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The Wrong Address FOREWORD
// TARAWONGA Springwood NSW,
1956 // THE PAINTED PATH Bridge Road,
Belmore 1960 // TRAVELLING NORTH
Australia, 1962 // PSYCHIC DRAMAS
Canberra, 1965 // THE SCREAMING MOON
Burton Street, Sydney 1966 // THE
ÉMIGRÉ Oriental Bay, New Zealand 1967 // WORKING CHRISTMAS Harris Street, Ultimo
1967 // HEART OF THE REVOLUTION
Wellington, New Zealand 1968 // WIDE
WORLDS East Putney, England 1971 // THE BOARDING HOUSE Reading Street,
New Zealand 1973 // SILVER SCREEN
Epsom, New Zealand 1975 // BARBECUE
BLUES Waterloo Street, New Zealand 1976 // DEMENTIA William Street, Armadale,
Victoria 1977 // THE LAST
COCKATOO Illawarra Avenue, Newcastle NSW 1979 // HALLS OF ACADEMIA Australia 1980 //
INFIDELITY Pitt Street,
Newcastle 1981 // FIREPOWER
Tarania Street, 1983 // RESPECTABLE AT TYRELL STREET
Newcastle, 1984 // FRIENDS
Irimo Street, PNG 1985 |
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[top of page][go to end]© copyright Thorold May 1995 All Rights Reserved Springwood NSW, 1956 Sassafras cut easier that gum, but burnt worse. My steel wedges rang at short sharp violence from the barking sledge hammer. A world-weary ten year-old, I sweated and grew biceps, violating the tough old fibres of fallen timber. Learned the dry, astringent smell of freshly lifted bark, and sniffed the soft layers of life on death at the core of rotten logs. In sparse mountain bushland west of Sydney, my parent's home had grown on hope and little money. The first stone was cut on-site. Crow-barred from leached sandy soil and cracked, split, shaped by a blasphemous hunchback and alcoholic mason called Huck Gonzales. He was paid, my father said, in whisky, and fed on possums newly shot at night when they scampered as natural thieves about the campfire. Each great block of yellow sandstone emerged from a hundred million years of rest into the clear dry furnace of bush air. Stood with an ordered multitude at the founding of the first house of William May. I am born of an elemental man. My father would be patriarch of his clan, created from his seed, housed in his dwelling, fed at his hand, defended with his anger and commanded at his will. Perhaps all fathers are mythic figures. My father's grasp was hard, his face hawk-tough, burnt and beaten craggy by the Mask-maker. Yet his blue eyes on dark nights could capture us in a merry troupe. The kids expected, when dad rolled home from the pub, to get an update on his pantheon of villains and heroines, disguised for our simple, credulous ears as truck drivers and bar girls. The caste of an Australian Ramayana. We shared the tale, told without fear of daylight denouement, woven evening by evening, until riding within this brocaded panoply ourselves, my family came to pity the drab trudge of ordinary lives. Luckily for the foundation of empire my mother believed in her man, and proved perilous with a block hammer against the cunning grain, when stone and fate resisted sweat and tears. Country girl, city brat, a patch of bush scrub, where each scented drop of luxury was wrung from thin pay packets. I remember being dirt poor. We cherished unusual treats. A chocolate, threepence found on the footpath, a strawberry or a peach (only one) maybe once a year. Not that we were hungry. There was meat with fresh green beans and buttered potatoes. And after-dinner memories. A new web of stories for the old day. Our world wobbled. Its weekend axis jumped the coastal plains of short dry grass, to mountain scrub. Gruff Mary delivered us with bumpy grace. She was a family member, adopted, honoured, abused. An ancient and amazing bitser, this vehicle. Sacrilege of a nineteen twenty-seven Willies Knight coupe, cut down with a hacksaw, coach work rebuilt in masonite and hardwood painted grey. The lady's mighty, slow revving, twelve-cylinder power plant had been transplanted by a boozy mechanic. Now a geriatric with bionic innards, her tired bones hid a racy 1948 V8 Mercury engine improbably grafted to a five ton truck gearbox. Father wrenched her to death-defying speeds, but could find no brakes to care for. He crashed her into crawler gear in desperate moments and clung like a doped spider to the mighty dovetailed wooden steering wheel. Mary built Tarawonga. We quarried far down the valley sides, heaving rock onto the Y-fork of a tree trunk. Cabled it to the old car's awesome crawler gear and let her loose across the tufting grass. Solo at a steady five miles an hour. So that forgotten one shimmering Saturday noon, we caught her over the next rise patiently climbing a farmer's fence. Slowly an imprint set itself upon the earth. Heavy sandstone foundations, a great stone fireplace that you could sling a hammock in. My axe arm would curse its maw for years to come. Topsides my father's craft began to lash commodious gables of red gum and oregon, with lingering attention from an inner eye. There were rich invocations to the deity if one of us, clinging to scaffolds barely fit for blind cats, dropped a piece of four by two into the clattering abyss. A final migration in Mary parted us from the sand hills and the ocean. From a fibro shack in a horse paddock inherited by the ghost of our pussycat. As Mary, piled high with furniture, whined and rumbled onto the highway, the cat leapt howling out of a cupboard drawer. She argued with gravity for an instant too long, and hit the bitumen in a technicolour farewell. Now it seems (so long ago), that somewhere on that trip I crossed a line from first childhood, and knew too much. Then my parents passed beyond those early springs of tireless possibility where Age could not find them. We came to Tarawonga, "meeting place of pigeons", to shape a panorama of heroic dreams within the raw bounds of our own hands.
[top of page][go to end]© copyright Thorold May 1995 All Rights Reserved Bridge Road, Belmore 1960 These houses knew their place. Federation red-brick with a porch and painted path. A handkerchief of lawn out front to face the ordered world with. Three generations had defined Bridge Road for the credit agencies, the postmen and the politicians. Each fifty-foot block marked off a television on hire purchase, three letters a week, two votes for promises of a lucky country to give the kids a start in life. Dad had sworn never to live in a street where backyard paling fences walled a grey horizon. Where a good shouting match would bring the cops before the local wildlife lit into the scrub. Within three months of our hijacking a mortgage on suburbia (compromise along the road to fame) an ancient lady on the downwind side had died in search of quieter havens. Spiders, unmolested for whole epochs of arachnid history, held urgent consultations on mass migration. May's renovation machine didn't muck around. We assaulted Federation decency's florid brick complexion, pock-marked her with a sparrow-pick and plastered her white like a whore from a Japanese print. New glazing made a sunroom from the dusty porch, dappled with shadow, bamboo blinds to keep us demur from garbos and the clattering trains. Coming of consciousness is coming of age. While the house transformed with unexpected possibilities, so did I. Through that decade of the fifties the landscape of mind slowly found its definition in light and shade. The half-grown century was about to discover rock-n'-roll, a milkshake stop along the highway, unvalued before we earned our seeing eyes and knew (though dared not say) that there are journeys but no destinations. Somewhere there's an old snapshot in a drawer. The artless memory of a box camera, it shows a gawky kid with big ears and nervous lips. Scarecrow in a school blazer (royal blue), and long trousers that stop too far above the ankles. Already without style, lacking faith in the big promises of being on the road to Somewhere. But caught forever with this phoney stereotype, there I am pasted by an accident of time and place onto the backdrop of a federation house and a painted path. Double-income families hadn't quite arrived, ("No wife of mine will work", He said). Yet H.G. Palmer's suburban stores offered easy ways to sign away tomorrow and tomorrow. Came a day when I was sent quaking to the street-corner phone with a message that mum couldn't pay this week. Sorry mumble good-bye. And His liquor bill was getting steep, so there had to be another way to make a quid. Why not try for mystery, we thought; foreign bodies in a room to rent. Mother fussed, and they sent a lady out from the university to check for gentility and bugs. An assurance that getting to know you Australian style would be etched with refinement in the margins of Asia. The girls from Kuala Lumpur and Surabaya were to think with nostalgia of Sydney bathrooms and the culinary daring of sago pudding. Yvonne was all angles with funny teeth. Wendy had puffy eyes, loved maths, hated exercise. Sharifa Ini seemed to shed hair around the house like a moulting cat, and giggled for no special reason. All pretty normal misshapen human beings, their minds tuned to harmonies in a tropic night. Alas, poor resonance for the jam-tin twang of a kid rung in on rafferty's street rules. What could I do, smitten at fifteen by exotic creatures, "university students". U-who's ? No tag for that one in Holden country. Imprinted like a plastic duckling for all time, my hot imagination nursed an image of the perfect body. Chinese girl in a cheong-sam. Honey-dew skin, the toss of her long black hair, pert fringe on an almond face. The caress of her cool slim fingers like a ripple of summer grass. The wretched truth didn't matter. Dreams will be dreams. My vision of the Australian woman thereafter hung on the handle of her shopping trolley. Blotched pink mutton, parcelled and bulging out of a cotton shift, her cheerful insouciance as de-sexed as a jumbo carton of potato chips. Unjust, absurd from an unlovely owner, but the tides of passion don't play fair. My heart was condemned to exile. That Christmas holidays it was time, they said to learn the work that real men do. So putting the periodic table and modern history safely on a shelf, I got a job stacking oranges for Joe. His Sicilian fruit shop lingers with its aromas of cantaloupes and onions. Stale sweat, fresh flowers, meatballs and tomato sauce waft in the chemical cracks of my brain. Fat kind smelly Joe had style, a lifestyle entirely complete. Our days journeyed from pasta and eggs floating in olive oil at six a.m. to gunning up the stout red Bedford, and a slow trip into town. We trawled the cavernous clamorous market with its signs not to spit in four languages. Old friends dawdled at each stall. "How much are grannies and Tassie spuds today?" You took your time over the texture of greens, the crunch of carrots only dug yesterday, the velvet skin of every peach. The boy (I, the boy) ran towering barrow loads back to the Bedford. And around noon we'd make it home to Mrs. Joe, where the boy would be banished to washing the spuds in an old bathtub up the yard. There is a trick of seeing, of blinking down an elf, a cloud, an empire before it gets away. And on the crest of new perception, suddenly past logic is a dream. My days are populated with ghosts; I am their only medium of exchange. Perhaps in Joe's Sicilian fruit shop the first turning slipped out of sight of the painted path, and houses became colour patches of memory. Moments of rest for a waif fated to wander through the oblivious worlds of H.G. Palmer's Hire Purchase Company, cantaloupes and Chinese ice maidens from a tropic night.
[top of page][go to end]© copyright Thorold May 1995 All Rights Reserved Australia, 1962 Howl metal, vibrate my bones. God where is he taking us? The road swirls and whips; gravity heaves the truck down. The razorback plunges, with its paroxysm of jungle waiting to suck the searing rubber, tear us off this sliver of bitumen. What is the old man doing? Hell, the brakes! That's it, something wrong ... What a way to go, sacrifice in a red garden chair. So all our futures have arrived. Family dies on mountainside. Youth found under refrigerator on back of truck. It's slowing. He's smashed her into crawler and the gearbox is screaming. Hold us hold us Bedford. Shudder. That's it, don't break up old girl. We've hit the rise; it's gonna' be okay. A cut brake line, our moment of transit. Out of control, almost; saved by wit and desperation for living out the dream. Such a dream to live by. Travelling across the years of our lives, the power of mirage has saved us from plain surface reflection in supermarket windows. Our words have swept stream upon current, time upon mystery. And far into the memory of hope five lives hurtle in this red Bedford truck, with its high-pitched canopy like a prairie wagon. Parents and a babe are packed in up front catching the drama. A roar of engines, near misses, the breeze, hissing rain, birds rising in alarm. While out of sight and mind a teenage girl curls on some old carpet, chewing her nails to the bone. The gawky boy ignores his sister, clings doggedly to the slats of a lashed-down garden chair. His vision is framed over the tailgate, in an arched horizon of the long road back. A time past, when the rainbow snake roamed my unspoiled valley, supreme with promises of things to come, stories that shimmered fell from my father. He shaped and brought the speech of heroes to our house. But then one day he went north, we went south. To winters, stony paddocks, warm pungent milk from uncle Shorty's cows. A village school in pine trees. Travelling north, father was gone. The Catalina flying boat whined, bellowed, hurled him into cloud banks. Invisibility, windowed with brief letters, hints ... wide shadowed bungalows, engulfing vegetation, downpours, earthquakes, Chinese trade stores. Rank cigarettes rolled in two foot tubes by dark men painted bright. And always his singing hammer on corrugated iron, the carpenter burnt, buckled in the savage sun. They shipped him out, I heard it a lifetime later, for hunting with the blacks. Shooting birds in head-high kunai grass while the master-race sipped pink gins in their fan cooled club and sneered. Until he cracked, by their standards. Lay calmly on a grassy bank, set the Lee-Enfield at a deadly range for the contract foreman's bungalow, and wiped its gleaming roof with good-bye kisses of hot lead. Adrift from New Guinea, southbound at five hundred feet, afloat on air again, the great bird rocked Billy May gently. A glint of sun on its wings, as he fingered silver cutlery, wine in chilled glasses, and a promise floated in between raw worlds. The islands of paradise were way below, the stupendous Australian barrier reef, strung in green and gold on a turquoise sea. To this he would return. All or nothing, the break point, the parting. No more putting off tomorrow now. It is Christmas, nineteen sixty-one. This year I finished school in a weary Sydney suburb, quarantined as "dux", drafted head prefect (head who?). Still a stranger, kicking at other people's gateposts. But now, here at toe's end is a path, a beginning. How is the dust on your shoes, hombre, and the bedazzled light in your eyes? The dream will change, it whispers, if only I can see above the eyebrow of hard roof-lines to that ancient rainbow snake again. Gaudy arch of supreme promises, in the shimmer of mist falling from the walls of our valley. Is today written with the quality of passing? Pedestrians drift in hypnotic shoals. Who amongst them knows the high wire of sudden self-awareness, the vertigo of teetering on the very edge of escape? Which of them cares? Looking into the flabby faces, I abandon them. Step through the facade, burn off their narrow strip life of shop-fronts and car-parks to embrace the grey sky. In wasteland at the city's outer reach I crush the rough, vigorous grass underfoot, impatient for take-off. We've sold the house, tarted and disguised, to New Australians scratching for varnished memories, the crumbling brickwork of old Europe. And have camped for two weeks above a Chinese restaurant, collecting pungent catalogues of souvenir aromas. In a pub yard below the Bedford waits, lashed shipshape, loaded to the gunwales with everything in the world we own and dare to keep. The caravan, flash with new paint, rocks astern. Later, in the winding miles on miles to the ends of a rugged continent, that van will pitch and smash its chassis to a tinder. But on this first brave, tremulous day our wagon-train moves out, unmarked by the city's self-obsession. Here is a festive season tale, brushed in water-colour, rich tones blurred, warm afternoon summer rain in torrents. We cross the Queensland border already intoxicated. Our dry Southern vision is numbed by potent green cane fields, banana groves in volcanic ochre soil, lush wild undergrowth at every verge. Ancient obelisks, the Spyglass Mountains, are anchors in time against a gunmetal sky, where Tyrannosaurus Rex surely sundered the landscape with tidal savagery, the trick of an eye-blink gone. Now picture the blackness of a tropical night. Gaslight in a steamed-up window, faint outlines beneath some hint of spreading branches. Shelter from heaven, for this is the Deluge, and a close encounter with Christmas Eve. Very close, in a sixteen-foot caravan with ankle-deep mud by the door. Dad is checking out the local wildlife in a pub, while mum and the kids find time to drift, solace in pretended sleep. Where each untethers a small island of private space between bunk's edge and a plywood bulkhead, floats behind the roaring wall of water, and away. Later there are scrapes and thumps, muted swearing, a new weight on the bedclothes, explored with cautious toes. At daylight we are reassured and bereft. Santa Clause has called for the last time. Then gradually in a haze between cloud-light and rising dust, our trail beam, our vision, our fragile hope diffuses. Maybe it is the platinum blonde with mauve eyes, selling buns in a lonely crossroads store. She is the sentinel to raise alarm. Her coolness. Outlanders are not welcome. But it takes a while to notice the swift stiffening glances at our number plates, the generosity withheld against them southern intruders. A casual contempt which takes money without touching the hand that holds it. We haven't planned for a battle of minds amongst the bougainvilleas. Times are hard, jobs as rare as a 1930 penny. In the tatty caravan parks, just outside the lamplight limit of peeling coastal towns, folk stand that stance of "those who are took", and know it. Shallow anger, a shrug, old sandshoes shuffling in the damp paspalum grass, a tired slap at mosquitoes. Their hollow eyes size up our rig: "Going north? Ain't nothing north mate". For each drop of petrol scrounged to satiate rusty Holdens and sputtering Vauxhalls, their desperate, sun-blinded quest leads south. Bang! Swerve, shudder, bang ! A rhythm of destruction that owes nothing to rock-n-roll. Bang! Stiff bodied, this truck. The caravan barges left, swings right like a cantankerous elephant in captivity. Already it has wrenched three towbars, and now the superstructure is tearing with a rasp and crackle at each lurch. What have we done? Is our hubris so great? This journey has become etched with torture by a crescendo of collisions. The continent wrinkles on its eastern edge, with a two and a half thousand mile frown. It is cut to wind-worn bedrock, ancient and unyielding, giving a meagre sustenance to low shrubs. On the gully ledges wiry gums and sassafras survive leaping summer scrub fires. Harmonies of this astringent country are in my footfall and axe hand. I understand its laws, for my people have mostly dwelt on an apron between the mountains and the sea. But at Capricorn's tropic latitude, Connor's Range cleaves almost sheer to the Coral Sea, and wet breath from the south-east Trades Winds feeds a green profusion in the deep ravines. Rich and poisonous for the unwary. We don't yet know this face of nature, or its owners. Our perilous unbraked rush to paradise is meeting with the ordinary terror of the earth. Turgid broth laps the beaches at Mackay, river mud from short sharp streams, trapped behind a travel poster reef. Someone forgot to mention that in Sydney, or speak of the visitor who ran screaming from the surf, anointed with nerve poison, trailing invisible box jellyfish tendrils. Dead in three minutes. I put my flippers away. North country, you love us, you love us not. How shall we choose ? Bowen, dry as bleached bones, her bays limpid, a dozen shades of blue and green. Ingham nestling in the sugar fields under a brooding mountain, wreathed with summer storms. How you charm and puzzle us. Vignette of gentle, muscle-bound Italians gathered by the hitching rail of a collapsing barber shop. Cairns sprawled in languid avarice for the tourist buck that's gonna' come, they mutter, just as soon as them buggers in Canberra are exiled to god's gulag archipelago. At some midday nowhere point, lost in rank grass, we run out of road. So as north as north can get, the expedition stops to study its navel. Scratch its damp hair, prickly with heat and insects, wipe back the rivulets of sweat. Should we ask after the Vision, or wonder who's paying for tomorrow's dinner? Let's find our new address. There is a shack to be had, standing into the sea and the sky, on a headland at Port Douglas. A one-pub town made famous in the white Dreamtime by vanished gold. Now every owner of an elbow on the bar has a movie-set tumble-down house waiting to be discovered by visiting millionaires. Meanwhile the mayor, over an acre of sun-tanned belly and dirty cotton shorts, loops a fishing line around one big toe and drops his bait into the shifting reflections of the bay. They are waiting for Godot at Port Douglas, while the stingrays wing lazy as V-bombers under the movie-set tumble-down wharf. Sydney town, nineteen thirty-three. Empty factories, soot-stacks silent, dead. Rusting steam-boilers, queues of desperate men. Mitha's boys got threepence for luck, to buy lunch with. Enough, if you skipped school, for a trip by tram to the very edge of promised lands, where new paling fences pegged the land developers' momentary horizon. Highways now bandage the body-bulges of suburbia. Geraniums struggle in concrete pots where dad hunted rabbits through scrawny brush, set bird traps, became free. New Year, nineteen sixty-two. Billy May is at the end of his track. His small clan waits, saddens. Seventeen years the hammer has sung, joining and shaping, crafting shelter for strangers, building the maker out. For when they tidy up, polish the windows, pay off the slaves, a carpenter is always on the street. And now this small, angry man with arms like iron hoops and towering pride is trudging from door to door in paradise without an admission ticket. In the deep North where southerners have no rights of friendship, and boom times haven't arrived. Naked we came and naked we will go. No place shall be called Our Home. I put the dream away. It is, after all, a time for surviving. You there with the pointy ears, and you of the insouciant beak, yes you too lounging with your tail in your pocket, what do you mean by it? Being alive on a day like this. And as for the cheek of you argentine ants counting bread crumbs without permission, don't you realize that my jackboot is about to crunch you to a cipher?
[top of page][go to end]© copyright Thorold May 1995 All Rights Reserved Canberra, 1965 Luxury was assigned by government ration. One bed, single; a vinyl lounge chair, green; one small desk inscribed with memories; a wardrobe and a mirror on the wall. You could edge in sideways, but push-ups were a squeeze. It all came cheap with creeping cold. With an early morning sensory assault from industrial disinfectant in the shower block, and thick quantities of shapeless food for bloated public servants. We were chosen (not THE chosen), picked by playing a game with triangles, and some psychologist's notion of logic. Marked with a code of spurious certainty that presumed us intelligent but docile, suitable ciphers to anointed clowns in for a grab at fame. The grey containers, fibro rooms strung like toy boxes along bare linoleum corridors were an escape from indirection to certainty. The cafeteria tables to which we were tethered masqueraded as Australia's version of the iron rice bowl. A reward for being born lucky, and if you were smart, one day - ONE DAY - the ultimate. A chauffeur to open your limousine door and drive you three miles to work. The Plan however, like all things made by committee, lacked charm or asperity. It needed a ratbag with two odd socks and hobnailed boots to kick it in the arse. Well, no. The padded rear of that species we nick-name The Majority will always seek bed and board in exchange for the gentle favour of serving powerful men and women. My spirit was at fault, a rebel in paradise. But heroes crave admirers, and for such brave sentiment the body was weak. A traitorous affair of trembling lips and mechanical twitches. A chaos of corpuscles that seemed to work from their own power source. Some auxiliary generator with a fault in the voltage regulation. The great engine of reason steered my cool and disbelieving eyes, but how could legions fall to such command while every muscle screamed terror and retreat ? At nineteen the wild, the strong and the free lend a mantle to romance, but alas, I was no visible model for the Marlboro cigarette ad' man. Each bumbling superior and fairy floss slip of a girl thought their worldly power had crushed another wretched creature (... how illusion corrupts us), while my inner eye stripped their rituals one by one. "Listen Huey", I said, "forgive me my body. I'll forgive them the old school tie and powder puff". But God being indifferent to multilateral trade deals, humanity and I persisted blindly side by side, tending private fantasies. Actually the Eye in the Sky could tell you, if it deigned to talk, that the scene was different altogether. Moment to moment, passing the butter, there was a camaraderie bequeathed by the grace of isolation. A whole generation of gals and guys flown in from the cities of the coast to bunyip country, to the imagined real Australia. Crows on fences and paddocks infected with a concrete blotch of buildings they called the nation's capital. The important things, Saturday night parties, quick flirts, hard drinking, marriage and babies in the suburbs, proclaimed these folk sane enough to shuffle manilla folders between Monday coffee break and Friday down the club. I felt like a dingo in a chicken coop. Alive. Now there is a state of genuine pleasure. With frost in the grass, ears tingling; when warm blood wins over biting air, you know that zap smiles and vacant farewells, the minutiae of looming embarrassments, are a trivial pursuit. It was time to leave, time to grow. Strange how we find our rewards. The crowd's roar of approval, so precious to the inner psychic dramas of each Schickelgruber toeing a chorus line in his Threepenny Opera at the office, could not capture my skeptic's soul in the end. Already I was apprenticed to ranging across untrodden territory, to the hard solitary poetic life of a boundary rider.
[top of page][go to end]© copyright Thorold May 1995 All Rights Reserved Burton Street, Sydney 1966 "Please give me my pants dear." Wavering, almost a hoarse whisper. Then weak rage. "Let me go you ovulating milch cow." "And are you a man or a mouse", she roared again. The plywood partition between our lives buckled like broken knees, groggy under the bovine moon of Saturday night fever, and decrepit paint flaked into my instant coffee. I saw him sometimes on the stairs. Narrow shoulders hunched against the pain of the world, clothes threadbare, pale unshaven cheeks. And felt only a twinge of shame, shaking with silent laughter, for twenty-one is a heartless age. Yet year by year his shadow is at every turning, like an ancient mariner from the realm of hidden fears. Dress our sad-sack with four stars and a baton, then watch him incinerate a nation to salve his bedroom wounds. Give him a pen to embroider and craft a searing novel of self-justification. Have the kindness to give a quid for a bottle of cheap sherry, and let a bloke sit in the park. Let someone amongst us be free. Low life was my calling. "Boy!" They let me breathe the frenetic air, "yes sir", serve God, buy ice creams for the editor, split copy as a hopeful in waiting. "See life sonny; so you want to be a journo'?" Promises, massaged with vague smiles: have faith in those ice creams, "oh yessir." Nine quid a week on the Daily Mirror, and the big-time's coming kid, soon, real soon. Were you a mouse, Mickey the ears, Mehitabel shy, unmasked to the wavering moon? "Hey you!" I licked crumbs and scuttled to unwholesome places, bedded down in scunge, hunted for dank cracks in old city walls: "room cheap for sober gent." You paid your tithe to some faceless predator from a leafy suburb, merry with children singing. "Hello lover; show you a good time?" Byways wended and beckoned. My harlot, mistress, Sydney-town sprawled from bed-down at Cockroach Crack to the Mirror's tumultuous presses up by the central railway station. Can't you see through paper walls to our exhibition of faces in the street? Roll up waxwork ladies, clever gents! Recognize your dreams of wine and roses. Was there ever a more timid mouse tripped over a fallen moon? "Hey sexy"! Reflections whispered, glittered in the shop windows of disposal stores on Oxford Street, while I posed in mind's eye with clever tools, bayonets and bush jackets ("get it off honey"), old aerial cameras that beckoned a bird's eye view. And always an embarrassed price on those bodies that you coveted for barefoot engineering in the dark. I would flee to morning, haunt the clear bright caverns like a sleepless man, where homesick dark Italians crackled and popped a bizarre electrical non-language from the loud-spoken turrets of Central Railway land, to grandmothers down for a visit. For here in greeting and farewell the country shyly met the city over a custard tart and milkshake, sticky sweet. "Got a light mate?" "Gidday Kath." No hiding under a doped moon eh? "Coast's clear babe, legs away." My way home touched the showroom doorways of dude mile down William Street, where hard skinny girls, all lip-stick and mascara eyes, trembled, stepped out with cruising Johnnies on the lam. And after the late shift I'd say "gidday", then pass, for with someone hanging round she'd be missing the high rollers. "Watch it Kid, you can't win 'em all." "Yar, keep yer pants on, Mickey the ears." A neon night blazed forever, pulsing like the promise of Shalom without her veils. See that swaggering skyline. "Everything for sale and steal the rest," the hustlers winked, as de Lacey quaffed a schooner in one gulp and slipped a bold hand under the barmaid's skirt. Though she wailed, "Rack off ya creep!", we pitied the boobies blowing their dough for a loveless flash of tits to music. It was a mirage though, this Moulin Rouge, if truth dwells where our dreams are. The screaming moon and Cockroach Crack, whores and neon sighs, were mere painted scenes. Real drama, freedom, dwelt in a five shilling paperback world of apricot evening light. Our journey started beyond old Steppenwolf's secret door, romping with forbidden Lolita. The Lady Murasaki showed me all the ways of love, I was a catcher in the rye. For how could life compete with art when glory was a wheely in an FC Holden, and breathless chivalry came down to ... "See ya Kath."
[top of page][go to end]© copyright Thorold May 1995 All Rights Reserved Oriental Bay, New Zealand 1967 Heather, dashed yellow, sky bright falling blue, hill slips faced with moss, thin wooden houses like glued matchboxes stacked in crooked tiers to applaud their men in from the sea, and now her giant engines have dropped low to a growl, the liner slips to haven. A warming from the land, caress of flower gardens carried on the wind stir an old memory, and breached by long cold Tasman swells we stagger reborn before breakfast, laughing, touching shoulders to be sure, stamping on the deck with new arrogance as the clamour of the waking city comes out to greet us. Upturned faces by the wharf, a young girl trips from Renoir in swirling white skirts and her black eyes catch mine before the sun passes. She is gone now, they are all gone, washed from the painted decks. Lolly papers dance tiny polkas on the quayside as I shoulder the old suitcase, still brave at twenty-one, step away at last to say "hello world" with that ingenuous hope of the very first émigré. Sweet and sour this town, strange and known like a trick of the mind. The gargoyles wink, suddenly displaced from another time once understood. Vowels pop in the air reshaped, novelty fruits grown in moulds, but really the same old flavour. A niche is here somewhere, must be, waiting for a tramp. But this noon it's luncheon á la park bench, and I have to say "G'day Queen Victoria", on your pedestal. You've made it too, anointed with verdigris and pigeon lime. Now trolley buses snap blue electric sparks about your tiara; that's recognition. Wonder if your ladyship liked fish 'n chips too? He is slumming in a downtown bar, bug-eyed sunglasses poised to sweep the demi-gloom, intent on the hunt, avaricious for shopgirls in fishnet stockings. But the vamps are away, trying for sophistication with coffee and gateau at Chez Nous. "Bombed out, man. Got a bob? Where you from anyway?" The jukebox gulps my coin. Clunk. "These boots are made for walkin' in," it wails. Anywhere mate, heaven or hell, but Sydney by the latest accident." "Bloody Aussie huh. An original leper. So that's why the place is deserted. Buy you a beer." Even goodtime guys have to pay the rent. It'll do, a hole for now. His spare room is musty with damp air. One pallid window blinks in the shadow of a dripping cliff. The old house itself must squat, humiliated and despised, amongst a brash younger generation of apartment blocks on the harbour promenade by Oriental Bay. Vicarious splendour is our ambience. Like jealous lovers we learn to spy the coming and going of gorgeous yachts. Their sleek, low-hipped hulls are pure coquetry. Willowy marconi rigs flutter and tease, sailcloth smooths with a cat's paw, unbuttoned as a woman's blouse, billows and sighs. I have fallen amongst bus drivers and musicians. Radical chic revolutionaries : subversive on Sunday, workers by Tuesday, playboys come Thursday. The resident band in a lucid moment (not flaked out on the carpet) debates a poet's aptitudes and bows low to offer training on the musical triangle, with long-term promotion to a tasseled castanet. Ambitious for the big-time though, craving real money on Fridays, I plump for a job with muscle-bound ladies in the thrum and hustle of Victoria Steam Laundry (est. 1912). It takes a laundryman, connoisseur of dirty shirts, to make an serious anarchist. New country, time to try another face. Mentors want to test my mettle. Let's set the scene for democracy in action, the 1967 election campaign. Figures by the stage steps now, a murmur, the crowd stirs. Close up, a crush of shoddy tin chairs, frayed carpet, cream plaster columns smudged with small fingers (the owners already wanting to go home). All grandeur is far above in illusion, where cherubs and bunched grapes gather about the ceiling cornices. The Prime Minister hovers, absurdly revealed, pink packaged flesh stacked on platform shoes for height. Behold ! "Lediz end djentilmen" the voice booms in electrical decibels, "ez yu know...". Ah, now there's the rub. If only we knew. One thing is certain .. Subconsciously I assemble the morpheme and with astounding lung power give it birth : "LIAR!" The cherubs flutter in their cornices. A hush, the voice stops, caught in delictio. "Ev..ev niva bin so insulted" it pouts, and crackles off in a huff. The hive swarms, buzzes, a policeman looks severe. C'mon Huey. Next act. Bring on the dancing girls. The band renews its offer of training on a tasseled castanet. This is it, my memory, our checkerboard of nights and days almost complete, as the pieces, larrikins, laundry ladies, politicians, move in closed squares, black on black, white on white. For a moment my ghost is here, on a balmy summer evening, near the stone wall at Oriental Bay long ago, eyes dancing with city lights, and lovers, and the turning tide. Can you see me, just out of reach, wistful, about to pass you by?
[top of page][go to end]© copyright Thorold May 1995 All Rights Reserved Harris Street, Ultimo 1967 The place was jerry-built a hundred years ago. An agglomerate of mortar and cheap bricks to pack in inches of free air, an allotment yielded by the gill for pound by pound of flesh. The working men of Sydney, depreciating every year, kept remnants of life at rest when cast forth from factories and driven from the pubs. They came to terms with every antic dream, stank, cried, ate sausages and bled from death till morning on this wobbly bed. My room is long and narrow, facing west. "Fresh linen with the rent mister, ten-fifty every week." A bed covered in green candlewick, a chair slapped over with grey paint. The wardrobe is propped backwards on a wad, to keep its door in check. There is a view for thirty feet of rancid, heavy air. The rest is bricks from sash to sill : a factory in the rear. A summer sun comes in, just briefly on the final yellow dust-beamed shot of day, breaks on each brick and body cooling, and then fades. The heat goes on though, dully through the nights, while a hangover of memories tugs and whines. They are pencilled on the walls, "I love you Marg", "the foreman is a mongrel" and "fuck you Sally", and "tomorrow's piss is mine". My sustenance of light, a single frosted bulb, populates the hour. Thin shadows flit and wane, for the walls reflect my predecessors supping on tinned pudding. Join our snack. It's Christmas, and I'm getting boozed in a town that's out of whack.
[top of page][go to end]© copyright Thorold May 1995 All Rights Reserved Wellington, New Zealand 1968 This was a winter city of steps and earthquakes. We perched with gulls against the southerlies. Claimed perilous ledges of habitation on the surging rim of hills. Men dwelled here in damp timber. Their houses rocked like battered lifeboats cresting the unquiet earth. If you ask where I lived, it was somewhere. Yes certainly behind a door somewhere. Straight onto the stone path, a facade green with mildew. And the rain like rivets without and within weak daylight, worn carpets, dishes to wash. Pungent fumes from a kerosene heater. Someone trying to stay awake at a writing desk. The year was 1968 and we were the brave. Contemptuous of closet sexuality and immoral wars. Knowing our fathers to be flawed men, our mothers servants to their whim, honour was on our banner. We would march under the tank tracks, while they carpet-bombed Vietnam to save democracy. We would put their lies on public display. And sing the Internationale with luscious irony, for the Russians were liars too. They didn't like our haircuts, found blue jeans subversive. But we were about to inherit the earth. Actually, making the rent was tougher than aping the proletariat. For seventy-five cents an hour we picked the chewing gum off fetid pub floors and polished dirty windows. Waiting for the Revolution had its drawbacks in godzone. Already we were outlanders, remote from favour. Servants of the Evil Empire were harrying our flanks. Yet in the tasteful suites of downtown business houses, callow youths with blameless eyes were respectfully at ease on the ornate stairways of ambition. Dave Crumm, my flatmate, was at home with rats. Cemented wires into their brains. He tortured half of them for the Psychology Department. Waited to see if the unwarped survivors were grateful for their peace of mind. Dave waved his forepaws in a droopy way. Giggled. What's in an after dinner mammal joke Horatio? Don't look like that. Our friendly passengers could wink and pass the wine. But there was no drowning the memory of Chau Ngan. Who came amongst us, then went to hell in 1968. A gaze too droll for stepping across. Wrists unusually flexible in worn white cuffs. He played a wan tune on a bamboo flute while the sun went down like thunder. In a front room Chau Ngan learned English, and wept for his wife in Takeoville. Learned the tongues of death. Learned to float for a moment above a gorging dark tide, as Lyndon Johnson swore an oath in a rose garden. That his Valkeries rode to no murder through the Khmer heartlands. And hidden from the ancient eye of Tonl Sap, Pol Pot's crazed vengeance gathered shape. Beneath the pain of Chau Ngan's flute, our banners held thin karma. Lost. My heart was born out of love, and purpose wavered at charm's edge. Margaret Svenson set me for capture in that year of passionate contradictions. Tossed straw blonde, pale, defiant bones. Armed with Zen poems to persuade us of cleverness and eternal truth. According to our heart's ambition. Square moon, square sun, blue eyes waiting. And the bloom passed. Remembrance has left, faintly, two distant figures. Rain streaming down our cheeks as we perched with gulls, cresting the unquiet earth.
[top of page][go to end]© copyright Thorold May 1995 All Rights Reserved East Putney, England 1971 We used to wonder at those doorways on the pavement, caught slyly between opulent shop fronts. Narrow stairways that hinted at intoxicating encounters on a hidden landing. But in older parts of town the tone was slightly sinister. East Putney doorways on the street had an embrace that was lean and dirty. Clients came and went at hours unfashionable for the rich or languorous. Their ad' was on a board in another part of town : "Flat to share, own room, cheap". We settled it over a pint of bitter. One rucksack and a radio to hump up the mean and perilous stairs. When you're broke and traveling light, the eye doesn't dwell on colour schemes. "Polka dots wif' everythin' guv'. Count em' off like sheep," my new host consoled. It was true. A pink polka dot bathroom, washable yellow polka dot with breakfast, lurid violet polka dot to dream with. Loiterers near this town address may once have claimed to visit a shoe shop and a florist. But humanity had been rolled under. Traffic surged in a low roar. Narrow, buckled footpaths crumbled around the edges. The cigarette hoardings were ten feet high to catch the flickering gaze of motorists. We were intruders at the margin of a gasoline driven stampede. Rodney and Michael survived as a mystery. Their tracks faded each morning with the frost. From the ken, I would guess, of more anxious enquiry than my own. Rodney had push, in the style of the street. Quick movements. A check shirt and moccasin man, with a lock of hair painted above his rogue eye. The knack for selling you a wind-up yellow plastic butterfly on a tube-station escalator. Michael wore steel-rimmed eyes, the only sharp line on his body. Blinking kindly, surprised at daylight. A dishevelled version of the young Trotsky, with wry humour. And a hint of fatal knowledge about the kinds of good causes for white hot ideals that make dead bodies on the unwashed pavements. Funny, isn't it, how even dangerous men clean their teeth after dinner, and sleep under pale green candlewick bedspreads. It was time to get established. I bought an ancient bicycle for five pounds from an Irishman at midnight. Lashed a rack from our fridge on the foc'sle, and went to joust with the dragons in their courting rush to the fabled houses of gold. This wiry mobility left the rubber-footed reptiles honking with despair. Until one day a black carnivore of the genus London cab, opened its door with a sudden shrug of impatience. This brought the bike to an awful collision with a ton of cold steel, and the fridge rack crumpled scientifically. Saluting Newton's first law of motion, I swam through a window of Armorgard glass. Won a trip all expenses paid, no tips required, to Saint Bartholomew's Hospital on the Strand. With a talent like that a bloke could joint the gulag of long-term dependants on National Health. Truth spoken though, England was the end of an over-world trail. Anchorage for a traveling man, adrift through time in a style that claimed to despise the package tourist. Flaunted exotic encounters with the daily boredom of ordinary people who had funny names and addresses. Yet justice was nigh, back in a hustler's town where money was real and the rent voracious. I schemed to buy off the moment of penury by flogging an old Leica camera to some ideologue of the glorious past, a native bunny. The only taker caught a train up from Oxford, an earnest and delicate fellow whose vowels would have curdled the spit on my father's colonial tongue. I cornered him in a pub saloon reeking of leather and varnish, to utter reverent phrases. The mystique of German engineering, feel that precision, (the damn thing had wrecked rolls of film). Chance of a lifetime for twenty-nine pounds. Those notes from a hand-sewn wallet were good for fish 'n chips too. The next week a plaintive telephone call. "He'd really changed his mind, old chap". Kept check-shirt Rodney and young Trotsky in respectful giggles for days. The Aussie T had arrived in the city of London.
[top of page][go to end]© copyright Thorold May 1995 All Rights Reserved Reading Street, New Zealand 1973 There are corners in that dark hallway, vaguely enticing. The old photographs, plastic flowers, the barquentine in a glass case. Women past their prime who giggle and vanish behind black, numbered doors. I ignore the telephone; it summons them. Jeanne's high squeaky voice answers, bleats. Mary comes, decrepit, her dull foxy eyes swearing to heaven, and with a cigarette trailing dangerously on her lower lip growls, "Jim you old bastard! Where the hell have you been?" So Jimmy stumps in, wounded he says. Fifty-five and five foot nothing in his only suit, that is as black as his boots and Irish as the cut of his best mannered brogue. "Oiv bin t'hospital," says he, flapping the plaster cast of a wrist, and his bulbous nose like a beacon. Where else would a working man be ? Here is Mrs. Miller shaking frailly in the draught; (how did you glow on this evening sixty years ago ...?). "Come in come in. Have a cup of tea... I wonder", she says, "I was wondering; you see I've been reading ...my minister says... but perhaps you know ...that every religion, well there's truth in ..." "I don't know", I say, "sit down Mrs Miller".
[top of page][go to end]© copyright Thorold May 1995 All Rights Reserved Epsom, New Zealand 1975 "Well surprise. Another child with black and white vision." "You're a hasty man." "Grey vision for a grey day." "Doesn't Rudolph Valentino give you goose bumps?" "Under my toenails. Where are you sitting?" A Thursday afternoon, rain, a cinema. An accidental meeting. Julie. Something special. Our minds were shaped in a different place. The architect's and mine. Gables with pirouettes of ice from an English winter had steeped his memory. Mine, the sparse shade of Australian summers, burnt grass, verandahs. But she was here in her bones. Julie. Known to the soft rain and wisteria. I had followed the architect of Epsom Hall to the genteel buccaneering town of Auckland, for a spell in teacher's college. From a circular drive I eyed the Hall's white clinker lines, like a cruise yacht moored in the greenery. Then tossed my kit aboard for a year, met Julie. After the film we walked in a circle of rain, shoulder to shoulder, in our hands a tent for two. The black umbrella drummed softly. Who are you lady, who is this man in my shoes? This softness and lightness, this hair tingling laughter, is not in the script. I know your irony Julie. I've watched your eyes dissect poor Wilson and all the court's pretenders. Play catch-me-if-you-can. But who put us together on the silver screen? Who whispered love ? The Hall sheltered babes and grandmothers. A sanctuary for making schoolteachers, they said. A half-way house for growing through life's stages, where daddy thought you safe in the hands of mister Wilson. Who could also play jazz, and was felt to vibrate with proper empathy. Perhaps it was for worldless pilgrims too, since I've never been sure of my planet of origin. We rode home in plodding J2, my old grey van. Her home, with mum and dad and all the relatives. Stuffed in that special Eastern European way of the ancestors, with bric-a-brac, velvet cushions, silver spoons, glass cabinets, souvenir plaques from seaside spas. Here I was (weedy little colonial) being bone-crushed by the great square fist of father. "Do you play chess?" he growled. What, dragons to slay already? Only on a full moon old man, with favour from the goddess. My Maori grandmothers at Epsom Hall (they claimed me) revelled in body-warmth at the whare kai. They had fled the blank walls of pakeha houses. "E tamaiti ! You're not eating. You'll get skinny and die!" "Marama you old witch ! Fatten us like pigs eh, then stuff us with hot stones for your hangi?" "Kati! Listen to this match stick! All bones, no flesh. Cold bones. Aue!" Here was elder sister, a weightier edition. Sister-in-law, mother. Grandma on the antimacassar shaking with gargantuan laughter. Expanding down the line, sight them off in the shooting gallery. What's your prize sir? So this was what tomorrow looked like. And how many kilos ago did that one simper as a swain hoisted her with reckless strength over the glowing threshold? Aue ! The future was too heavy to hold. They transmogrified on long weekends. Changed plumage and body odour. Grew rings on their fingers, these final-year college girls. Like locusts who'd munched their way through rich pastures of indulgence, the horde sighed. A mighty rustling it was. Cast around for a male to feed and breed with. My glamourless shade drew some stragglers in desperate moments. Comic sad little locusts waving their feelers for the wish of a nascent Frog Prince. I remember, she ran out to say good-bye. Dark hair falling about her bright eyes, waiting for a kiss. And the first pain of doubt in her glance, that last instant by the roadside. When I left limply, flattered, astounded, hating myself.
[top of page][go to end]© copyright Thorold May 1995 All Rights Reserved Waterloo Street, New Zealand 1976 You've seen them populating the landscape. Like embarrassed teenage girls not built for fashion and the flirting style. Cheap investments by the newly rich, economical apartments trimmed and tarted up with mini balconies and aluminium eyebrows. Cloned interiors of pre-assembled pastel boredom. But then you're quick to judge and slow to find our hidden passions. Upstairs downstairs. High class or low. Shall we be labelled by a speculator's whim ? "No!" they said; "come to Gino's shop and have an equalizing mozzarella pizza." So I did and we weren't. I moved in. Downstairs to a studio-bedroom (as the agent said). Half carpeted, a sinful double bed thrown in. For the memory of grass and halcyon skies I painted the concrete floor green and planted hints of summer. Languorous chairs. A garden table brilliant white, shaded from fluorescent suntan by a giant striped beach umbrella. The menagerie above caged an amiable chaos of randy fellows. Terry shuffled a shifting pack, women won on patter, sympathy and brawn, while hollow-chested Evan with his music scored Harmony, a girl like Spring. But Michael was condemned by black fingernails and halting speech to making love with hard sleek engines on the garage floor. The slash and burn barbecue à la wheelbarrow (for the coke) was a man-made catastrophe planned, so we claimed, to stake out a holding-paddock for skittering women and other dumb pets. We had to let it happen, had to strike for fame in the wastelands of hey-wacha-doin-tonight. Nouvelle cuisine is a curly ask in a bachelor dive. Cabbage is cabbage, so when I was asked to cut the coleslaw for our spread, it seemed a natural to serve it neat with a dose of vinegar shot in. Well how's a guy to know the genteel tastes of maids and carpet salesmen? Whose idea was this commando mission into the mysteries of social style ? Pink luminescent light beams painted the ether and assaulted our domestic souls. Snatches of uncomprehended niceties hung between the hammer-beats of heavy rock, while a thin harvest of restless sweet things dropped NOT VACANT signs over their gilded eyeballs. Catching a general view of life, the barbecue objected, sank into deep gloom and sent its acrid smoke bombs spiralling up the staircase. We quit, and settled for a backyard burial. Requiem to burnt sausages without honour. So much for mating customs, we thought; get on with life and don't judge us by our coleslaw. So we did, and would you believe it, they did. Well, Terry went funny, fell in love with a blind pianist and got a job selling corks to rumbustious vintners. Evan floated off in a bubble of semi-quavers, while Michael sought solace, sprawled luxuriously amongst cartons of Dominion bitter. Fiddled and tuned the temperamental carburettors of rich men's Jaguars. My concrete Riviere with its neon sun remained uncluttered by languorous bodies. For in truth I like the psychic space of silence.
[top of page][go to end]© copyright Thorold May 1995 All Rights Reserved William Street, Armadale, Victoria 1977 You notice the cracks first, the grey streaks like grime between the fingernails. A working history of the inner city coded in tired brick walls, split and peeling window sashes. The charm of Victorian ironwork despised by rust and neglect. Next you are surprised by the first poses of ownership. The new car on hire purchase at the door. The mortgages that cling like reproving relatives, confining the feckless generosity of young ideals to a slight delay. Tomorrow, they murmur, is postponed until the bills are paid. Eventually you understand. Their designer renovations will remain enshrined in the airbrushed pictures of coffee-table-conversation magazines. One day the aspiring possibilities of youth are panicked by the mirror-eye of middle-age. The house is three-quarters "owned" and lives three-quarters lost. Blurred With the dull palette of paradise omitted. When a smooth-talking agent persuades old hope to find a haven up the coast, "prime real estate" is on the move. A "sure investment" for the young executive with vision and a working wife. Marigold's addition to these yuppie postcodes was one of nature's accidents. No hovering menace of a mortgage here. And if she slipped a little at the edge of gaiety, the fault was from an inner, subtler pain. This house in Armidale, so like its kin, had been the final afterthought of a declining inheritance. One monopoly piece, assembled by a dignified and grasping ancestor from backroom political payoffs in the ruthless years of the Great Depression. Now it stood, modest and stolid with three dead pot plants on the porch. Its extra bedrooms rented out to a cavalcade of men, forlornly classified by Marigold (they quickly came to see) as maybe Right for a longer stay in the street of rising names. She was born to an age when women no longer waited like hat racks in the vestibule of a man's career. Marigold did duty collecting the views of expectant mothers on throwaway nappies, and tabulating the mercenary needs of corporate accountants. Market research, they called it. Her two-piece jacket and skirt, the white ruffle blouse and glued coiffure, wrapped and concealed a muffled chaos. Marigold was decaying along the fault line between known terror of her daily work and statistical projections of a lonely decline. Freeze dried by a tableau of tomorrow's dread, pasted with two cats and a television into the tar-sealed frame of an urban snapshot. Roger the Dodger was my intro' to the joint. I chanced upon him flogging the life out of an exhausted yellow-cab to make an extra buck. An old pal, my gnomish friend had never lost his sense of the absurd, and in a knockabout way now honed his sense of turning a quid in the computer consultancy racket. "Nothing to it mate, yeah. You wanna bed? There's this broad with a plaster-cast hairdo. The house, come over, check it out". "Money, sheilas, whaddya want, a ticket to heaven?" With modesty he told us then the highlights of a Dodger's way. We sank another beer. Yeah, well, on a raucous, drizzling afternoon at the mid-week races, this tipsy tart with a streak of luck took the battered cab to anywhere. To a lonely spot, and paid him by the hour to lick and tickle in the pink of pleasure. Said the Dodger. What the hell. Half a gnome's luck, but soft breaks are not in my contract with the great puppeteer in the sky. Downtown from the loveless pavements, a room is a room, and a bed without bugs is a bed. So who's to complain? Until trapped with your money in a bond and a lease, you look again. Time came, we did. Even the Dodger and I stepped back at the artefacts of Marigold's creeping derangement. In the flaming orange-bright kitchen, cupboards fumed with collapsing putrid grocery bags. Bought and forgotten. Black slime in the bath, cat piss on the carpets. Accidental, unspeakable glimpses past bedlam's door to the boudoir of Shelob. Faced with the stuff of Picasso's dreams we retreated at last to the imitation Spanish decor of a corner pub, to settle our sensibilities. And plot hasty exits to a poem less surreal around the edges. A mortgage for the Dodger. His house of tired bricks in a quiet suburb, a sure investment. For me, Dag's Progress to another city up the coast. Pilgrim in search of a cause, with all the world's wisdom packed on the roof-rack of an ancient Kombi van. They said I was mad, the Dodger and Marigold, as she kissed me good-bye.
[top of page][go to end]© copyright Thorold May 1995 All Rights Reserved Illawarra Avenue, Newcastle NSW 1979 "Now how about a cup of tea eh? Sit down sit down. Yes tea. Just a minute. Nice bit of toast. There, I'll make some toast. What do you think?" Hands transparent with age. They try to grip, their shaping almost over. "You need a place ? Merv has a place," Joyce had chuckled like a mischievous cherub. "Old bugger he is, gotta watch Merv." So here we were. That crew from the Last Supper clung to a bedroom wall, condemned to inspect our squalid condition. From yellow space helmets their mournful Italian eyes tried to make sense of a dozen half-read books, unironed shirts and some alien god's constituent, obtuse and unrepentant, dismantling a carburettor with infinite care on the Lord's day of rest. We coexisted, our syncretic miracle to find a thread of humour over crumpets and honey. There is a sacrament wherever wry men meet. "They visit me you know. These photos. Look, this is Edwina. A tigress she is. Never cross that one mate. And here ..mm. Bessie, the first you see. We had some times her and me. I'll never forget them days by the lake. And on the other end there is Mavis. She used to stand right where you are now, and polish silver. Always polishing spoons, Mavis. You'll hear them banging when they call at nights." I never did. But the spirit of another age was near enough. The little red-brick church where Joyce and Merv met mediums of the dead seemed a haven for old chivalries. They spoke the clear hard tongue of mining folk. Each paused to lend a hand, or smile, while them Ladies on The Hill sniggered mortally, passing by to their beauticians and morticians. The bundy clock and furnace, pitiless work, had consumed his peers. Yet Merv found life and frugal nourishment, like some ancient exotic plant, on the unweeded slag heap of souls. He didn't wait for friendship, frail and stooped in his eighty-third year. This timeless leprechaun, perpetually embalmed in a grey silk waistcoat, was already walking around death's door. And back again, just to be sure the kettle didn't boil over. A kind of miracle. At his core the man remained untouched by a lifetime of the singing clash of boilermaker's hammers. Merv was almost deaf. Violence which once had wrenched and crippled his gateway to the music of the spheres now left a querulous inner peace. "Aark ! Shutup shutup!" squawked his white cockatoo, unheard, hanging upside down from its perch. Sometimes the cockatoo was right. The old bugger was a broken record, jumping the tracks of a music-hall tune. But how could you get mad with the merry eye of an historic monument ? "Why", I asked, all innocence one day, "would a tottering fellow in a trilby hat go south each month, a hundred miles to wicked Sydney town?" "What's that to a kid like you?" he winked. "Great striptease in Oxford Street. Wanna' come?" We are the mere people, stored in toy-town boxes. Permitted trim green beards of lawn, all wrapped by grids of bitumen. From far judgment, the high cold clouds above, how might an angel's gaze find joy and damnation amongst the little folk, way below all glory, putting out the rubbish? Saluting Edwina, Bessie, Mavis on the sideboard, we sip our tea and guess. She'd swoop with a rush of certain knowledge. Carry off the crotchety soul of a cockatoo hanging upside down, noisily scolding the world. "Aark! Watchout watchout!" But Merv wouldn't hear, making me crumpets and honey.
[top of page][go to end]© copyright Thorold May 1995 All Rights Reserved Australia 1980 One day they forgot the muzak and we lost our disguise. Suddenly bladed carnivores were heard in a rising crescendo, as cold steel mandibles crushed and tore at the rendered carcasses of broiler chickens. This was the Hall of Residence of a not yet great university, where the hopeful splendiferous were listed like war dead, on wooden plaques when they passed with certified mentalities into the employment offices on Main Street. I lie : some would move serenely into daddy's business, while others hoped to catch the habits of a boutique and brandy lifestyle. The cloying odour of callow landed privilege hung about their bunkhouse jokes, the sports cars resting sleekly outside, the weekend woolshed dances at "okay" spots. It was not their fault, not yet, not quite. Somewhere on my shelves there's an image from the chill imagination of a science fiction illustrator. A space-port inherited from cavernous futures, where warps of time and place intersect, and travellers through oblivious worlds pass like shadows on the mirrored floor. Summoned by wandering memory I see a small crowd amid those elusive reflections. The worried faces of "overseas students" from The Hall. Elsewhere people. People? Split by a gulf of polyester shirts and staccato intonation from thong country, shunning the zinc cream and T-shirt drawl, they agglutinated at feeding time to trade news on charter flights, and regret their splendid isolation from the hustle of Asian cities. So I rolled like a lemon between beer nuts and gado gado, to settle at last for adorning the Asian salad as a kind of crinkled aperitif. Tolerated, a token concession to local cuisine. They pacified me with tidbits of careful English, and wondered with sidelong glances about ASIO and the KGB, whether skullbones of the whispering night hovered to claim reports at my hand on their brand of brilliantine. Other outland palefaces lingered, decorations in the Asian Quarter, merely quixotic, fishing for some common equation of minds working. They mostly found it, found the banality or surprise; small favours, a message passed, Sen's lucky day, Fong dropping things as usual. They survived quietly in courteous quarantined. Our doubles, those rare, eccentrically curious imports, migrated across the no-go zone, said "gidday mate", tried to admire sagas of the legendary Great Piss-up, left saddened by gaping indifference to their traveller's gift of second knowing. One man built his bridge and walked it. Glen arrived for a term, escapee from mother making up his bed and wrapping lunch. Laughed in his creaky way some bacon & egg breakfast time, and was wed to a Japanese girl in bobby-socks. Gleeful beer and kisses were passed out under a tarpaulin, while the perplexed politician, her father, rushed from Sapporo, grasped the hands of strangers with horror in his eyes. Later, together, hand in hand they came down a foot track towards me, stepping over tufts of grass, and my heart sang for them in the timeless bright morning. For this was a thing destined, as it was meant to be, though I didn't understand its making or my own crooked, wishful smile as they passed.
[top of page][go to end]© copyright Thorold May 1995 All Rights Reserved Pitt Street, Newcastle 1981 Old privet makes a wedding arch of dark lace, and sprinkles morning sunshine on the path. This place is touched and greeted by the murmur of wind chimes. All who pass are marked and known. Our echo is stolen and kept among the leaves for the reckoning that comes before we part. The coal pits were not a daily deadly chore haunting the first masters here. Their sons and daughters came home twice a year, in spats or tresses, to play languid badminton on lawns only faintly dusted by passing winds with grime. Our new aristocracy dissects the scented air with stranger energies. Tai-chi arms drift in slow motion, catching "tiger's paw", and bodies bend to "lotus leaf unfolding". Roaring steel mills under the valley ridge still smudge their signature on a low, pale sky. "House" is a humble word, kept for places in the suburbs, narrow of eaves and mean, boxy rooms painted in cautious pastel shades. Number two Pitt Street shrugs the epithet and spreads her verandahs, encrusted flourishes of Victorian ironwork, arched windows tinged with an exuberant solemnity of leadlight. She defies the workaday shame of neighbours, jostling heaps of houses sticky-taped with tarseal, a choking necklace of humanity beyond the hedge. I am admitted to vague company, bare forked limbs without a stitch of repartee, owners absent without leave in the quest of holy grails, prime numbers, alchemy for rings of power. The vaulted rooms are barely disarrayed as we pass each other in elliptical orbits. Our masses align briefly while muesli is digested according to the laws of planetary motion, and words fall among the utensils, bereft of interpretation in the unfocused gaze of my new acquaintances. They have their passions though, these wraiths. MacPine, weary of the electron microscope, may bend his will upon a startled piano and let his fingers loose to titillate the aspidistras with plangent waves of a Faure impromptu. Unshakeably attached to the mystic self, oblivious of music, Hossbone snaps and winds through the stretched angles of endless katas seeking Zen ( or is it reassurance?) in a new twist of each pliant muscle. We are drawn to imitate, inveigled to acknowledge a master by playing novitiates to the mortal risk of Hwa Rang Taikwon Do. Square-bodied Sunshine lends her passion to freewheeling lean bicycles, and packing her lunch in a plastic bag one day, like Oates of the Antarctic, steps outside into the blizzard of free air. A carefree adventure for seven hundred miles, joyful pedal-power to Melbourne she says. But we know her step too well, a journey out of one man's life, right off the edge of the planet. More calculating women call at night, a subtle exchange whose terms have layers of sweat and promise. In the dim stale-smelling jumble of his lair Hossbone clambers spider-like over dour Kylene's heavy-duty frame, looking for pressure points on her pale hard flesh. The mirror of a hard pale mind. There are no surprises until the lady, scoring a black-belt through a lucky break in Hossbone's vain defence, changes her appointment calendar to take in an investment class instead. Zeta plays girlish for MacPine who believes in fairies and love at the bottom of the garden. Squished figs on the clover and giggles in the metaphors. Bred on more barren ground, spoiled for free dinners, the tilt of her nose infects me with an allergy of acute distrust. But my nettle is no match for MacPine's hallucination, until the planets realign over the muesli, where wide-eyed Zeta finds Hossbone bereft and tries for infinite flexibility. In the skirts of the old lady herself, perched on the front steps between the plaster lions, I like to pause On long, warm evenings, and listen for the rustle of wind in the leaves. Our cloistered infidelities are faintly dusted here with honest grime, while the roaring steel mill under the valley ridge smudges its reckoning on a low pale sky.
[top of page][go to end]© copyright Thorold May 1995 All Rights Reserved Tarania Street, 1983 Little fibro shack on stilts, clinging by the dusty rail bridge at the fringes of a country town. Strangest of all homes for insurrection. A sub-machine gun, ribbed like Death's skeleton himself, draped in a grubby dressing gown, lurches in the corner of a wardrobe. D of the expansive moustache stirs spaghetti, bellows "food's on, speciale Italiano. Wog tucker for you mob. Stuff it down yer and yer gunna' like it. Un'nerstand?" X, the lady who loves animals, and wants to free-fall two thousand meters: butter soft, steel heart, yin of a man's yang. Sniffs the steaming sauce, cogitates. Grinds her cigarette to extinction in the cap of a jam jar. Self. Like an impostor on the deck of flame, browbeaten into rimless spectacles. I lack the élan of a spaghetti grenadier, and tend to fancy free-falling into bed. The family has a lowlife hanger-on, safely patronised as man to dog. "Kaffir ! Yer black bugger, git outa' here !" Run dog, but knowing safety, you nuzzle in. Tail down, between the woman's tender knees. Our house is pitted with the seeds of terror in faint guises. Pass the salt and praise the ammunition. "Nice day. How goes the airbrushing of Stalingrad ?" Tin-soldier talk. Or do we settle for a TV dinner ? In a front room, his and hers, D's miniature battalions pause. Forever on neat boxes of brass shells. Waiting to be packed with violence. A place for games to be played with press and powder funnel. Chests of cordite, bullets for making real corpses in an idle moment. D fears the insurrection of my eyebrows. Blow us away, my storm trooper of the army of dreams. Lay us out in rows to moulder. Who will be left in this Valhalla of brave poses to wash the dishes, comrade, when the moon sets over the crimson grass ? But irony is too tart a taste for the hot flush of glory. "You got a cigarette X ? Na ? No bloody cigarettes. Gotta have a fag with dinner. C'mon girl, we're goin' for a trip, while his nibs here licks the plates." The expeditionary force rocks off into the night. A full panoply of jungle greens and jackboots. To thrash the Landrover over a ditch, and three hundred meters to a corner store. Kaffir and I can listen to our home at last. Little fibro shack on stilts, moving gently. Old wooden bones which remember. The first coming of strangers with guns.
[top of page][go to end]© copyright Thorold May 1995 All Rights Reserved Newcastle, 1984 Signed in peeling paint. "The Resident's Committee forbids children to play in this courtyard". Home for the hopelessly hopefully upwardly mobile. Through the brick backsides of respectable apartments, burghers burbled and farted discretely. Cockroaches made off with vestiges from better days. "Seventy-five a week", said the lease. "Balcony, w dash w carpets, parking underneath". Extra. A kind of toy room, "always handy sir", the agent lisped. Frosted window to the courtyard without games. It looked my only source of handy cash. Strapped for respectability, I cunningly inserted a three-foot bed, and slipped an ad' in the local rag. The prospectives came, sniffed my ambience, sipped coffee with furtive tongues. Fled, refusing to be miniaturized. Until a bargain basement lady, aquiver with chiffon and anxious chins, expired with the certainty of ownership into a charity shop's chair bargain of the week. We cut a deal for twenty-five. From the beach-head of toy land the lady laid siege. Two pairs of panties, pale green and generous pink, flew in daily rotation from the shower rose. I put a telescope to the blind eye of intuition. Settled for a strategic retreat behind the literal bones of our contract. Fair's fair in black and white. But every lady has a heart for someone out there in the blue, with a shoeshine and a smile. She ran an ad' (Monday bargain rates), "Ring Patty, friend wanted for good times". And the Johnnies came rollin' in. Tough choices for a quiet life, electric pulses of heavy breathing. The sudden click, my male voice zapping their erotic dreams. So at last, catching capacious Patty between play land and the kitchen, I tried to cut second deal. "We march to different drums dear lady. Find another house, flat, street corner, railway waiting room. I'll deliver you free of charge bags, shoes, body and pink panties all complete". "Done", she said, "for two day's refund on the rent". These days I'm respectable, and short of cash. There's a room to let. The ad' runs every week, like an echo from hopelessly hopefully better days to come. "Quiet guy for flat; stylish, carpets. Parking underneath".
[top of page][go to end]© copyright Thorold May 1995 All Rights Reserved Irimo Street, PNG 1985 "Mi helpim yu." The large soft fingers fold gently around my keys. A strange greeting from strange hands, so dark against my pale, the quality of new sensation. Unbalanced, I admit the uninvited and watch technology defeat all good intentions. For the lock will not acknowledge its new master. "Nem bilong mi Pita." "Apinun, nem bilong mi Thor." Sadly I take back the keys. A legion of green ants claims right of way On the choko vine entangled with the gate. It's a condominium, as they say in the cities of the West. In equatorial Lae it's a high covenant fortress, decayed up from its damp green bottom to the corroded window bars. A sleepy scene of silent raging warfare between geckos and an ark of insects. It's paradise to the voices in the foliage, over the barbed wire, across the chasm of colliding worlds. The privileged dwell in this block of four retreats, defended from poverty's claw by three metre cyclone fences. Imprisoned. Tethered by the culture of their bellies to the ethereal domain of supermarket shelves. The expatriates trade their guilt psychoses for the shifting masks of "expert", the fool a thousand miles from home. Caricature of fey qualities, wishfully misfit, missionary, mercenary. My feet quietly slap about parquetry floors prizing the solitude of their echoes. Eight beings sweat and sing hymns and sometimes fight in a box of a one-room shack, not twenty meters over the wire. On early mornings smoke wisps hover from their fires and the shouts of the children are full of hope. Once were warriors here, now bereft. The squatter camp, a perch on unknown land. Tormented spirits are abroad amongst these lost proud men from the mountains. With funny languages and broken weapons they crave to seize the dazzling prizes of new knowledge. Only the women find something to sell. The women forgive my prodigious isolation. They admire my freezer's capacity for making cash. Crimson ice-blocks are the currency of civilization. Sold by heavy, patient Jane of the spiky hair and missionary smock to "munkis", all elbows and dusty kneecaps. Who, miraculously in the depths of a ragged pocket, find twenty-five toea to dye their tongues sticky-cold-red. James knocks every night, after dinner. Slight, polite, insistent, searching for a key to the realm of parquetry floors. He comes with a single torn exercise book. At first to study (he says), to learn from the silence of empty rooms. But away from the rich aroma of kin he is spooked by a stranger within. They hold him in awe, pool ice-block money to succour their hope for the clan. With his book James carries new power. But out of their sight he bares his shame and terror. The image of a boy in an unironed shirt. James brings the garment humbly, like a vestment to the temple of light. For forty minutes each the torpid evening (I try to forget the power bill) he irons with infinite ritual and respectful conversation. Behind my dancing mask, trickster, expert, self-deceived, finally I know the limits of permission. Of all the treasures, what minute gifts are taken from my hands.
[Thorold May] |
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