A Long Way From Home Page 5

  That may not seem alluring, but her true response was all voice, pure voice. Her face hardly moved at all. Why was this immobility so seductive?

  ‘It is how the public wants it,’ she said to me, speaking, as usual like she was very tired, had been up all night reading Spinoza.

  ‘Let me win one round,’ she pleaded. ‘It would change my life.’

  It would not change her life at all but she was immensely attractive, a little beatniky with a short and shaggy haircut, waves, soft curls, like Gina Lollobrigida in Beauties of the Night. The Problems of Desire, Volume XXI.

  ‘If you really liked me,’ she said, ‘you would let me win a round.’

  I desired her, immensely. She was so slim she could move her skirt from back to front and back again. She sometimes did that in triumph, a sort of taunt and flourish you could only do on radio, in public and in secret both. Five points to Miss Clover. And away she goes.

  ‘If you win the next round,’ I asked, ‘will you come out dancing with me?’

  ‘If I win the next round I will do all sorts of things.’

  Baby Deasy might have heard this. I would find out soon enough. Now, lying in my bed with Oceania, I summoned up a vision of that alluring mouth. ‘I will do all sorts of things,’ she promised.

  Who would be a bachelor? I thought. Headlights washed my bedroom ceiling and I saw a moth and heard the throaty engine of a powerful car. It passed slowly then throbbed and bobbled inside the shed where it was permitted to continue.

  The night was cut by a woman’s anguished cry.

  Then, forgive me, I was a Peeping Tom in my dark kitchen and the hairs on my arms and neck were now electrified. The yard next door was washed with neon lights. The air was green like grass. And there, in the centre of the shed was what I would later learn was a Jaguar XK120: long, and slender, pearly white, with bulging mudguards capped by corner indicator lamps melding into headlamps and a long hood. It was so beautiful it might have come from outer space. The pilot then emerged in full view and I thought he must be freezing having driven with the hood down. Clearly he had worn his camelhair coat and yellow scarf, but that would be insufficient on the Pentland Hills. As to whether the car was sold or unsold, the question did not even enter my head. The nature of my thought was dictated by the curdled scream.

  Mrs Bobbsey came inside the shed as onto a bright stage, rushing, arms flailing, her dressing gown like a comet tail behind.

  Good grief. She was striking him. On the head. On the chest. He was attempting to hold her wrists.

  MYOB. Yes, mind my own business I thought, and was relieved when Mr Bobbsey reached a switch and the stage was dark.

  ‘You great moron,’ she cried. They could have heard her down in the sale yards, as far as the Catholic church, across the road at State School No. 28.

  I retreated into Oceania No. 3 Mar. 1953. There I found a proposed survey of the archaeological structure of Melton East, just ten miles from Bacchus Marsh.

  An owl cried mopoke.

  I might have expected archaeology in Greece or Mesopotamia, never in the paddocks of dreary Melton. But here it was suggested that an investigation of the common or garden Kororoit Creek (which I would cross tomorrow on the train) would unearth ‘relics of the indigenous population in abundance’. Thus an educated man, a schoolteacher, was surprised.

  I returned to the kitchen for a glass of milk. There I accidentally saw the very natty Mr Bobbsey, an actor in the back door spotlight, entering his house to lie with his wife.

  Reading was my analgesic.

  In Oceania I discovered the archaeologist proposing to excavate those famous properties Rockbank and Deanside which had once been the massive grazing lands of W.J.T. Clarke the richest man in Australia. On Clarke’s Melton lands twenty thousand sheep had been shorn in a single year. Nearby, behind the present gunpowder factories, Oceania predicted evidence of ancient Aboriginal burials, artifacts, middens, scarred grey-box trees from which the indigenous peoples had cut canoes and shields.

  ‘Idiot,’ I heard.

  I sat up in my single bed and saw, through no fault of my own, the Bobbseys at their kitchen window, locked in combat it appeared. Then it was dark. Then the Bobbseys’ screen door slammed and I saw what I took to be the female riding piggyback, laughing, or crying as she slapped her husband’s head. This was not at all erotic, but there was sufficient light to see them on the lawn, stumbling, upright. Then they were racing round inside a bright parallelogram of garage light and now the male was hooting, mocking, fool, fool, fool and the female was laughing without a doubt. Oceania could not compete.

  From the next door house there arose cries of unmistakable distress and then that screen door slammed again and then again and the two children ran into the light, the boy in front, the girl behind, white nightgown trailing like El Greco, weeping and begging, seeking their parents who soon collapsed onto the moony grass under the weight of their children’s need and I, in the night air, in pyjamas and bedsocks, was unreasonably afraid.

  What was said I did not hear. What was understood I could not guess. Now the father was piggybacking the tall fair haired girl whose feet almost touched the ground, and the little boy was riding monkey-high on his mother’s shoulders and I was alarmed until it occurred to me that perhaps the Bobbseys were happy.

  ‘You fool,’ cried Irene Bobs.

  And kissed her husband’s hand and mouth.

  The children shrieked with laughter and entered the concrete-floored shrine in slippered feet. Titch took one high garage door and his wife the other and together they slowly blocked out the brilliant light.

  All night I read. It calmed me down. I was still at it when the dunny man walked past my window to collect his weekly ‘honey bucket’.

  I slept and was back in my father’s church in Adelaide. My mother was in great distress as the police had found strange wiring underneath the pews.

  I woke to hear the sports car burble up the drive, see Mrs Bobbsey capering beside it in her dressing gown.

  The rooster was waiting with his girls at the back door. I made an egg sandwich for the train.

  9

  Dear Titchy was honest, although his truth was driven by his plentiful emotions, and his explanations of his actions could be a bit approximate, as in the case of his purchase of a Jaguar XK120.

  He attested that he had first seen the Jaguar parked in Lydiard Street outside the Ballarat train station. He said he just ‘stumbled’ upon it. Fair enough. But he refused to admit that an XK120 meant anything to him at all. In this he was like a husband admitting he had been staring at a woman’s legs but insisting that it had not been with any special interest.

  My husband had walked right past the world’s fastest production car?

  Excuse me, no. He had gawked with all the others. And his curly little Titchy mind would have thought the following: what bastard child of Ballarat has imported an XK120 and parked it here, to be drooled over by unlicensed drivers, drapers’ clerks and butchers’ boys? The Jag was a thing to die for. It had been abandoned naked, unprotected, with its hood down, so any apprentice plumber could touch the red leather upholstery and open the walnut glove box and see what was inside. Of course my husband wanted it, like he wanted a Ford dealership, whether that was wise or even possible. Who would not want him to have everything his heart desired? Who was presently engaged in persuading her sister that their shared inheritance must now be sold so Titch could be a dealer?

  Clearly Joe Thacker had laid the Jag out like bait so Titch would walk past it on the way from the train to Craig’s Hotel. That’s what I said, to excuse him for doing such a stupid thing.

  But no, oh no. My husband was offended by my excuses. And if I thought he was Whacker Thacker’s victim, he said, I had no idea of who or what he was.

  Fair enough. I had only been in Craig’s the one time, in the saloon, not the public bar where women were forbidden so the men could swear and talk filth with no impediment. There I had met the fam
ous Whacker Thacker, he with the peeled potato chin and grubby overcoat. He said he would put me in his coat pocket, the dirty flirt. He said he mistook Titch and me for Babes in Toyland and perhaps we looked like that to him. But compared to those muddy spud farmers and racecourse touts we shone like clever jockeys on our way to win the cup.

  This was the dirty water in which Titch had been taught to swim, the stale sour air he had fed on as a child. In this poison lake Joe Thacker waited for him.

  Thacker was a hard man with large and handy fists. Titch was the most successful Ford salesman in rural Victoria. He made his way across the filthy carpet towards Joe Thacker’s distant corner. Titch was gimlet-eyed, focused, pink cheeked and brilliantined with dainty shoes. We had both agreed that he would buy a Ford Customline from that big crook in the corner.

  Thacker’s drinking companion would turn out to be a book-maker but he had the look, Titch said, of someone rich enough to employ others to do the bashing for him. He was larger than Thacker and he leaned on the bar with his stomach pushed against his waistcoat and a proper gold chain to keep his watch in place. He wore a silky grey tie and a white shirt a little looser than his neck demanded.

  He, Mr Green, was a hand crusher.

  Joe was drinking his beer mixed with tomato juice for unknown reasons. He announced that he had three units for the visitor to choose from, all Ford Customlines, all parked around the block. One of them was two-tone. We wouldn’t take a two-tone, Titch said. While discussing this aspect of the business, Titch felt himself to be the subject of the bookmaker’s impolite examination.

  ‘You’re Bobs, that right? They call you Titch?’

  This Mr Green had a big head, thinning hair, rude red mouth.

  He lifted an eyebrow so tidy you could imagine his barber spent an hour preparing him.

  ‘You’re the son of the famous Dangerous Dan? You are the little whizzer who won my court case against your father.’

  Even I knew exactly what disgrace he was referring to. I appreciated how painful this was still, and if you want my view on it I can say that it had been typical of Dan to blame a boy for something not his fault. Even rude Green understood the situation had been ridiculous. They had asked a boy to be a witness for the defence and had not explained that he was required to lie.

  Many years ago Dan had undertaken to fly this same Mr Green to the races at Ballarat. I had heard the story many times. Titch had been at the airfield at Humbug Point when he saw Green climb into the Maurice Farman. It was this passenger’s size that made the event so memorable, the huge tailored gut and big red lips, sixteen stone if he was anything. Titch watched the plane struggle to clear the fence at the end of the airstrip. A less desperate pilot would have turned back but Dan now had the money in his pocket and nothing would make him give it up.

  Airman and bookmaker laboured on through drizzling rain and unexpected cold. Slowly they ascended through the altitude which separates the steeples of Melbourne from those of Ballarat. They gained two thousand feet but arrived no higher than the rooftops. Of course the bookie missed the race. He was two hours late.

  Green then sued Dan for loss of income.

  In the court Dan’s barrister called Titch to the witness stand and said to him: ‘So your father could not have expected this difficulty?’

  But of course, Titch said, he must have expected it. The minute he saw the passenger, the size of him.

  ‘You told the truth,’ Green said and was still incredulous, years later in Craig’s Hotel, that anyone would do such a thing.

  The distinctive smell of the Alfredton sale yards entered the conversation. That is, Joe Thacker was shuffling his feet. Who could have predicted that this same feral creature would end his life a rich man with a huge house on Lake Wendouree and a Bentley and all the paintings that had once hung in Reid’s Coffee Palace? (Who could imagine Green would die of shotgun wounds?)

  ‘Which brings me to my point,’ said Joe. ‘Which is why I wanted Titch to meet you, Mr Green.’

  Titch said he was here solely to look over these Customlines. That is, he was a Ford man, there to buy a Ford. He thought, why is Joe winking at me?

  ‘Mr Green,’ said Joe, ‘has a vehicle he needs to sell today.’

  Titch had a list of prospects in his pocket. His aim was to make a sale by bedtime. He repeated that he was only interested in a low mileage Ford Customline.

  Mr Green was laughing at the thought of such a thing. Titch did not connect him to the Jaguar. Green was checking his Windsor knot and buttoning and rebuttoning his posh suit. He was very pleased with who he was.

  ‘But this is not a Customline you have?’ Titch insisted.

  Green confirmed that was correct.

  ‘I’m a Ford bloke,’ Titch said.

  ‘You seemed to have walked straight past your opportunity,’ said Green.

  ‘Suit yourself.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘No, no, you don’t get it,’ cried Joe Thacker. ‘He’s Titch. He’s your only hope.’

  ‘That’s your XK120?’ Titch asked.

  And of course it was.

  I know my husband. I know what he was thinking. He didn’t have authority to buy the Jaguar. He was only going to drive it. It was all desire. He could never ever sell this vehicle in the Marsh.

  Joe was of the ‘go on’ school of car salesman. Go on, give it a spin. Go on, sit behind the wheel. ‘Go on, mate, you can do it.’ With which he tossed a heavy brass key onto the bar. Titch did not touch it. You would never know, to look at him, how his heart was racing.

  ‘Give me a number,’ he said to Green and the bookmaker’s chin jutted as he felt the hook.

  Green said, you know the book price Mr Bobs, but Titch was already in that zone where he was unaware that these men were twelve inches taller. And he was only approximately aware of the book price. And it was thrilling for him not to even care.

  ‘You want cash today, Mr Green, then the number has to be realistic.’

  Green said he would take eight hundred but he was not smiling any more.

  Titch could get very careless about numbers when they involved something like cashflow and capital for a dealership, but he was a calculating machine for this sort of thing. He did not know the exact number but he knew there were very few XK120s in all Australia. So if he could get this for seven hundred he could make three times the profit of a single Ford Customline. Of course, he was in love beyond his class, but even in the middle of this giddy fit, the arithmetic was simple.

  ‘You going to float me?’ he asked Joe Thacker.

  ‘How much cash you got on you, Titch?’

  He hadn’t even driven the XK120, but he had the hundred and fifty quid I had given him and he staked it all. Joe offered to float him another five hundred and fifty, until tomorrow night. If the Jag was not sold by then, Titch could return the car and pay interest on the loan. They discussed percentages and did sums on a cigarette paper.

  This was gambling which we had agreed we should never do.

  It was not gambling, Titch insisted later. He had seen, in his mind’s eye, in the midst of the negotiation, the prospect for this car i.e. Halloran the builder, who he could find, late any afternoon, in Dolan’s Ballan Hotel sitting in the ladies’ lounge with the licensee, Mrs Maureen Haggerty. Halloran was a ladies’ man and was driving a Citroën Light 15, a lovely piece of engineering, but without the show-off value of the Jag.

  ‘How could you know this?’ I wailed at him that night.

  ‘It’s a gift,’ he said. ‘I was born with it.’

  On another day that might be true. This time it would be a disaster. He would arrive late in Ballan. He would park the XK with its hood down, against the transformer shed which, no matter what an ugly lump it was, provided a flattering light. Showroom quality, he thought.

  He would turn out to be wrong, so wrong, but I wasn’t at Craig’s Hotel to save us. My husband was enjoying himself. He saw how Thacker and Green were looking at him. He mistoo
k their greed for admiration. They also misunderstood him, and I could have told them had I been allowed. The point was that he, Titch Bobs, resident of Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, would take the leaping cat roaring down the Pentland Hills, holding onto the suicide bends ‘like shit on a blanket’ as he sometimes said. This was Titch’s only fault, the belief he could have anything he wished. This is how birds fly into window glass, how women fall pregnant. There is no sense to it, only wanting what you are not allowed to have.

  10

  As I passed the high school, my headmaster popped out like a cuckoo, waving, running between his roses, out into the path of coal trucks.

  I thought, he will fire me now. I said, ‘What is happening with the tribunal?’

  He was out of breath, his high forehead beaded with moisture like a refrigerated melon. ‘Have you written my syllabus?’

  ‘I’m going to the city.’

  ‘You could almost write it on the train,’ he said. ‘One hour each way. Easy peasy.’

  Did he already know my fate? Was he sucking my blood before I got the chop? This made a certain sense except that he would never touch the sort of syllabus he could expect from me. This I pointed out.

  ‘You will teach it obviously,’ he said.

  And so I dared feel hope. I asked the date of the tribunal.

  ‘Willie, trust me,’ he said and I thought, no, he is a scoundrel. ‘They will write to you in due course,’ he said. ‘Just look after the syllabus for me and I’ll look after you.’

  ‘How can they send me a letter? I don’t even have a letterbox.’

  Huthnance raised his pale ginger eyebrows and yes, of course, I was speaking nonsense. The postman would throw the envelope on the verandah together with the other threats where it would grow old and wrinkled amongst the windblown leaves.

  ‘Do I have your promise you will write my syllabus?’

  I could hear the train already at the Rowsley cemetery. I gave him my word as I jumped back on the bike.

  Aboard the train I thought, why did I promise? I was such a pastor’s son that I was already keeping my word, thinking about the merino sheep, wondering if the first Australian flock had been stolen from the king of Spain. No, as it turned out, but that would have been the basis for an interesting syllabus.