The Glass Canoe (16 page)

‘Sort of natural gentleman. Doesn't try to push his opinions, always gives me plenty of chance to say something if I want to, but doesn't let the pause go on too long, you know, if I can't think of anything to say and he feels I might get embarrassed. Not being as brainy as he is. But he never talked to me as if I was stupid or something.'

‘You were wrapped in this bloke, Shorty.'

‘Suppose I was, at that. Took him in to the RSL at Windsor and bought him a beer and told him I'd enjoyed having him on the trip. Then I took him all the way to his joint, big two-storey place painted white, two car garage, all the trimmings.'

I couldn't resist it. ‘All very clean, kept nice, and all the rest?' I said while he stuffed two bits of chocolate into his mouth.

‘Beautiful. That professoring must be a bloody good lurk. Taught me something, anyway.'

‘What was that?'

‘A bloke doesn't have to be a prick just because he's got a good education.'

THE MINISTRY OF SUBCULTURAL RESEARCH

When I got Sibley's mind back from Sharon I sat out in the sun and read the printout.

‘Evidence suggests fighting tendencies precede indulgence in drinking. Also evidence that indulgence releases and accentuates the same proclivities for aggressiveness. Cycle accelerated by habituating effect of being a drinker.'

Sibley had been watching the little dialogues that found expression in knuckle, knee and slipper. The next gobbet of wisdom told me

‘The habit of drinking and fighting develops a
compulsive quality.

Drinkers seem aware of this, without avoiding either.

The habit is characterised by free-ranging hostility, perhaps caused by:

Territorial uncertainty and disruption, e.g. foreclosure of mortgages, non-payment of hire-purchase commitments, threat of new housing development and higher rents than they can afford.

Overcrowding.

Socio-cultural change. (Transition from cottage to high-rise environment.)

Financial difficulty following disruption of family relationships.

Percept monotony.

Underproductivity.

Subordinate status.

Effect of social fragmentation; belonging to a group alienated from other groups.

Environmental monotony.

Powerlessness in face of incomprehensible forces of government, business and education.'

I was looking for some sign from Sibley that we might have liked being drinkers, and might have enjoyed the
occasional biff. Or even needed it. Maybe if we didn't push each other away with fists we might get so close we'd end up being a warm jelly mass, no guy able to tell where he ended and others began.

‘Their hostility has no specific object and often turns inward to group- and self-destructiveness.

NB. Suggestion for a Ministry of Subcultural Research.

Expected benefits: fresh approaches to problems of society e.g. Study of drinkers can reflect conflicts of the larger whole. Drinkers tend to cohere into a subculture which acts out problems bequeathed by the past.'

That was enough for the moment. For some reason I felt extra thirsty, so when I folded the papers I gave them back to Sharon and took my rightful place at the bar. I didn't mind that both elbows rested in a cool pool. I even felt a bit dirty on all the laughing, and the cracked jokes flying around: there had to be some place in the world that was kept safe for pugnacity. I drank for two hours hoping for some sort of stoush, before the mood passed. I blamed Sibley. He was getting at me.

THIS BIT DOESN'T NEED A TITLE

Next time I saw my darling I burst in on her at her place—she's got this crazy habit of not locking her door—just as she was trying on her swimming gear.

Sometimes I go for a swim, and once in a while I go with her. She swims a lot. She has dozens of swimsuits, all colours. Her skin goes this golden colour and it's great to be walking down to the water with her because everyone looks at her like they look at the other three or four girls with spectacular shapes that you might see in one day. It's very pleasant walking with that sort of girl, I can tell you.

She's unconscious of her looks, sometimes.

For instance, she's got this golden hair under her arms that she never cuts. Just a little tuft under each, not a massive bush. And she'll never shave her legs.
I think she never looks at them. The rest of the population takes care of that.

What I'm on about is a line of hairs that stick out a little way under the bottom leg of the swimsuits. Just fine hairs.

When she's in a two-piece, or anyrate when she's got the bottom half on, there's this thin line of hairs climbing up from the triangle to her navel. It's a deep navel, you can't see bottom, and it's only a fine line of hairs. Curly, like the ones lower.

I mention this because it was the first thing to hit me when I burst in on her.

‘Hullo,' she says, smiling all over and whipping off this blue thing at the same time. Never before or since have I seen a girl, woman, child, man, pup or any living thing welcome you the way she did.

I must have been hypnotised, looking her all over. She was smiling at me.

‘Bursting with sex, you are,' she said.

SHE DIDN'T EVEN STOP TO THINK

At the course we got out on the greens first thing in the morning. We knew shortly the big sit-on machines would be there for one of us to ride round on, but in the meantime it was three one-man machines dividing up the eighteen greens every second or third morning.

The dew marked the edge of your cut, and made the job easy. It wasn't so easy on mornings with no dew. It's hard to see a three millimetre cut from two metres in the air with the sun behind you.

I spent the time thinking of the radiogram and the spindle. The difference was, I'd been silly enough to mention it to my darling the night before. Sunday night.

She had a player and we'd sat on the carpet playing her music on it. I don't have any music. As for carpet.

‘I wonder what,' I said, and left the words there. She picked them up a minute or two later, it was that sort of evening. We'd made love on and off during the day, though to describe it better, when you were with her, everything was making love.

Even watching her. Even talking to her and watching the little expressions on her face as different words pleased her.

‘What do you wonder?'

I should have left it there. But no, I had to go and tell her. It was one of those moments you come to, where if you go one way: that's it. There's no going the other way, and no going back where you started.

‘How the machine knows.'

‘Knows what?' She had her legs tucked up under her, the way girls do. I tried it, but I can only do it for a minute or two. Her blood system or muscles or something must be different. I have to move, or better still, get up on two feet.

‘How wide the record is, and that there's two of them on the spindle so it lets down only the one and keeps the others up above that edge there?'

I pointed to it, as men do. As other men do, pointing to a mountain, or a car smash. I see them doing it and I always think: stupid bastard! She's got eyes, she's probably a damn sight smarter than you and she probably saw whatever it is when you were still scratching your balls. But I couldn't help it. I pointed, just like the rest.

‘That little edge there.'

She didn't even stop to think.

‘That's easy.' My bottom jaw fell. Just like Mum's when she finally stopped breathing.

‘Why do you look like that? I thought you wanted to know. There you are, see when the record goes down, under here, that edge hits this little plastic knob— that's how it knows the width. It's either a twelve or a nine or a very small one. So according whether it hits the knob or goes there, so the arm knows where to come down.'

She told me how the thing knew there's more to come on the spindle. I didn't hear. I didn't want to know. I hadn't ever wanted to know.

Modern technology she had reduced to commonsense and observation, seeing how it worked and what happened when.

I wanted magic. I wanted to admire the people who thought it up and the people who made it. Just like you look up at the stars and one of them, like Sirius, has a surface temperature of twelve thousand degrees and another is dead and shrinking to a pinpoint. Or that there's millions of them that make our sun look like a flea on a dog's back.

If it's just commonsense and one step after the other, how is it a whole world full of people goes off at sparrow fart each morning to work for it and be part of it? For a lifetime.

How can they give—yes, give—their lives to some stupid little thing anyone can understand?

Looking at stars or through electron microscopes has got to be different.

Maybe I'm jumping the gun and all those little jobs have wonder and magic in them and things you go home in awe about and sometimes think about at night when the power of them suddenly hits you. I don't mean to be all that intolerant, though I'm not altogether against intolerance, and if those jobs I call little have some things in them I haven't seen, then I'm sorry.

But I can tell you something that has awe and majesty and something so close to magic that I bet no one can put it into all the words needed to describe it.

And that's when Danny's on the burst and swerves just before taking a pass from the half, and that swerve takes him past a stiff-arm the ref didn't see and wouldn't have seen, and then he takes three strides towards the inside centre—not away, towards—and this wrong-foots the inside centre so his tackle misses Danny by a whisker after Danny's sidestep. So how is Danny, who works on the council waving flags and Stop and Go signs to traffic, how is Danny's brain able to do these things, and his arms and legs and speed and balance and eyes, all in the space of one second, tell him that another four strides towards the fullback aiming slightly to the fullback's right, which Danny
saw early in the game was his favourite side to tackle, will convince the fullback that he has Danny dead to rights, and how is it Danny knows that if his own centre is caught by the opposing winger who has come in, that he'll still have time to reverse the ball to his lock coming up the middle four metres behind him and about three to his right and this would be the better pass because the lock's not covered, and finally passes, all before the fullback drives his shoulder into a hip made of air because Danny sidesteps again at the last moment. How is it?

And to see him in the pub, you wouldn't think he could piss straight.

But if it's sheer power you want, take my job.

What would you find to wonder at on a golf course? I'll tell you. It's all round you, whether you're on a tractor or on foot following a mower.

Grass.

Doesn't sound much like magic, does it? But I'm cutting it all year round and it's magic all right. Did you ever wonder how many blades of grass there are on a golf course? Count how many in a square foot.

Each of those blades, in good spring and summer weather, pushes up something like four inches a week, sometimes an inch a day. Can you imagine just what length of grass there is pushing up out of the ground every day? Every minute?

What does it? I don't know. It's just grass. Growing in dirt.

53560 square feet there are in an acre, and there were around five hundred acres. Around twenty-two million square feet. Take your own number of blades of grass for a square foot. Two hundred, at an inch a day would make over five metres of grass-blade. Five metres multiplied by twenty-two million? Work it out for yourself. I make it a hundred and ten thousand kilometres of grass a day. That's power. Just grass. Growing in dirt.

What does it? Nearly three times round the earth, in one golf course. Some blade of grass. Let's know if I've worked it out wrong. I might have exaggerated the four inches or under-estimated the two hundred blades.

It's something I can't grasp. The power in the bits of sand and dirt, and the water we give it, I can't understand how it goes on churning out magic day after day, and me there cutting it fast as it grows.

Sometimes when I'm hypnotised by the straight lines I'm drawing with the edge of the cutters on the fairways, I think: what if with some other magic, some additive, we could eat grass? Fast-growing, hardy, needs no care, just dirt and water.

I get carried away for a bit then look up and see I'm heading straight for a tee where some joker's hitting off. You can't cut fairways crooked, so you can't swerve. If the ball's coming straight at you, all you can do is cut
the motor and go to ground. Taking care you don't lose a leg in the cutters on the way down.

She only looked at it for a second and she knew. I wish I hadn't asked her.

LIZ THE LARGE

Elizabeth Large was her name, but so many people called her Big Betty that when she moved up the hill on the Mead, she told everyone her name was Liz. Better she should have christened herself afresh, but she stuck with her parent's choice.

They called her Liz the Large. She had a big mole, brown as a scab, on her cheek, and one single hair poking up out of it.

She wasn't always a big woman. Twenty-five years ago she had been fifteen and she and her girl friends had nothing better to do on weekends than follow the football round. When young girls follow football they get to have some liking for footballers.

Johnny Bickel—he later played second row in grade, but never made it to representative teams—
thought she'd be an easy root and began to take notice of her, and she responded to what seemed to be the new world opening before her. The other girls had to watch from a distance and eye off other boys when Johnny let Liz go with him to the games and sit there waiting for him to shower and come to take her out after he'd had a few beers with the team.

Johnny was pleased at the prospect of a whole new girl opening before him, too. However, that's not the way it happened.

In later years, when she was drunk, which was five times a week, she'd come out with her story, and everyone would pretend it couldn't possibly be true. Just to keep her going.

‘Don't come that sorta bullshit with me,' they'd say. ‘There never was a time you were like that.'

Sometimes when she insisted and they kept on at her, she'd squeeze out a few tears. It wasn't easy. She was a big horse and hard as nails. Two years before, I hit her on the arse with an airgun slug and she didn't even twitch.

‘You believe me, don't you?' she said to me.

‘Course I do, Liz. Believe what?'

‘You know, about me and Johnny.'

‘Johnny who?'

‘You don't really know?'

‘Not yet.' I took a swallow, put the glass down and listened.

‘I was only fifteen. Not fat like now. A skinny kid. Johnny was a footballer.'

‘Johnny who?'

‘Bickel,' and her voice had a shade of alcoholic reverence.

The name rang a bell. There was a real estate agent called Bickel, his name plastered all over the place, vacant blocks, houses. You know the thing: Sold By, etc.

‘He wouldn't believe I was a virgin. But I was. He took me down by the river, you know where the bridge is in Parramatta Park, where the willow trees come down near the water. It wasn't a car park then, it was all grass down to the water. I wanted it to be nice for him, but he couldn't get it in.'

‘Couldn't?'

‘Couldn't. Something about the way I was made, or just being so young. He got the tip of it in, but for a long while he couldn't get the rest. He got it out and put spit on it and kept trying. At last he got me to put my legs up against two trees—I was hurting in the back from the ground and little stones, but he kept trying—and with the tip in he sort of drew back and set himself and dug his feet into the ground and drove. Later he said it was how he was supposed to push in the scrum, but he wasn't laughing then. He looked very grim. It was hurting him, too, poor Johnny. But he got it in. When it went in, it went so fast he knocked all the
breath out of me. And kid I didn't need all the breath I had.

‘But you should have heard him. He was quiet for a second, then this look came over his face and his hands dug into me and he started real low: Ooooooooorrrr, and he didn't stop till he was yelling.'

‘Sort of a victory yell?' I suggested.

‘Don't give us the shits, Meat. He pulled it out as slow as he could, it was hurting something dreadful, and when it was out I looked and the skin was peeled right back from the tip like a banana.'

‘Tough,' I commented. ‘What did you do?'

‘Do?' she almost yelled. ‘You shoulda seen me! When he pulled out, there was blood everywhere!'

‘Poor Johnny.'

‘Poor bloody me! I was all torn inside.'

I looked at her stupidly. It had always been part of our boys' culture that as soon as girls were big enough they were old enough and when they were old enough they were big enough. It had no place to accommodate this bit of body news. Big enough to drive a team of horses through, big as a horse's collar, yes, that was the extent of our caring. But torn?

Poor bitch.

She didn't want to say any more, maybe because then the bloke came in that she was living with. For years she was cocking it up for all and sundry, but now she lived with a bloke.

All the time she was cocking it up she was married, but that was different. He was only her old man. She lived with this new bloke in a station waggon parked near her husband's place. When they weren't there, they'd be at the Cross.

They'd been there so long, the milko delivered milk to the car.

As I said, she wasn't a skinny kid now, she was big and fat. And sometimes she liked to pretend she was being bullied.

I was going past the station waggon one night around tea-time, taking Danny up the hill to his place—his pains were bad, too bad to keep drinking—and I passed the car which was the home of Large Liz.

‘If you wanta sleep with me tonight,' she shouted, with a laugh in her voice, ‘You'll have to sleep in the bath.'

It was a hot night, there was no bath, and sleeping with her would be like sleeping in a bath anytime.

In the pub she had a habit of getting her drinks when it was her turn to shout, and backing away from the bar stern first. That was OK, but instead of sort of sliding sideways and back, she'd charge backwards out into the main stream and rarely did she miss backing into some poor bastard with a beer, or since it was near the taps, more likely three or four schooners in his hands.

‘Hey!' the bloke would say, surveying the damage and looking at her.

‘Sorry,' she'd say.

A man would have felt bound to replace the spilt beer, but that sort of equality hadn't reached Liz. The man would see it was a female, shake his head and say lamely, ‘That's all right, love.'

Next time she got a beer she'd do it again. Never seemed to make the connection between this time and last.

Funny thing. About three weeks after she told me the story of Johnny's getting peeled, she was passing me to get a drink and said out of the blue, ‘I had to go to a specialist with it. But they could never fix it up. Not the way it was before. Johnny opened it right up.'

The guy with me gaped, but when I didn't say anything he didn't ask.

Poor Liz. We heard only a while ago something was the matter with her. Her attendance at the pub had been a bit erratic; when she came in she didn't have the same old bounce, and she went down from schooners to middies.

One day, a bit curious—besides, she wasn't a bad poor bugger—I drove up to the station waggon and parked opposite, putting the bonnet up and fiddling with the hose clips. A doctor was with her. They'd
called him from the glass-sided public phone up the street, and she lay in the back of the station waggon. The doctor opened the side curtains to get a good look at her, and he was hunched up on the floor of the waggon trying to examine her.

There were sounds of arguing.

‘Look,' he was saying. ‘I'll tell you when you're dead. I'm the doctor, not you. I'm an expert and the instruments say you're dead. You've got no pulse for a start.' She was so massive, her pulse was miles under the surface.

‘But I'm here talking to you.'

‘So there's life after death.' He was a young doctor.

‘How could I talk if I was dead?'

‘Any more lip out of you and I'll sign the death certificate now.'

He folded his arms, looking down on her from where he knelt on the waggon floor. There was very little room, but he managed to look imposing.

She began to yell a bit weakly, Help, Help, and the like.

I walked over, rubbing my fingers on a piece of scrap rag.

‘I'll show you up! You'll never get the better of me!'

She saw my face round the end of the vehicle.

‘You're my witness, Meat. He's making out I'm dead. You can see I'm not dead, can't you?'

She didn't sound too sure herself. But I can tell movement and the sounds of sensible speech.

‘You'll never die, Liz,' I said. She cheered up.

‘Yeah, wouldn't be dead for a million bucks,' she said defiantly.

The doctor was uneasy with a third person present, and I was about to chip him about the way he treated people. Then I remembered I might have an accident or something one day when I was full. He might come to my accident and treat me, as they say, conservatively. You know, just leave you. Do nothing. I decided not to offend him.

What? What was I thinking of? Bugger him. ‘I heard what you said,' I told him. ‘You do what you can for her.'

She sort of recovered for a while and went back to schooners but she always looked peculiar. Then she went down and down over the next two months, to middies, then to sevens, and finally got so low they moved her to hospital over her protests.

She didn't know and the doctor didn't know, but when the ward sister saw her after they'd bathed her, she moved her to Maternity.

‘What's all this?' Liz wanted to know. ‘Come on, what's the strength of you mob? What am I doin' here?'

The other ladies with big bellies in the ward, and nice coloured tops over their nighties, sitting up in bed reading magazines and sniffing the big bunches of
flowers that were all round the place, smiled at Liz the Large.

‘Just rest, dear,' they said. ‘Sit back and rest. There'll be a cup of tea along in a minute.'

‘Rest be buggered,' says Liz, undaunted by the prevailing kindness. ‘I'm crook and they go and stick me in here. It's unreal. Me, in the pudding club! They're bloody mad.'

‘When is it due?' asked one young lady in a nice voice.

‘Due?' she choked, although her voice sounded, they tell me, as if the volume had been turned down quite a bit. ‘Due? I'm not due. Nothing's due. I'm not having any kid. Jesus Christ, this can't be happening to me!' And she turned her face away. In the other direction, actually, but there was another woman with a fat belly smiling at her. Liz groaned and looked away.

‘Will you all stop grinning at me? You give me the pip.'

The day before she would have said shits. They were wearing her down already.

And she could feel it. When they brought her some pink night wear—Liz didn't have any to bring to hospital, she always slept rough—she made a fuss, but in the end the young nurses got her into it and combed her hair and fluffed it up a bit around the sides—Liz always had it drawn back tight out of the way so it wouldn't get in her beer—she looked a lot less like the
old Liz and a lot more like the rest of the ladies waiting for their babies.

At first she resented this. Why did they have to doll her up like the others? She didn't feel right. But by next morning, after the best sleep she'd had since she was a little girl in pigtails, it somehow didn't matter so much that she was different.

When the night nurse hovered near her, she woke instantly—she always slept light in the station waggon, all sorts of characters got up near the Lake—and was just about to tell her to get to buggery, when her eye caught sight of the other beds and several of the bellies that were facing up, what with their owners sleeping on their backs.

Instead, she said, ‘You don't have to worry about me. I'm all right.'

The nurses told stories to each other when they had their tea break about difficult patients they'd had. It wouldn't have done Liz any good to know she didn't even get a mention.

The next two weeks were a new life, even though both kidneys were failing and they were trying to keep her alive till the baby came.

As she sank lower, she still didn't believe there was a baby. Not even when it was kicking. She'd always had a full belly, and the little thing inside her didn't take up enough room to swell her out any more than she already was.

Word got around and we made sure the boys gave her a visit. Sharon was always on duty in visiting hours, so we fixed it with the publican for her to take an hour off in a slack time. When he looked a bit doubtful, we pulled all the boys out of the pub and showed him how slack business could get and he agreed right away.

Most of them said later they never knew Liz the Large would come up so well with a bit of care and soap and looking after.

In a fortnight she sank as far as she was going to, then fell right through the world. As she seemed to go, one of the women noticed—it was ten in the morning, opening time at the Cross—and called the sister. They got screens round in a hurry, saw they couldn't do anything for Liz and then remembered the baby. They looked at each other. What now?

There was no doctor around, so they pulled the blanket down and Liz's nightie up, spread her legs wide, lifted her knees high and had a look.

The top of a little head—only a square inch of it—was on show. They smiled then, and spoke to Liz. Quietly, but close to her ear so she'd hear if she was still conscious.

‘It's your baby, Liz. He's coming now. Just a little squeeze now. Bear down, love. Bear down. Can you hear, sweetheart? Just a bit of effort. Come on now, help us. You can do it. We'll see it gets looked after.'

She must have heard, because the muscles in the big thighs tensed and the huge stomach moved and the little head slid out. It was covered with short, but very dark hair. Liz had black hair.

‘Bit more now, love,' they said. ‘Better if
you
do it. Come on, don't go away. Liz! Another effort. Push now. Bear down. Come on, one more time.'

The stomach moved again, very slowly, but it was enough. The baby slithered out into waiting hands. They upended him quick and got him to yell and clear his throat.