The Glass Canoe (6 page)

THE PUB WIDOW

Friday nights were busy, drunks everywhere. So much noise you couldn't hear the BB guns popping at the butterflies. In the trees along the creek cicadas sparkled, croaked, throbbed, blared and deafened. You could hear them in the pub.

One Friday, the day of Freddy Mott's funeral, when there were still a few mourners who hadn't bothered to go home and change, dotted here and there in suits too tight and black ties, a woman came to the door of the pub.

There was nothing strange in that, but this woman wasn't a drunkard or a fighter or even an old bag, she was nicely dressed and sort of neat. She carried a small something in her hand but the remarkable thing about her was the look on her face.

If she was a man you'd say he'd come looking for the bastard that just ran him off the road in his nice new car.

But she wasn't a man. She was the angriest woman you've ever seen.

‘Listen to me, you useless lot!' she screamed above the hullaballoo and the cicadas. ‘I'm Missus Mott. We had Fred's funeral today. When he was alive he spent all his time with you always down here in the pub, so you can have him now!'

She took the lid off the something in her hand and with one furious sweep of her arm let the contents fly all round. Most of it fell on the nearest pool table. Drinkers and poolplayers gaped.

It didn't go far, just settled slowly on the green tables and the floor round about.

Freddy's ashes.

MAC

He tried to keep it dark, but no good. He tried to live it down: it just wasn't on. He'd been a copper and word always got round. No risk. He gave up worrying about it.

They all knew he was a gentleman, which he was, a real human man, but no one ever forgot he'd been a copper, and he never forgot they never forgot.

He never liked getting stuck talking to one particular crew. Not that he was a floater, he'd stay at one place leaning on the bar, but he wouldn't go round stopping at people and striking up a conversation. He stayed there, and they passed him or stopped and spoke to him, then passed on.

When he had a few he'd tell me of his early days in the force. ‘This inspector was always drunk and his favourite order was: Out batons and charge, boys!'
His face was a map of long-ago slashes, kicks and fractures. So ugly it was handsome.

And he'd describe fights where he had to go in and restore order.

‘Always took a backstop with me. Guard my back. Some of the brawlers, there was only one way to handle 'em. Whack, and down they go. Never bend down, use your boots, that's what they're for.'

And stories of his times up the Cross. King's Cross, not our Cross.

‘This Morrie invites me to his place on a Friday night for a feed. Well, I knock him back several times, then after a week or two he seems so serious about it, so dead set to have me, that I say OK, I'll be there.

‘I've met him in the street in drag, and he wasn't objectionable, he was well-spoken, clean, and I've said to him, if I did the right thing I'd run you in. Anyhow I lob there this Friday night and the place is a picture. The most pretty, the most comfortable little flat I've ever seen in my life. And I've seen a few. And the spread! You wouldn't want to know, it's some of the best cooking you'd ever see, in a good restaurant or anywhere. He introduces me to his girl-friend, a boy of course, and I forget I'm a policeman for an hour or two and polish off this dirty big meal. It stopped me, I tell you.'

And the girls working the Cross.

‘You'd see a bit of trouble down the road and when you get there it'd be two of the girls fighting. Pulling
hair, and their funny punches. You know, instead of the arm straightening at the elbow, they tense up the whole arm at a bit more than ninety degrees and swing this from the shoulder. Like the rocker arms on an old printing press.

‘Righto you two molls, I'd say. Stop it or I'll hang one on you. And to the one out of her beat, Get up your own territory. I wasn't on the paddy waggon, you see,' he said to me in explanation.

This was some demarcation; the man on the beat didn't take the money out of the mouths of the boys on the waggon.

‘What they'd do, they'd round up a few, take 'em round a corner somewhere and charge 'em ten bucks to get out of the waggon. Put it over there in the corner of the seat, you'd say. And when they'd gone there'd be no one to see you pick it up.

‘They had to be kept to their territory, or they'd fight all day. You can have a yard full of stallions and there'll be a bit of biting and kicking, then a leader emerges and they all settle down. But you have a yard full of mares and no leader ever emerges. Not ever. Fight all the time.'

If he thought you were pretty much a straight, he'd maybe talk of some of the dirtier side of police work. Like the domestic arguments he was called to settle in houses where the walls practically ran with cack and the smell something you'd never forget. On the floor,
everywhere. People that lived like animals and behaved like them.

‘Animals aren't dirty, Mac,' I reminded him. ‘Unless they're caged.'

‘I apologise to animals', he said.

‘Yes,' he took an inch off the top of a fresh middy. ‘The things humans do you never find in the animal world.'

‘They haven't got our imagination.'

‘Maybe it's that. Anyway you'd never believe the range of things humans'll get up to in the way of behaviour. Out Parramatta way we had a bloke used to come at night to the nurses' home, get amongst the washing on the lines and cut the gussets out of all the girls' panties. We set traps for him, but even when he was sighted no one could catch him. He was so fit he must have been a long distance runner. He'd been doing it for ten years, so maybe he was over the hill, I don't know, but we combed the force for a young athletic copper. He lay in wait night after night, finally sprung him and chased him. It took him five miles to gain on him and when he caught him he tackled him and lay on him until a police car brought help. He hadn't left that night's gussets behind, there they were stuffed in his shirt.'

‘What did he want 'em for?' I said. I wasn't too sure what a gusset was.

‘In his boarding house we found five chaffbags of scrap rag, and bottles and bottles of almost clear
liquid. I say almost. What's this? we said. I boil 'em, he said. Then what? I drink the water. It was a new twist, even to me.'

Apart from what he told us, we never knew much about him, and not knowing, we suspected a lot.

Mac would never really belong to our tribe.

At the corner of the red bar, Alky Jack was muttering. He might have been talking in our sleep for all we heard him.

My eyes followed his shaking hand up the arm to the wrinkled elbow and saw it in the grave, fleshless, relaxing to white dust. And saw the moment when the last shred of flesh parted, rotten, and the profound skull, free at last from all connections, rolled sideways to rest where an ear had once been.

MY DARLING

Was different from the usual run. To begin with, she looked like a little girl. Fourteen, sometimes. Sometimes seventeen.

When she appeared round a corner or you spotted her in a crowd of people you couldn't miss her. There was this light shining out from her legs and arms and face. It shone out to about an inch all round and when you got close to her and put your finger inside the inch, it felt warm.

In the dark, you could see her face clearly. It wouldn't have mattered what else she had or didn't have, the bloom on her smiled like flowers. When she laughed, you knew elves and sprites and fairies still sparkled in the world.

I don't mean she
was
a little girl. She was in business for herself, she earned Christ knows how much brass,
but for some reason she was stuck on me. I've never found out why.

She was the sort of girl that would call you Darling about a hundred times running, then ask if she was boring you.

One kiss was never enough for her. You were lucky if you got away with less than about a thousand. No use saying anything: you might just as well have thrown water into the sea.

And if you made love, she didn't pause for breath, she was into it, kissing until you felt you were going under in the sea. And if you made love again, and again, there she was, smiling. If you wanted more, she was there. Ready, and not only ready but waiting, and not only waiting but willing and eager. If you wanted to stop that was all right too.

No matter how tired you were, you got the full treatment; love all the time coming in a golden stream from her eyes. A golden blue stream, would you believe? If you were dirty and covered in sweat, no matter what the dirt was—concrete, oil, anything—she put her arms round you. Never mind her dress, or how you smelt, it made no difference. She loved you and that was it.

If you were late and she was waiting for you on a corner somewhere, she'd get a bit anxious thinking you might be run over, and you'd peep round the corner opposite and see her little face a bit taut, looking this way and that, up and down the street. Then when she
saw you this great smile would break out all over her face. It seemed as if her whole body came alive and joyful, her arms and legs sort of smiled too. And people looked at her because of the light shining out of her.

But when you were waiting for her and she suddenly came into sight and saw you right away, she'd run. No one who'd ever had her running towards them could ever forget it. The light, the face, and everything shining, and her pelting towards you, and when she was close enough calling out Darling! And she didn't pull up either. Smack straight into you. And if you couldn't take the impact, there you were both on the ground and she didn't care what bruises she had, you'd be laughing and kissing as if there was no one else in the world.

After Mac had gone I left half a beer on the table and ran out to the car. But driving up from the car park I left the engine running and came in and finished the glass.

Way overhead the helpless moon swung round the earth on Newton's string.

When I got to Sydney and she came down out of her building, she was so desirable her body looked fierce. Sharp rays of something shot out from her skin and hit me. She looked pleased to see me, but when she saw how I wanted and desired her and had a dry mouth,
she looked more pleased than any other time. She had a pen in her hand. She'd forgotten she had it.

She saw me looking down, and looked too.

‘Here,' she said. And gave it to me with such a love-look that I took it.

I didn't want a pen. I had one.

Later we drove out to the sandstone cliffs looking east to the sea. Where we stopped, to listen to night come.

AUSSIE BOB

He was once an Englishman, but he'd been out here sixteen years and considered himself Australian. In his spare time he taught boxing to the kids at the Police Boys' Club and most of the time I knew him he had one hand injured. I noticed that every time the hand hurt more, he got drunk. He got drunk if he had a bit of sickness. He got drunk if things went badly at work, or if young guys got promoted over him.

‘Who wants to get old,' he'd say. ‘You're RS these days if you're old. You've gotta be young.' RS means ratshit. I think it tells the story.

Bob drank whisky with a beer chaser or beer with a whisky chaser. One time he drank one way, next time the other. He always poured the last bit of beer in the whisky, to get it all. Sometimes he'd pour it back and forth three or four times, just in case.

‘Whisky's good for you,' he said. ‘You'll never get worms while you drink whisky. You take a glass of whisky and a glass of water and drop a worm in each glass and see what happens. Whisky shrivels it, water makes it healthy.'

He'd been all over the world for this company he worked for. His favourite story was of when the British were in India.

‘I was at a dance and met this real snooty woman about thirty-five. As I was dancing with her I thought This is good, she's rearing to go, and sure enough that night I took her home—to her place, too—and got me end in. They get better over thirty.'

‘Like a rattlesnake?' I suggested.

‘Yeah, but a day or two later I pass her in the street and raise my hat and say good morning. Young man, she said, remember this. Where I come from sexual intercourse is not considered sufficient social introduction. You could have knocked me arse over tit with a feather.'

A few months after this his two girls went out together with two local kids on a Friday night and got themselves killed. Car smash head on at a ton and a half on Highway One. Just went out for the fun of it.

I sent him a card. He didn't come into the Southern Cross for a while so I thought I might call round at his place with a few cans and maybe cheer him up.

In the yard next door a mob of fowls were battering an old hen. Really picking on her. It was probably
her
eggs they came from. Fowls aren't human.

I didn't make much noise. Perhaps I should have. The door was open, no one answered my knock, I could hear voices inside.

I went in, I didn't think he'd mind. As I got further, the voices were kids' voices. Kids of four or five or six. I can't tell what age they are when you get down that far.

I didn't want to interrupt, I just listened. The voices got older. Nine or ten. The kids were saying things like what they did in the holidays, and singing a song or two they learned at school, or reciting poems.

As the voices got bigger, they got louder. I came closer and up to a door that was open a little. I didn't go right to it, there's nothing easier to pick up than a movement close to a slightly open door. I stood about three metres back.

Bob had a tape recorder going, a little old one, and the tapes he was playing had to be his kids' voices. Tears were coming down his face, he wasn't even trying to wipe them away, and falling on to the front of his trousers where the fly is.

I turned away, found a table and put the beer down very quiet, and carefully made for the door. As I got there I heard the voices on tape change to boys' voices—his two other kids—and he shut it off and went
to another tape or else ran the same one back. His boys were OK, they were alive and kicking. He didn't need to cry over them.

When he came back to the pub, everyone gave him a few words and said how sorry they were, and this seemed to buck him up. He got drunk his first night back and wanted to fight everybody, bad hand or no bad hand. They all understood except one stranger, who invited him outside. He was going, too, but the boys pulled him back and Mick and a dozen others explained Aussie Bob's case to the stranger who saw the justice of Bob being allowed to shoot his mouth off because of grief for his two girls. Mind you, if a stranger had done the same thing when it wasn't a question of something as solemn and respectable as grief, they'd have joyfully thumped shit out of him.

Out in the pub yard, in a heavy shower a day later, Aussie Bob was fighting raindrops. Punching as they passed him on the way down. At one stage he copped an airgun pellet in the chest and said someone ought to do something about those kids.

The pub lost interest in his private battle. No one thought the kids ought to be stopped. You don't hang the cat because it kills a mouse.

Fate wasn't finished with Aussie Bob. Some months later, in October, his two boys went out in his new high-powered car, bought new for Spring when young
men's fancies lightly turn to thoughts of speed, and got killed inside an hour from leaving the house.

That finished Bob. He got on the piss every day, never sober enough to play his tapes of the kids' voices, and finally took to going to work drunk.

His mates did their best to hide him, and on night shift they'd persuade him to get out of sight. When the supervisor came in, Bob was always outside on the plant.

He was on the plant, all right. Lying down on it, sleeping it off under a cylindrical tank, which was supported on four short legs.

It had to fall. Bob had to be there when it fell. The grating supporting it was at fault, and the tank took Bob and the grating down eighteen inches to the vacuum tank underneath. A leg of the top tank fractured the vacuum tank and bits of Bob and grating were sucked into the vacuum tank.

There was no way of telling he'd been asleep. His firm made a presentation to his family, but there was no one to give it to. His wife died when the fourth was eight, he had no relatives in Australia. They put the money into what they call a suspense account, in case he acquired relatives.

None of these things should have happened to Bob: he wasn't made for tragedy; fate or God or something got hold of him and savaged him. Regularly we ironed ourselves out and we did it on purpose: he had it done to him and it was permanent.