Mug Shots (22 page)

Be prepared

Back in the sublunary world, the cabinets are bulging with books, there's a leaning tower of mail, and twenty-six voicemail messages. One is from Bob Brissenden, thanking me for the interview I'd organised in the previous Saturday's paper. A later one tells me that Bob has just died.

One of literary editorship's greatest trials is the unexpected death. Suddenly the workshop shelter is ripped off, and thirty or forty paragraphs, depending on the importance of the deceased, are required at once. It happened to me with Patrick White (my own fault. I should have had something ready). I was at a party at the time, frantic calls went unanswered, and the following morning's headline read: Poet, Playwright and Novelist Dies.
I tried
to repair the damage the next day but it was too late.

It happened to me with the Melbourne poet and critic Vincent Buckley. I'd returned from a function to a chilling phone message: sixty-three-year-old Buckley had died, and twenty pars were needed in the next two hours. I managed it, but something went wrong in the production process, and he was turned into an octogenarian: 87-year-old Poet Dies.

It happened to me with Manning Clark. Late in May 1992 the night editor rang. The eminent historian had just died, and could I come in immediately and write something to catch the second edition. I raced to my books, scrabbled through manila folders, and taxied in. At 10.30 pm I was at my desk: 800 words, and forty-five minutes. I managed 500, ran out of gas, flipped through my files, found a piece by the polymathic Peter Craven that I'd rejected, and liposectioned some of its paragraphs while the giant presses in the basement hummed in neutral, waiting, and produced a piece of pure cobbledom, a bricolage of dustcover blurbs, press cuttings and plagiarism, tapped out with one frantic finger, and none of it telling the truth: Manning Clark was a historian who didn't let the facts interfere with his
theories
, a poseur in an absurd high hat. A great dramatiser not only of history, but also of himself.

Dusted and dignified

In the same month of the same year, my brother and I had persuaded our mother, now a widow, to move from the family home to a unit in the respectable outer Melbourne suburb of Blackburn. On the morning of the auction, we paid 4 Montague Avenue, East St Kilda, a farewell visit.

The place had been stripped of everything except memories, which seemed to shimmer, along wavelengths beyond the human ear. The old oak bookcase and grandfather clock had gone from the lobby, the bedrooms were bare, and we came to rest in the lounge, my mother's pride, used only on rare occasions when we entertained—when Uncle Tom and Auntie Dot came to play solo, or when Uncle Pat returned from the war, and my father sang his favourite song—‘I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles'. He waved a beer bottle in tune with the music with such vigor he dislodged the lampshade, which bounced on the carpet without breaking.

Brother and self lament the sale of 4 Montague Avenue.

Normally this was a quiet, dusted and dignified room, with rosewood cabinet and table, dominated by the portrait Rupert Bunny had done of my mother—when my father was away on wartime Thursday Island. She had done the rent collecting, including Bunny's who, then an old man, had a studio in Toorak Road. All these treasures now kept her company in Blackburn.

I used to like the silence and spaciousness of this room, and would sometimes immerse myself in it and gaze up at the stained-glass window (a feature of Californian bungalows of the 1920s) showing an English cottage set in green glass hills with creamy white cloud behind it—a folk memory of Home.

The three of us—mother, brother and I—stood silent in the big bare room, and then she pointed her walking stick at the fireplace. The brass plaque that sat in the grate was still there, covered in dust. I picked it up and rubbed it like Aladdin's lamp, and the bunch of Elizabethan roisterers slowly emerged—first their heads, the table, then the dog at their feet. My childhood seemed to be hidden in that tavern with them, and the more I rubbed the more it came to life.

By noon a crowd was gathering—it seemed indecent in so quiet a street—described as ‘leafy' on the auction board. We joined them. The auctioneer, young and smartly suited, stood in the driveway entrance, at the exact spot where my brother would turn, run and bowl at me, Ray Lindwall style, while I did my best to bat like Keith Miller. ‘Remember when I lofted an on-drive and cracked one of the top panels of the bow window?' No, my brother didn't. We walked along the driveway and looked up to check—the crack was still there.

There was a worrying silence when bids were first invited, then another when they came to a stop at $190,000. Offers of $5000 were then suggested, then half that, then finally single thousands, which inched the price up to $202,000. Four Montague Avenue was sold to what my mother described as a lovely young couple. We were giving up ownership, but were going to be tenants there always.

Blandness strikes back

It was unusual for James Hall, editor of the
Australian
magazine, to invite anyone to lunch. He spent money as if it were his own and not Rupert Murdoch's (he had accepted a story idea from my friend Luke Slattery, but suggested he take the bus down to Melbourne to do it).

‘You're probably wondering why I've invited you to lunch,' he said, as we began on our first (and only) bottle. I had enough tact not to reply. ‘I'm not happy with Mungo McCallum's column in the magazine and wondered whether you'd like to take his place. (This would explain why, at an airport years later, when I went up to McCallum, who was dressed in khaki adventurer's outfit and bush hat, looking like an attenuated Ludwig Leichhardt, he dealt me a fleering snub.)

I said I'd think it over, but since McEvoy of the trembling hand had raised the rent again, I had nothing to think over. As the meal progressed and a failed suggestion was made about a second bottle, each of us sank into gloom. Jim said he came from Lincolnshire, the most boring county in England, and feared that some of its forbiddingness had crept into him. ‘Not at all,' I lied. Not to be put off, he said he'd been a failure in journalism.

‘You edited the
Australian
once.'

‘Exactly.' We were getting nowhere, and I was following him down. Eight hundred words a week for months, maybe years: a soapbox that at first might be enjoyable to mount, but which would eventually mount me.

‘Another bottle?'

‘Only makes me depressed.'

‘There you go.' And we did go.

By August, three months in, I'd become something of a whinger, complaining, as I paced my 800-word cage, of the sunny blandness of Australian life. Then the blandness struck back. I was peeling potatoes one Friday evening when there was a frantic banging on the front door—a breathless woman, telling me one of the terraces was on fire. I ran out—the upper storey of the one two doors down from ours was ablaze—then rang the fire brigade.

Ugo, our next-door neighbour, had just done the same. Then we went outside and waited. The fire was already spreading from number twenty to the roof of Ugo's, number twenty-two. He rushed in with Eugene, one of our sons, and saved his computer, as embers fell on their heads. And I went into twenty-four, to save—what? My brain had turned into playdough. Credit cards, cheque books and, as the upper room started to fill with smoke, the cat—tossed out of the back window onto the skillion roof.

Then back to the street. The fire was chewing up the rafters of twenty-two on its way to twenty-four, and the brigade still hadn't arrived. Great smoke swirls sailed into the darkness, more and more people gathered, and one of them said, ‘The whole row's going to go up.' I thought of our books, our beds, our clothes, everything that made us what we were, and felt as if I were dying—pictures, papers, possessions, all the layers that grow around the self, about to go. I prayed hard and deep, as I'm sure I'll do when the real thing comes.

The fire engine arrived, but there were more agonising minutes while they tried to find the hydrant. By the time they got the ladder up they'd found the water (it was under the truck) and starting hosing. As in horror movies, the monster took hit after hit and kept on going. I didn't know it then, but there was a firewall between twenty-two and twenty-four. The creature was chomping its way round the wall when it died, exhaling billows of smoke. Our place had taken smoke and water damage, but was saved. Twenty and twenty-two were gone. Carmel, now back from Melbourne, stared at their charred remnants in disbelief. I'd never write of middle-class blandness again.

Part of our roof needed fixing, and was covered by a tarpaulin that leaked when it rained. It was nothing compared to our neighbours' losses, but water came down on our books.
I contacted
the roofing company and asked if they could hurry up. Yes, we'll do it soon. When was soon? When we can. We waited weeks, the water dripped, I rang again, yes, yes, soon, they were busy with the other terraces. I put a note under one of the windscreen wipers. I'm a columnist. Get it done or I'll do a piece on you.

For the first time, they moved fast. They contacted James Hall, and he gave me a lecture. This was something a columnist never did, and he might have to talk to the editor about it. ‘Go ahead, make my day—report me to the headmaster,' I said.
I didn't
like his tone, and he didn't like mine.

Would I get the sack? From the column? The job? Jim was grim, and demoted me from the front of the magazine to the back. There were more lectures—not too much reminiscence, don't centre it on Sydney, avoid talking about literature. I nodded in assent, and ignored them all.

The uneasy armistice went on. I was starting to run out of ideas. My column had eaten its way through everything I could think of, and was still ravenous for more. I filed when I had ideas, and I filed when I hadn't. I realised that's what all regular columnists do, and I could tell when they did it.

I marvelled at Paddy McGuinness, who, in his prime or nadir, filed 800 fulminating words five days a week—knocked them off in the morning, and then, bloated with opinionation, waddled off to lunch. (He ended his days, a crimson face in an aureole of white hair, holding court to the last remnants of his audience in the Unity Hall Hotel in Balmain.)

I marvelled at how some columnists fill their space with banalities week after week and manage to escape not just the sack but imprisonment for crimes against incisiveness and style. How one of them could escape punishment for beginning a piece like this: ‘The other night I sent back my wine. Although we were at a top restaurant, there was a fly in my drink. Such things happen. But the very next day, I had a terrible experience. Drinking my morning coffee at my favourite cafe, I felt something furry in my mouth and spat the coffee everywhere. It was a blow fly. The waiter couldn't believe it had happened twice. “It's too much of a coincidence,” he laughed.'

Fearful of such a fate, I spent weekends reading and
worrying
, or simply hoping that something describable might happen. I got a lively column about the fire, but it was a flood that would give me more. We had rising damp at the front of the house, and, after heavy rain, an inundation at the back. The laundry, which had provided spartan accommodation for Melbourne visitors (John Timlin, Barry Dickins, Clare Forbes, Lucy Frost, Meredith Michie, Margie and Rai Gaita, Patsy and Laurie Clancy, Faith Richmond and Tim Robertson, and from South Australia Jeanne and Brian Matthews) was one night overwhelmed and our house guest at the time awoke to find her bedtime reading floating on the floor. It was time for home ownership.

Finding a house

My late estate agent father had never tired of telling us the rent we'd been paying for years was ‘dead money'—and for a
tenement
at that. It was either buy now or never buy at all.

Our search provided solid column provender for weeks. One Saturday I did some preliminary foraging, hoping, with our modest capital and an equally modest loan, we could still enjoy the pleasures of Paddington. I started with Enchantment Personified: ‘The sweetest of terrace houses. Behind a pristine facade, romantic drawing and dining rooms await.' They're still awaiting—the agent said he was looking at the high twos.

I declined to A Place to Hang Your Heart. It was a corner building divided into two dwellings the size and shape of a double-decker bus, with a bathroom so low you'd have to crouch to shower. ‘We're looking at ones,' said the saleslady,
and looking
was all I did.

I finished with a ‘one-bedroom hideaway with truly unique three-level layout'. It wasn't so much a terrace as a stage set, behind which you could do no more than get into costume and slip onto the street. There was a bonsai living room, and an upstairs ledge where a ladder led to a stunted attic, where Melbourne visitors (I fantasised) could be sent to deter them from staying again. ‘Ones!' shouted the salesman as I exited stage left. ‘Low ones!'

We only had enough for a house in the country. A weekender that we'd live in all week. We inspected semi-rural properties bearing no resemblance whatever to the copy that described them. This came to a head with ‘Unique Heritage Cottage in the Heart of Windsor. Potential to run a business. $100,000'.

It was a hot day, our car was playing up, and irritation at the weeks of searching bubbled up like a fumarole. ‘Heritage' meant run-down, and ‘cottage', rooms in which cats could not be swung. And the agent, large-bellied and crimson, kept calling me ‘mate'.

Agent: You could run a nice little earner here. Devonshire teas, mate. Handicrafts. Pottery.

Self to wife: And you could do the scones in the galley.

Agent: The galley, mate?

Self: Are you calling that cubicle a kitchen?

Agent (changing tack): You could renovate the shed.

Self: I don't do renovations.

Agent (to wife): Once you get him out here in the country, he wouldn't be so uptight.

Self: I hate the country. We're looking at the country because we can't afford the city.

Wife: That's nonsense.

Self (having meltdown): Do you think my wife's going to bake scones in that lean-to and I'm going to put on a smile and an apron and serve them up to tourists?

Wife (leaving): Sorry about this. Is that an aviary down
the back
?

Agent (in a sympathetic half whisper to wife): You could keep him in there, love. Enjoy your retirement.

After months wandering the periphery of Sydney, the Blue Mountains were firming. It was looking like Bullaburra, at the bottom of the social scale—then we chanced upon a cottage, four rooms and a shabby bathroom—at Wentworth Falls, that had come on to the market that very day, and which we could almost afford, with a small loan from one of our daughters and a late run on a credit card. Our offer was accepted. After a building inspection (‘Ceiling space no leaks in evidence. Mice droppings and one dead mouse present') legalities were formalised, and on 8 October 1996 around 2 pm, I imagine a faint ripple of air in a Wentworth Falls real-estate office—an imperceptible transfer of ownership from the vendor to us. Propertied at last.