Mug Shots (6 page)

Dead

One April morning, Mrs Gillies, the landlady, knocked on my door to say there was an urgent phone call for me. I took it in her panelled lobby, every detail of which still remains clear to me, in the light-flash of the news. It was Lorna Hogan. Terry Mahony, one of our closest friends, had died in hospital, from a gunshot wound, after a long night at a Newman Society ball.

Terry had gone back with Bill Ginnane (another friend, though less close) to Ginnane's house. There was a rifle in the spare bedroom where he was recuperating. Somehow it had gone off, fatally wounding Terry. That was all Lorna knew. She was in shock and so was I. Terry had been one of the Newman Society stars, a graduate in law, now working for his father's firm of solicitors, but his real interests were theological. He knew his Aquinas, and while we waffled, he would have the exactly-right Thomist quote. I'd known him at school, had played cricket and football with him, drank and argued with him, and now he was dead.

There was an Irish vigil at the Mahony house on the Friday: a night of prayers around an open coffin. I didn't go. I simply couldn't imagine him waxen and inert, arms folded across his chest. The Requiem Mass and funeral followed on the Saturday morning, and I felt the weight of him as we shouldered him to his grave.

There was grief, puzzlement and then questions: a rifle in the bedroom had somehow discharged. There was nothing in the respectable dailies, but
Truth
, the Melbourne scandal sheet, was right onto it: ‘Solicitor shot dead. Secret police probe' was the front-page lead a week later. ‘Homicide detectives who have been conducting a hush-hush probe into the tragedy have been unable to find out how he was wounded.'

Four months later there was an inquest, and again
Truth
was the only paper to cover it. ‘Hush hush death' was the headline, and it got worse: ‘Someone, somewhere, has been trying ever since to hush up the whole affair. Now the coroner's court has made an “open” finding, but how and why Terence Mahony was fatally wounded remains a mystery.

‘Ginnane said that he had returned to the kitchen and had been reading the paper when he heard a noise from the room, and Mahony's only words to him were “Bill, Bill, I'm shot—get a doctor”. Senior Detective Carton testified that he could not find any suspicious circumstances, nor any reason why Mahony would commit suicide (he was engaged to an attractive young woman and his legal career was going well).

‘But',
Truth
added, ‘further evidence, which may have assisted the coroner to reach a definite conclusion, was not before him. In an official file there is a statement from Dr John Francis, who saw Mahony in hospital. Dr Francis said he asked another doctor in front of Mahony if the shooting was accidental. Mahony shook his head, indicating that it was not. Yet he was not called upon to give evidence.

‘This is further complicated by the fact that Ginnane had earlier said that he was “sitting up in bed having a cup of tea when he heard a noise”. This inconsistency was never questioned—nor the fact that Mahony lingered for a day in hospital but gave no one an account of what had happened.'

Since Bill Ginnane, who went on to become Reader in Philosophy at the Australian National University, is now dead, it seems that the mystery of Terry's death, and of the
inadequacy
of the inquest, will never be solved—despite the effort of Lorna Hannan (née Hogan), who unearthed much of the above
material
, and who loved him as a friend, as did I and many others. Maybe it's better to have no closure. Then things remain open, and in that mystery Terry Mahony still lives.

Two boys

As the grinding-wheel wore on—hitchhikes in the winter cold, the daily battle to maintain order and interest—I longed for escape, but not in the way of Jim Kennedy. Kennedy, porridge-pale and melancholy, taught at the high school with Kevin Keating, and it was Keating who broke the news to me.

‘Jim Kennedy's on a morals charge,' he said, as we shared a late-afternoon bottle of beer. ‘The cops came and took him away. He's just been released. I've invited him round.'

‘A morals charge?'

‘Two boys.'

We sat down to eat our nightly grilled chops and three veg, listening for footsteps on the stairs. Soon we heard them, then the knock on the door.

Jim Kennedy's Celtic paleness had changed to grey, as if he'd suddenly turned sixty. No thanks, he wasn't hungry. He sat in the single shabby armchair and stared ahead. The silence seemed unbreakable.

‘What'll you do?' Kevin managed.

‘Go. Tomorrow's train. Go.'

Two boys. With one he'd have a chance, but not with two.

‘D'you have a drink?'

‘That was our last beer. Sorry.'

Kennedy got up and scanned the mantelpiece. There were bottles of various shapes, all empty. Except one: Dolly Varden Wine Cocktail, inherited from the previous tenant.

‘You can't drink that. No one can drink that.'

‘Always a first.'

He poured himself a glass. It was an unpleasant brownish colour, thick and syrupy.

‘My hemlock,' he said. He managed half a glass, then shook our hands and left.

I had a period off the next day about the time the train was due, and walked up to the station. The Melbourne platform stretched into the distance and at the far end, past families, two old ladies and a porter having a smoke, under a turned-down hat, in a turned-up overcoat, was Kennedy, with a single case. Should I? Reluctantly I headed down the platform's great length. Kennedy was looking straight ahead, at the large MARYBOROUGH sign across the tracks. When he registered—I was on gravel now—he picked up his case and walked straight past me, as if I wasn't there.

Lovely girls—and literature

At least he'd escaped. So had Desmond O'Grady the year before, by persuading a psychiatrist that Maryborough was bad for his mental health. I agreed with him, but no psychiatrist was going to free me from the three-year bondage to the Education Department (they'd paid my university fees).

Worse—the town I was trapped in, one of a cluster of old goldrush settlements in Central Victoria—was disappearing before my eyes. The shire council had decided that the main street needed a makeover. The old shop verandahs that gave the place its character were removed, and Maryborough became soulless and suburban. In the fifties, to conserve was a word solely applied to jam.

Then Kevin Keating announced he was moving out too—but only to Ararat, where he'd been transferred. In December, two of his ex-students, now at Bendigo Teachers' College, came to say goodbye to him. They knocked on his door, and when it wasn't answered went inside (he never locked his door—‘What can they pinch?' he'd say). Kevin had been a creative teacher, and they showed they were too by decorating his room with palm leaves ripped from a tree outside my window, while I cowered inside, wondering what the landlady would think.

When Kevin got home, he called me upstairs to meet Rosemary Temple (short and dark) and Carmel Hart (tall and golden-haired). His monastic flat had become a greenroom, with fronds fanning up from fireplace, windows and walls. ‘Lovely girls,' Kevin said as we were introduced. (It was his generic term for all young women.)

When they were leaving, I followed the lovely girls down the stairs, held onto the handlebars belonging to the taller one and asked what she was doing over the Christmas holidays. She said she'd be in Melbourne. I said I would be too. And here we go again:

‘Perhaps we could … at some stage while you were there …'

‘Meet?' That was the word I was after, but she looked like Botticelli's Venus and my legs looked skinny in my baggy shorts. ‘Perhaps I could …' Venus waited patiently for the punch line—‘Give me a ring? I don't have the number. I'm staying with a friend.' (A boyfriend, what else?)

Knowing I had no hope, I battled on. ‘Could I give you mine, then?' (Don't call us, we'll call you.) She wrote it down, and then floated away, as if the bicycle was airborne.

Every day during that long summer, I hoped for a call. And if she did ring, I worried, she might get my mother. ‘Barry? You want Barry? Who am I speaking to?'

Uncalled, I sought distraction in literature. Encouraged by the publication of a short story in an ephemeral literary magazine called
Direction
(four issues) I wrote another, about Burke and Wills, which took as long to appear in
Southerly
as the duo did to cross the continent.

Desmond O'Grady, friend and rival, was matching me—he too was in
Direction
(he was associate editor, so he got himself in twice in the opening issue, one under the unlikely pseudonym of James Desmond) and in
Southerly
too.

We were together in prose, and together in drama. Earlier in the fifties we'd seen Lorca, Ben Jonson and Sophocles at the tiny Arrow Theatre in South Melbourne, run by (and whenever possible starring) Frank Thring—the only camp Oedipus I've ever seen. Verse drama was the fashionable mode. We were dazzled by Christopher Fry's
The Lady's Not for Burning
, bored by T.S. Eliot's
Murder in the Cathedral
, and prepared to suspend enough disbelief to accept gangsters speaking in verse (Maxwell Anderson's
Winterset
)—with the genre put under greatest strain in Douglas Stewart's
Ned Kelly
, as performed at the university's Union Theatre. When Felix Raab as Ned fell with a crash, his pentameters roaring trapped around his helmet, pathos became bathos, and muted titters could be heard.

There had to be another way, and in Australia it was Ray Lawler who found it. At the end of 1955, when the phone had stayed silent and hope abandoned, I saw
Summer of the Seventeenth Doll
, and witnessed a revelation—not in the play's form (a conventional three-acter) but in what Lawler had done with it. Here were working-class characters speaking gruff working-class language, but when Lawler put an electrical charge through it, its very resistance made the words glow like a filament.

There were gasps of audience recognition as the rough language poured out—not of themselves but of the working-class types who, in those days, still lived in Carlton. Frissons swept through us as we heard forbidden words—bastard, bloody, bugger—that only seven years before, in Sumner Locke Elliott's
Rusty Bugles
, had to be changed, under threat of prosecution, to stinker, mug and dimwit.

Vincent's Powders

hen it was back to Maryborough. I took over Kevin Keating's flat, and Brian Sharp, a fellow teacher and friend, moved into my old room below. He soon had inmates complaining of what Mrs Gillies called ‘that awful music'. It was Sibelius, and he taught me to revere him (I could hear it upstairs). I went to Melbourne less often, and plunged into Proust.

On Friday 23 November, distant Melbourne suddenly came up close. ‘IT'S AFLAME.' That was the
Sun News Pictorial
banner headline, with the rest of the front page showing the runner Ron Clarke squinting into the sparks and smoke as he carried the Olympic torch into the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Despite the concerns of the Olympic supremo Avery Brundage, Melbourne had made it on time and was famous for the Warholian number of days.

A huge inflated kangaroo floated above the city, with a giant pink Aspro packet sticking up from the pouch. When the wind blew it moved in rhythmic thrusts, as if mythically engendering the spectacle beneath.

Tickets had gone quickly, and I could only manage one to the heavyweight boxing, in which a fair-haired, fast-moving Russian danced around an acromegalic Bulgarian giant for four rounds before he did a King Kong collapse onto the canvas. It was the exact opposite of what was going on in Europe, where the Russians had invaded Hungary to put down a revolt against Communist rule.

The revolt was crushed, but the battle continued when the two countries met in the water polo. There was blood in the water when the game was halted by the referee. Hungary was leading, and was credited with a victory, and went on to win the gold medal. Half the Hungarian delegation refused to go back.

Until November 1956, a Berlin Wall of provincialism surrounded Melbourne. The Games broke it open, and television, which had just arrived, poured through the gap. We stood at electrical shop windows to watch Bruce Gyngell usher it in. He was in a dinner suit, and behind him were packets of Vincent's Aspirin Powders arranged to form the letters TV. The symbolism was perfect.

The findings of the Royal Commission set up before television was introduced sound like something from the Dead Sea Scrolls. ‘The objective from the outset must be to provide programmes that would have the effect of raising standards of public taste. The danger is that success depends on an appeal to numbers, and it is difficult to escape mediocrity and vulgar
sensationalism
.' ‘Vulgar' now sounds dated and snobbish, but that's what most television now is: the V in TV.

Funny eyes

In December 1956, with the school year closing and me secretly planning to join Desmond O'Grady in Rome, the teachers had a wind-up dinner. I managed the stairs quite well afterwards, opened my door, and Carmel Hart's sitting in the shabby armchair by the window—the girl who wouldn't ring, the girl who sailed past in the main street in her red-haired boyfriend's car (acknowledging me with a wave).

‘What were you wearing?' I ask her, fifty-four years later.
I couldn't
remember, and she couldn't either. And
why
was she there? (Even now I can't really figure it out.) She was back from Bendigo Teachers' College, had had a row with her parents, and since she'd broken up with her boyfriend, when she walked out of her house she had nowhere to go.

So I was visited, it seemed, by default. Though what had attracted her, she later told me, was her father's opinion of me after he'd done some repairs at Wandsworth. He had heard me talking to myself on the landing: ‘He's mad.'

After some awkward groping-for-common-ground talk, Carmel Hart said she'd better be going. But where? That was okay—she could climb back through a window. ‘I'll walk you home then.' (Confidence at last!) Instead of farewells at her front gate on the outskirts of town, we agreed they could be better done beside the fenced paddock opposite. It was a summer's night, the moon was up, we looked, we gazed, and in the words of one of Joseph Heller's novels, Something Happened. Falling in love is not only corny, but wrong. It's a soaring, with each responding to the other the way birds do, when they court in the air.

When we'd come down to earth I saw her to her gate, said goodbye and, feeling as if I were floating several feet above the ground, left. Five minutes later Carmel Hart was running after me. Her father had locked the window; she couldn't get in. Since my fellow lodger Brian Sharp had now left for Melbourne, I installed her chastely in his room for what was left of the night.

In Europe the town focus is the square; in Australian country towns in summer it's the swimming pool. During Maryborough's unsparing winters, the pool was no more than a white scoop of concrete, dormant behind the trees of the park. In September it was watered back to life, and by November the whole town seemed to gather round it, like Hindus by the Ganges, celebrating rebirth. We joined in the celebrations, and had a courtship in and out of the water, submarine and ultramarine.

After romance, ritual. I met her parents, we had the requisite cups of tea and lamingtons, and Carmel declared it a success. Her father Harry hadn't found me mad after all, though her mother Anne said that I had ‘funny eyes'. Then it was her turn. Aunts and uncles and family friends were arranged around our lounge room, and my mother wheeled in her big-occasion auto tray, laden with more than lamingtons—Alexanders from Patersons of Chapel Street, cream cakes, vanilla slices and a crowning sponge—crushingly middle-class hospitality, perhaps designed to put rural inferiors in their place. My mother called Carmel ‘dear' a lot, and though Carmel later said it felt like a Royal Show judging, this too was declared a success. My mother later agreed, though having heard of Anne's opinion that I had funny eyes, she riposted that while Carmel was a lovely girl, her legs were a little large.

We became engaged, as one did then, very soon after. It was concentrically celebrated with two parties at Carmel's South Caulfield flat. There were balloons and booze, but no inter­actions between my university friends and her Bendigonians, who soon went outside and began running around the house bellowing pop songs, while the intellectuals huddled in the living room singing the then-fashionable psalms of the French composer Joseph Gelineau. At the inner party Carmel encountered puzzled stares (how did
he
get
her
?) and at the outer earlier suitors, now well away, threatened to carry her off and save her from these hymn-singing wimps.

Who chose his trousers? (I'm now engaged to Carmel.)