Jacko (2 page)

Jacko himself both exulted in and was frightened by Dannie. He frequently noted both to me and to others that you didn't know why these New York girls wasted time on you. He feared they might have a missionary fervour, a task of consciousness-raising in mind.

The cherrypicker was ten floors up now, its great lazy forearm traversing the face of largely opaque or draped windows. The cable handler was coiling cable on the floor of the bucket so that it could in turn be played out into whatever apartment they were successful in penetrating. If any, of course, given all this stoically tinted and draped glass.

It was not until about the eleventh floor that Jacko began to think, This cherrypicker thing might return a dividend. At that height he was more prepared to focus on the face of the building than on the gulf below, and was gratified to be swung across a window which gave him a view into a kitchen.

The kitchen was rather well done – copper fittings, blond panelling, microwave. A woman of indeterminate age held the door jamb with one hand and was calling down the corridor to somebody. The primal mother summoning to nutriment.

—Ah, murmured Jacko as the yearning for such a maternal call struck him.

—What'd you say? asked the despised cameraman.

—I was thinking of my old mum, Jacko confessed.

—Okay, said the despised cameraman.

Now a living room on the twelfth. Wonders beyond the glass. Very heavy mittel-European sofas. Poles or Hungarians dwelt there for sure. A gilt-framed still life. Could be Corot, only this wasn't a Corot district. This was a district chosen by Jacko as one of mid-rent and mid-intent, the sort of building whose tenants and owners did not have a law firm on a retainer. Ordinary, genial, tentative New Yorkers.

By the thirteenth floor Jacko loved this middle class tenement for yielding him so much already. For warming to him. For distracting him from the space below and from the curmudgeonly technician with whom he shared the cherrypicker.

—And the Snowy River riders on the mountains make their home,

Where the river runs those giant hills between;

I have seen full many horsemen since I first commenced to roam,

But nowhere yet such horsemen have I seen.

This time Fartfeatures said nothing. For Jacko could hear an echo of Dannie's fluent, muscular commands coming through the despised cameraman's earphones.

—We're doing the intro, said the cameraman.

—The name's Jacko, Jacko reminded him.

But the cameraman ignored him. Bending over his viewfinder, he said, On the nod.

Durkin was telling Jacko the same thing through the nodule in his ear.

—Intro five seconds, said Durkin from the studio eight blocks south and two blocks west of the bucket.

Jacko counted in his head and then the cameraman gave a marginal, negligent nod. Jacko knew he thought, This is just light television anyhow. Who gives a damn about crass morning timing. Jacko smiled with a poisonous brilliance therefore. Just for the mongrel. Just for the drongo bastard.

—Good morning all you tousled, dressing-gowned, somnolent and bemused inhabitants of Babylon-upon-Hudson, Jacko began. This is the Australian invader, Jacko Emptor. The nightmate of the dawn. Weary of doormen who lack the correct sporting attitudes, I am at the twelfth floor of the Delancey Apartments, and although there doesn't seem to be much of interest going on beyond the glass, I hope to be able to talk my way into the window of someone on the fourteenth floor, which is as high as we can go.

In the nodule in his ear, Jacko heard Dannie briefly conversing with Durkin. They were going first to a shot from the building across the road. Then cut back to the studio for news and an interview with an actor.

—We're off, said the cameraman.

Above him, Jacko could see a male face looking down from a closed window. It was curiously aged and yet firm-chinned and composed. It had the cropped hair which generally went with muscular men.

—Tell the operator to slow down, Jacko ordered the cameraman. See, that window. There. There's a feller.

Casually, Fartfeatures spoke into his mike.

—Stop, fourteenth floor. Ten o'clock.

—Steady as she goes, said Jacko.

They slid a little way past the man's window. He regarded his visitors curiously yet without surprise.

This is the fellow, Jacko knew. The cameraman gave instructions which eased them back until the balustrade of the cherrypicker stood level with the man's window.

—We're live, the cameraman muttered, and Durkin said the same thing into Jacko's ear. Jacko beamed his yokel smile.

—We're fourteen floors up now, he said. Colder than the nether extremity of a witch, and where I come from they never make a morning as braw and mean as this one is.

Dannie would be undercutting shots from the building opposite so that people would see that Jacko Emptor stopped at nothing.

He said, We hang beyond the window glass of an apparently intelligent and communicative male New Yorker. Let's talk to him eh. Let's give her a burl.

New Yorkers were growing accustomed to Jacko's argot, to the idiom of Stammer Jack's unutterably remote cattle duchy.
Give her a burl
was a modest item from Jacko's Australian lexicon.

Jacko turned to the window. He never wore quite as demented a smile as when he was asking for entry. He knocked on the glass by the man's right shoulder. The man nodded a little and looked at him. Indeed, a muscular fellow who wore a T-shirt in a way which made you think of ageing Marine NCOs. America was full of such military types, yet you never spotted an equivalent back home in Oz.

This fellow – a tough, stricken man, Jacko thought, rat-tat-tatting merrily away with kid gloves supplied by Barney's of Seventh Avenue in return for a mention in the credits.

The aged, tough man regarded Jacko's gloved knuckles without prejudice. Jacko leaned towards the inset glass and roared, Good morning, Sir! I'm Jacko Emptor from the Vixen Six Network, making my first airborne attempt at penetrating an American household. Are you a tolerant man, sir? Would you be willing to open your window and admit us to your home?

It was the astounding moment of consent. The man moved warily to open the window lock. Not, however, with the sort of wariness which had causes outside his own body – causes such as that a lunatic in a cherrypicker, a lunatic wearing earmuffs and a porkpie hat, was hammering on your glass. It was more the wariness caused by, say, a boil on the back of the neck.

And there was the problem now that the window opened out sideways. Jacko and the cameraman and cable handler had to crouch so that it would clear their heads. Jacko played this for comedy, but in the way he had learned: that he did not have to overdo things; that his large, meaty face, his reliably startled eyes, and his silly combination of hat and earmuffs could be depended upon for their own fair efficacy.

When he was a boy he would have tried too hard and people would have disliked him for it. Now he was a man and had put aside the things of boys: he had discovered timing.

His joy in being aware that some twenty-five million people in the eastern United States were now saying to their spouses, He's a lunatic, that Jacko Emptor!, was nothing beside his intimate joy when the man opened up his window.

The wind seemed to have grown in force, in its intent to tear big Jacko away from the gritty, kindly, exposed sill of the husky man in the T-shirt. Jacko nonetheless managed to roar, What a decent feller!

Barely breathing, he launched himself over the balustrade of the cherrypicker bucket. Employing a strong grip, the man in the T-shirt helped him. Higher than any star above Stammer Jack's and Chloe Emptor's cattle station, their son Jacko committed himself ecstatically to the grip of a stranger. It took a lot of wriggling of the hips to get into the man's apartment, a lot of stomach-grinding endeavour, a lot of damage to the fabric of his overcoat, but at no point did Jacko feel terror.

No sooner inside and standing than Jacko had to turn, panting, to receive the camera. But in the act of turning, he learned things he considered, in their way, prodigious. On an early version of a colour television set, which sat in the far corner, Jacko had seen himself enter the dimness of the man's living room. Proof if he needed it that others were parties to his spoliation of hearths. The furniture was of the kind that Jacko had first seen in a June Allyson/James Stewart film set on a Cold War air-force base: one ovoid coffee table, another boomerang-shaped. Both had thin, angled metal legs. The chairs had floral cushions and angular arms and lightly varnished legs. The very look of them evoked images in Jacko's mind of James Stewart's sober, brave, magisterial visage, of June's prehensilely aggrieved lips as her husband took off in a bomber from some desert airstrip to be democracy's sentinel and to crash-land in the Arctic.

There were stores where this sort of thing would be valued, what Jacko thought of as old people's Florida furniture. The big buy of 1955 washed up here to the fourteenth floor, on winter's high tide.

Fartfeatures was more than ready to throw his camera in at Jacko. Jacko kept one eye on the ancident television set to see that Dannie let this camera's jiggling images of hectic entry go out to the viewer. For stealth, cunning and intrusion were nothing without these confused, jolting, blurred images. A cat burglar saw the world this way. Dannie refused to make the naive choice of the smoother images from Camera Two on the roof across the road.

As the despised cameraman tumbled in, Jacko handed back the camera, looked at its aimed eye, spread his arms and sang, We're in! The cable handler had also arrived, making the most athletic entry of the three of them, and was uncoiling cable out of the cherrypicker and into the living room, to give the camera the chance to roam. He pulled the window all but shut to keep the vicious air out.

In his ear, Jacko heard Durkin state that that was it. Dannie might have cut it there even if the studio hadn't told her. The belief was people would hang on in celebration of Jacko Emptor's one-hundred-and-forty-foot-high success and deliverance. They would want to know, above all, who this husky and impassive old man was.

Shivering, Fartfeatures said, Okay. We're dead.

—Oh mate, said Jacko to the man in the T-shirt, you wouldn't have any coffee, would you?

Jacko's host put his hand to his throat. A robot's voice, very mechanical, electronically spiky and utterly without intonation, answered.

—I can get you some, it said. Can't drink it myself.

Had you been there, and been more interested in Jacko than the cameraman was, you would have thought, Yes, this is an utterly characteristic Jacko smile. It was broad as the yawn of a mastiff on the – for now – untransmitted and therefore unselfconscious dial of Jacko. Jacko – discoverer of new rooms, empowerer of new voices, and native of wide and silent Burren Waters, two hundred miles west of Hector in the remote Northern Territory.

Jacko and the cameraman, attended at some distance by the cable puller who was now running cable across the floor, amongst the archaic furniture, all followed their host into the hallway and so into the narrow kitchen. There was just enough room here for the three of them. The man bent to a cupboard and found a can of coffee.

—How long since you had the op. eh? Jacko asked. You know, the operation.

The man straightened himself. His hand went to his throat, where Jacko noticed now a small black hole. The fellow had in his fingers a minute microphone which he must, between speeches, conceal in his fist. Every sentence was a deliberate exercise. The fellow hadn't been catatonic at all. He had been concentrating on his breath and the muscles of his diaphragm.

The man said, Six weeks back. I wrote to you a week after the surgeon first pulled the cords. I'm grateful you came.

—Wrote to us?

—Yeah, said the monotone squawk. CBS news.

—Oh shit, mate. We're not CBS news. We're Vixen Six. You know, Basil Sutherland.

The man squared his aged NCO shoulders.

—I wondered why you'd come in a cherrypicker, the man conceded in his unearthly diction.

Jacko said, Haven't you heard of Basil Sutherland? The biggest bastard ever to come out of Australia. Aside from me eh.

The man raised his hand and said, I don't watch much morning television.

—A proud boast, mate. And I don't blame you. Makes hair grow on the palms of your hands. Why'd you write to the news?

The cameraman said, We're going live again on ten.

—What's your name? Jacko asked the man in a hurried murmur.

—Sondquist, said the man, again raising his hand. Bob.

He had put the electric kettle on and was spooning coffee into a glass plunger. Did he not know that they were going live, or did he not care? The despised cameraman said they were live on the count of two, and tried to dominate Jacko and the man with two strokes of his index finger.

For going live, Jacko cranked up his old, ingenuous Australian smile, a cliché in its own terms, but fresh news on this coastline.

—We're in Mr Bob Sondquist's kitchen, built in the '40s or '50s, I'd say. The era before we average fellers took up cooking and turned it into a fancy activity. As far as I can tell, Bob was expecting us to be someone else with more pretensions. This is a common experience for Vixen Six. He thought we were CBS news, to whom he's apparently written. Why them, Bob?

Bob stood up straight and faced Jacko and resonated.

—I wrote to them about my daughter, Sunny.

There was a little scar tissue on Bob's throat. But apart from that you could rarely see the aperture, and – given Bob's deft hand movements – barely catch sight of the mechanical device. Jacko did not choose to rush the issue of the daughter Bob had just raised. Never a linear man, he wanted to know all about Bob's means of talk.

—And Bob, you lost your oesophagus, did you, mate?

—It was the larynx I believe, said Bob.