Matthew Flinders' Cat (6 page)

Cross-dressing has no social demographic and adherents ranged from panel beaters to barristers, men working on garbage trucks to others from the big end of town. They would drop in during the course of the day ostensibly for a quiet drink at Marion’s Bar, and at the same time do their business with complete discretion. After a drink, all it took was a nod and a wink and they’d be directed upstairs, where they could try on a range of beautiful local and imported French lingerie, attended to by an outrageous transvestite known as Gorgeous Gordon, who also doubled as a fashion adviser. Although most transvestites are extroverts and usually gay and mostly happy to be named and talked about, Marion’s more discreet clientele, the strictly heterosexual cross-dressers, knew that she would keep their identities secret to her grave.

Sam Snatch appeared to have it, coming and going. Marion’s cross-dressing customers were always singularly serviced upstairs and so waited patiently downstairs with an overpriced cocktail in front of them. Once they made their purchases, they could leave by a set of back stairs leading directly onto the street from the pub.

Billy didn’t feel up to meeting the two men waiting for him in the beer garden. ‘Don’t think I want to meet anyone today, love,’ he said to Marion. ‘Do I know them?’

‘Yeah, one, Casper Friendly. He’s with a new bloke, blackfella, haven’t seen him around here before.’

Snatch turned, suddenly agitated, ‘Aboriginal? From Redfern? We don’t want none of them bastards in here.’

Marion sighed, ‘How would I bloody know where he came from, Sam? And, by the way, it’s Aborigine
not
Aboriginal.’

‘He’s a bloody boong as far as I’m concerned. How’d yer see them anyway? It’s not your job to serve out there. Come in for a pair of pantyhose, did they?’ Marion looked scornfully at Snatch and took a drag from her cigarette, allowing the smoke to escape through her nostrils. ‘Yeah, right on, two blacks, one a derro, the other from the boonies. How many pairs of French knickers do you reckon they gunna buy between them?’

‘Yeah well, you know how I feel about Abos, nothing but trouble.’

Marion shrugged, ‘What am I supposed to do, ask for his bloody passport? Shirley was late in so I served them in the beer garden. Casper’s a regular early drinker and he brought a mate.’ She commenced polishing the surface of the already immaculate bar, ‘Tell you what, though, the new bloke’s carrying a stash of fifties you could choke a horse on. They’s drinking scotch as well.’

‘Drugs! He’s a fuckin’ pusher!’ Snatch was paranoid about drugs. There were plenty of cops and judges out in get-even-land with old scores to settle with him. In his new vocation as a publican he was determined to keep his nose clean, aware that the next time he appeared in court he might not be fortunate enough to find another Billy O’Shannessy to defend him.

Marion rolled her eyes. ‘Drugs? Now why didn’t I think of that? He’s a black Lebanese who wears moleskins, an Akubra and badly worn riding boots. As a disguise, it beats the hell out of a Hugo Boss suit, hair gel, gold necklace and a diamond-encrusted Rolex.’

Snatch ignored her sarcasm, suddenly excited. ‘From the bush? D’ya say this bloke was from the bush?’

‘Can’t say for sure. Anyway, that’s what his clobber suggested. Maybe you’re right, he’s a pusher disguised as an Aborigine disguised as a stockman.’

Billy knew what Snatch was thinking. It was unusual, though not unheard of, for an Aborigine to come to the big smoke after working on a contract for several months in the mines or as a stockman or fencer, his accumulated salary paid in a lump sum. Many of them would virtually hand their pay over to a publican, agreeing to drink it out, living and eating at the pub. These men, who also had their equivalent in merchant seamen paying off and waiting between ships, were a bonanza no publican could resist. They were usually loners who worked hard for a living and then went on a ‘booze and bird’ holiday for a month before returning to work. It was a tradition started by itinerant shearers way back in the middle of the nineteenth century and such men didn’t consider themselves alcoholics or layabouts.

Snatch now turned to Billy. ‘Do us a favour, will ya, mate?’

Billy knew what was coming, ‘What is it?’

‘The Abo bloke and Casper, them two, they come to see you. You know the drill, check the boong out for me, will ya? Bring him over after?’ He winked, ‘Could be a quid or two in it for you?’

Billy looked up at the proprietor of the Flag Hotel, then back at the glass of scotch on the counter, and cleared his throat.

Snatch got the message. ‘Scotch for Billy and yid better keep an eye on them two, Marion. Don’t let them scarper before Billy gets to them.’

‘Yeah, righto,’ Marion said, then looked at Billy, one eyebrow slightly arched, ‘Black Label, wasn’t it, Billy?’

‘Christ no! Red!’ Snatch yelled out. ‘Red Label! Bloody hell!! Think I’m made of money, do yer?’

Billy smiled at the barmaid, happy enough at the prospect of getting a second scotch out of Snatch.

‘Jesus, you ain’t even touched the first! Drink up, mate,’ Snatch instructed, impatient to get Billy out the back.

Marion gave a snort, ‘Take yer time, mate, them two aren’t goin’ nowhere. Casper was more than anxious that you should be informed of their presence the moment you came in.’ There it was again, two sentences, one coarse, the other well structured.

Business among the homeless was usually conducted in the mornings when most of the derelicts were still sober. It invariably took place in the beer garden at the rear of the Flag Hotel, which, until the staff turned on the smokeless barbecue, Sam Snatch allowed to be used by the alkies. In this way he kept them out of the pub itself while ensuring that most of their dole or disability pensions would be spent at his bar or on supplies purchased from his bottle shop.

At noon the beer garden entered another dimension when it catered to patrons drawn from the various small businesses in the area. They came in for a couple of lunchtime middies and one of Snatch’s famous aged Aberdeen Angus T-bones. At half-past ten, a barmaid would take the last orders from the morning drinkers and, precisely at eleven, Snatch’s huge frame would appear at the doorway leading into the pub, from where he’d shout out, ‘Righto, piss off, the lot of yiz! Out of the garden! I’ll be waitin’ for yiz in the bottle shop! Sorry, no credit, gennelmen, unless you bring yer bank manager to guarantee yer financial status!’

Billy was usually called in by the brotherhood of inebriates when there was a problem with someone’s pension or the dole. More often it was the need to open a bank account. Welfare payments were now being paid into bank accounts and many of the alcoholics had never operated one. They usually fell far short of the mandatory requirements known as the Hundred Points, the criteria set by the banks to qualify for a cheque account. For many of the homeless it was a catch-22, the Department of Social Security insisted that all dole and disability pensions be paid into a personal bank account while the intended recipient often had no chance of qualifying for one. Billy would be called in to straighten things out with a bit of what he referred to as ‘creative paperwork’.

Occasionally it was a more complex issue, with a wife or kids involved, where a letter was needed to one of the many authorities that control the lives of the poor. Often a legal document would be sent to a man who, at best, was semi-literate. It would need to be translated and replied to in kind. There was scarcely a drunk in the inner-city area who hadn’t at one time or another enjoyed Billy’s services.

Billy now assumed that Casper’s new mate would have some sort of problem along the usual lines. But today, with his routine disrupted by the kid and the cop, he didn’t feel up to the hassle of dealing with someone else’s problems. However, Sam Snatch had forced his hand and he knew he lacked the internal fortitude to stand up to the aggressive publican.

Billy took the first fragrant sip of neat scotch. Every morning he faced the same battle, forcing himself to drink his gratuitous first nip slowly. Billy told himself that while he maintained this go-slow ritual, he remained in some sort of control, a problem drinker rather than a confirmed alcoholic. Drinking branded scotch was an example of maintaining one’s standards.

He knew he must avoid, at all costs, the way many alcoholics approached the first glass of the day. That is to say, holding the glass in both hands, its base resting firmly on the counter, then bringing the mouth down to the lip of the glass, tipping it very slightly and feeding the precious liquid down the gullet so as not to spill a drop. Billy would always drink his like a gentleman, lifting it to his mouth in one hand while seated on a bar stool, his back straight. Drinking his first of the day in this way was one of the many benchmarks he set for his self-image. It was undoubtedly one of the hardest for him to observe as, once the scotch was placed in front of him, every nerve in his body screamed out to him to swallow the lot in one gulp.

Lifting the scotch glass carefully, he took a tiny sip and brought it back down to the counter. With his briefcase resting on his lap and his left hand still shackled to it, he was forced to keep his right hand steady. There had been times in the past when his hand had trembled so badly that he couldn’t lift the scotch glass for the first twenty minutes. But today, thank God, his hand was behaving itself and he reached over to the small glass jug Marion had placed on the counter beside him and added to the scotch an amount of water roughly equivalent to the sip he’d taken from the glass. The end of the first drink would eventually arrive when his final sip contained only a vague tincture of the beautiful malted whisky.

He would never be seen drinking anything but scotch in public, and Sam Snatch’s free tipple meant that Billy could maintain his affectation no matter what the state of his finances. After this, Billy would make his way to the bottle shop and purchase whatever type of booze his current finances would allow before leaving the pub and returning to the Botanic Gardens. It was only when there was business to attend to, such as today, that Billy remained at the Flag. Business meant two further glasses of scotch, the price for his services.

Billy had done business with Casper Friendly before, but always with reluctance. The quarter-caste Aborigine was a notorious wheeler-dealer invariably operating some sort of scam involving the ignorant and the desperate. Even though Billy was always willing to help for a very modest cost in kind, many of the men were too ashamed to approach him directly. They may have been drunks but they still had their pride and they’d been concealing their inability to read and write all their lives. Billy, despite his status as a homeless drunk, represented some sort of educated authority they couldn’t bring themselves to face.

On the other hand, Casper Friendly was illiterate. ‘Whitefella don’t give Abos no teachin’ in my time,’ he’d laugh. Knowing that some of the blokes in need of help would come to him rather than go directly to Billy, Casper’s illiteracy had become his calling card.

Casper had an easy laugh and appeared generous with his money when he was working a client, so that it wasn’t difficult for a mark to confess that he had trouble ‘readin’ and writin’’. He often enough became the acceptable conduit for the help the homeless needed. The final thing in his favour was that he was perceived to be an Aborigine and therefore carried a status on the street even lower than the white alcoholic needing help, so there was no need to ‘eat crow’ by coming to him.

Billy had no problem with any of this, it was Casper’s charges as an introduction agency he objected to. If he brought Billy a customer who needed to open a bank account, he would charge the customer ten dol lars a fortnight from his pension for the first year and five dollars forever after. The commission Casper earned helped to keep a gang of freeloaders faithful to him. They served as his standover men in the event that one of his clients failed to pay up on pension day.

Billy found himself caught between a rock and a hard place. While he would have preferred not to work with Casper, an outright refusal would have been unthinkable. Besides, he wasn’t at all sure that Casper’s henchmen wouldn’t come after him if he proved refractory.

Casper Friendly was a man in his sixties, almost ten years older than Billy, which made him old for a street alcoholic. Thin as a twig, he had been a fringe identity around Darlinghurst as long as anyone could remember. The pension office records had him registered as Casper Friendly, though neither of these names was correct. Someone, way back when the cartoon had first featured in Saturday afternoon matinee shorts, had named him after Casper the Friendly Ghost. This had been modified over time to his present name.

The original nickname, it seemed, was arrived at because he was an albino as well as a quarter-caste Aborigine and he resembled someone with bleached eyebrows and hair suffering from a severe dose of sunburn. To add to his overall paleness, he only ever wore white cricket gear. In moments of sobriety he would explain that his grand-daddy had been a member of the first Aboriginal cricket team to tour England in 1868, and wearing cricket gear was an honour bestowed upon his family by the elders of his tribe and had something to do with their secret men’s business. Like Sam Snatch buying the pub with his windfall and savings, it was generally accepted that this wasn’t true, but veracity has no priority among the homeless and nobody cared, so Casper was free to claim anything he liked.

Billy finally completed drinking the second scotch and made his way through to the beer garden, where Casper sat with the black man. The Aboriginal albino waved over to him. ‘Hey, Billy, where’s you fuckin’ bin, man?’ Casper indicated the man beside him, ‘We bin waitin’ here since fuckin’ openin’ time!’