Clem—Clem …’ Clem kept his eyes down as he got his drink. ‘Clem!’ There was as much steel in Clem as there was in his chairs, and he paid for his drink and turned away as if he were stone deaf.

  By the middle of this exhausting year, when Carmel was pregnant, we’d extricated ourselves from my mother’s house. (‘Go on, take a flat. Your father’s never here and Gavan’s on the other side of the world, but I’ll manage.’) We moved into a place in Caulfield, where we could begin proper married life, and which Carmel furnished with a table, buffet and chairs in the new Scandinavian style. Melbourne was taking the first steps towards civilisation, and so were we. Every afternoon after work, pale and tired, I’d change into bottle-green corduroy trousers, settle into a Fler chair, and sip a Coonawarra claret.

  We’d had a hectoring cleric in Mildura, and now we endured another at our local church in Caulfield. Father Gleeson was an Irish priest of the old and thankfully declining school, built like a bull with a roar to match, regularly inveighing against the modern world and predicting its eventual collapse. The birthrate would decline because of antisocial methods of contraception, and we’d be overwhelmed by more fecund races—including, presciently enough, those of Muslim faith. At one performance he was fulminating about contraception’s evil when he was interrupted by a crying child. He stopped and waited, and the infant howled on. ‘Either I go or that child goes,’ he roared. The child went, enabling Gleeson to continue about the blessings of large families. And then we went, and didn’t come back.

  Birth and afterbirth

  At about this time of exhausting class warfare, Bill Hannan and Desmond O’Grady, newly sophisticated, returned from Paris and Rome respectively. They wore sharp jackets and pointed shoes, and had bad news. Australia was not a good place for would-be novelists. Cultural thinness. Fiction couldn’t grow in it. Bill went further. Not only did Australia have no soul, it wouldn’t matter if it had. He’d converted to the French New Realists—Michel Butor and Alain Robbe Grillet, who maintained that fiction didn’t need story or character, merely neutral descriptions of the external world: all that could be known was the surface of things.

  Since I at the time was having a Ned Kelly period, and writing a story of his final hours which Southerly, moving at its own marmoreal pace, would eventually accept, I riposted by saying that Australia mightn’t yet have a civilisation but it did have myths, and until cultivation and Left Bank berets came along they would do. All this was tossed back and forth as we wandered the suburban streets with the unavailability of a bar or coffee shop proving their point.

  If Desmond was critical of Australian society he was surpassed by his Italian wife Gegi, whom he’d married in St Peter’s in Rome. Both Gegi and Carmel were pregnant, and Carmel became a complaints sounding board. They ranged from the poverty of the cuisine to the lack of central heating. We had a party in our flat to welcome the visitors back to the land they weren’t happy with, and the two pregnant wives found they were wearing identical coat-dresses from exclusive Georges. Though Carmel’s was lilac and Gegi’s light brown, she and Desmond left immediately.

  By now the baby was imminent, and kicked at night as if impatient to get out. It made its escape early on the eighth of November, but seemed to have second thoughts beforehand, forcing Carmel to endure a thirty-six-hour labour. Her husband was not on hand to help. At our arrival at the hospital, we were confronted by a fierce nun, who told me to leave at once. The patient was briskly instructed to ‘go and empty your bladder’.

  Carmel was then taken into a cramped and primitive labour ward, with two beds separated only by a plastic sheet. As she endured her own labour, she had to listen to the cries of the woman on the other side as she gave birth, and then witness the doctor emptying the afterbirth into a basin. The hospital was called Bethlehem, and the name was apt.

  When, after a day and a half, the baby arrived, she was blue, and taken away immediately. Her mother had to lie there uncleaned for hours, while others waited their turn on trolleys in the corridor. We called her Madeleine, and she had perfect features. ‘When your father saw you after you were born,’ my mother said helpfully, ‘he went out and vomited.’ We marvelled at this being that had begun life no bigger than a full stop at the end of a sentence. To hold that evolutionary accident was the sole cause of this miracle requires a leap of faith greater than that required for Christian belief. Madeleine was not the blind product of the forces of nature but a gift.

  All done the old-fashioned way: first the wedding, then the baby (Madeleine).

  The gift cried a lot at night, and every morning I’d emerge from our flat as if dazed by a dart and walk to Caulfield Technical College, to which I’d mercifully been transferred. Though the students were more manageable, teaching was just as trying as at Richmond. It was hard to be enthusiastic about punctuation in front of a class of forty after a run of sleepless nights.

  Madeleine was soon getting teeth and I was losing them. The trouble went as far back as the war, when our father, who was in charge of Air Force stores on Thursday Island, sent us back a huge tin of quarter-pound blocks of chocolate. First we used them to build ships and castles, then we began eating them. After this, and a daily diet of lemon tarts in my school lunch, my teeth gradually succumbed, and I was forced to go to a dentist.

  ‘They’ll have to come out I’m afraid,’ he said, as he inspected the stumps and stalactites of my upper jaw. A few days later, in a surgery opposite Caulfield Railway Station, a mask was put over my face, and I was told to inhale. It was nitrous oxide
, laughing gas, and I had an Experience. I was ballooned to Somewhere Else, where the ace of diamonds had inexplicably to be presented to gain admittance to a behind-the-mirrorland quite different from the field of dreams. Things happen in dreams, but this was suspended in timelessness. I was floating in an eternal now, and this, it was immediately evident, was what the afterlife was going to be like. Time and space will fall away, leaving just you, treading presentness as one does water. You don’t expect intimations from your dentist, but this has stayed with me ever since.

  Nightmare of the red room

  Despite her now having an indentured husband, Carmel was pregnant again, and we moved from the Caulfield flat to a characterless house in Carnegie, a characterless suburb. The price ($6500) was all we could afford. ‘Stylish’ was how the estate agent puzzlingly described it, and stylish was what Carmel did her best to make it become.

  Some things needed doing in its progress towards this ­condition, and I couldn’t do them. I was the kind of man who thought grout was the name of an Australian wicketkeeper, a bastard file a public service expletive, nogging something done with eggs, and sarking a Scottish folk dance. When the fuses went, we had to wait in the dark for my father to come, as he did when the pilot light went out under the hot-water tank.

  Determined not to give up, I got up a ladder once to unscrew a curtain rod bracket. The screw had been painted over, and was immovable. At that moment one of Carmel’s sisters and her husband arrived from Queensland. Alex, huge-handed and practicality incarnate, got up on the ladder, poked with the screwdriver and loosened the screw in what seemed one continuous movement. Alex was the kind of man who spent hours in his shed playing with tenon saws, mitre boxes and diaphragm valves.