The Story of Danny Dunn (46 page)

Helen was not to be outdone. ‘Or, as Sammy says, “A certainty is a dog that usually comes last at Harold Park.” You're right, of course. But there are two things I am absolutely certain of – my husband and my mother-in-law. Thank you, darling.' Helen rose from her desk, walked over to the small leather couch and perched on Danny's lap. Wrapping her arms around his neck she kissed him deeply, then drew back and said, ‘Which reminds me, Daniel Corrib Dunn. You haven't done your French homework for four days. Your teacher is getting anxious!' She grinned, looking at him lovingly. ‘I'll call Brenda in the morning and talk to her. How lucky am I, to have the mother I've always wanted in Brenda, and the man I've always wanted in you. You know, I really think I could have been a great publican's daughter. I like a good pub: the atmosphere, the noise, the camaraderie – it's pretty fundamental.'

‘Whatever that means,' Danny replied, unimpressed. ‘It's the pot where people come to get pissed, the pisspot. I guess that's pretty basic. Getting back to your trip, how would you like to fly to Egypt?'

‘What? By aeroplane?' Helen asked, surprised.

‘I know you're a positive angel, darling, but yes. I looked into it a while ago, when you first started talking about Cairo in that special tone of voice you have.' He smiled. ‘I think, from memory, Qantas flies to Tehran, then Iranian Airways would take you to Cairo. It'll take you a day or two, but it's a damn sight better than two weeks by P&O and another two weeks home. It'll mean you'll spend less time away from us, yet still have more time for research.'

‘Oh, how exciting! I've never been in an aeroplane.'

‘You'll be the first in the family to take an overseas flight, not counting the twin-engine Dakota that took us from Bangkok to the hospital in Rangoon.' Danny laughed. ‘Flying costs the same as a first-class berth on P&O. The posh people all prefer to fly these days, my dear.'

‘In that event, I'll stick out like a sore thumb,' Helen grinned.

During her time away they received an airmail letter from Helen every week, the single sheet of blue paper crammed with her smallest writing, full of funny stories that made the twins giggle, featuring her adventures with four major characters in the Cairo museum, where she was attempting to establish the whereabouts of the samples of the bandage that once covered the long-ago discarded arm of King Djer.

There was Ben Bin Bandage, the mummy restorer, who went to great lengths to show Helen all the wrong bandages.
‘But madam mustn't be so fussy pot. I can find you bandage nearly, exactly, almost identical, the same, only one thousand years the difference!'
Dr Abdul ‘My Goodness' No, who was responsible for unwinding mummies, whose first reaction to any of her requests was,
‘My goodness no, madam! These bandages, they are for the unwinding of, not for the taking of and using of and finding old resins maybe on the inside of that which was never seen before and I think is the poppycock and nonsense of!”
Fatima Frankincense, the mummy-stuffing herb expert: ‘
We are mixing secret spices for the pharaohs and also for madam's very delicious dinner tonight!
Madam is having dreams after eating. She is beautiful Cleopatra on royal barge sailing with very, very important Roman soldier, Mark Antonia, friend of Julie Caesar, down the Nile and hiding sometimes in papyrus. And very nice things they are happening inside there indeed!
And lastly, Mohammed the Mummy Minder:
‘Madam, if you want I can find you whole arm with bandage complete, not shitty small piece. They are having plenty resin, very cheap, genuine pharaoh, every satisfaction guaranteed! Goodwill to all mens!'

But reading between the lines of Helen's letters it was apparent to Danny, Brenda and Half Dunn that all was not going well in the search for the elusive resin-stained bandage. Then
a month after she arrived Danny received a cable from Cairo sent directly to his office.

NO LUCK BANDAGE CAIRO STOP
GOING TO LONDON FURTHER SEARCH STOP
SEND SEVENTY POUNDS C/O EGYPTOLOGY DEPARTMENT
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON STOP
LOVE HELEN

For three weeks Helen continued her search in the Petrie Museum at University College London without success. With her money rapidly running out she knew she would soon be forced to come home. Then she came across an entry in the register that simply read ‘Linen, Abydos, Dynasty 1'. Within an hour she had located the ancient samples, which were stored together with a swatch of the finest modern Irish linen, put there by Flinders Petrie as a comparison. Included was a note in his handwriting comparing the quality of First Dynasty linen with the best modern cloth, exactly as she'd read in the green book. Within a day she examined the Egyptian linen under a microscope and identified what she thought were minute traces of resin. Not long after, a university archaeological chemist verified the resin content, as well as the presence of two additional agents required in the mummification process. Helen was jubilant! She now had the indisputable evidence to support a groundbreaking piece of original research. The snip of a girl from Australia would have to be taken seriously in the clubrooms of the Athenaeum in Piccadilly and the hallowed halls of international academe.

On Helen's return to Australia, Danny and the twins, Brenda and Half Dunn waited excitedly at Sydney Airport terminal for her to emerge from customs. The twins held a handmade placard that read: WELL DUNN, MUM! and Danny another that said, YOU HAVE EVERY RESIN TO BE PROUD!

Now, in January 1960, Helen handed Danny a bound copy of her dissertation. Twelve copies had been printed and bound by the University of Sydney Press. He opened it to the title page:

ROYAL TOMB OR CENOTAPH?

Reassessing the Evidence from

First Dynasty Saqqara and Umm el-Qa'ab, Abydos,

with

Special Reference to the Arm of King Djer

****

Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

by

Helen Brown, B. A. (Hons), M.A., University of Sydney

January 1960

It would take at least a year, maybe more, for Helen's dissertation to be read and marked, and in the meantime life marched on at a steady pace, much as usual. Danny was getting nowhere with the council or the police over the noise and overcrowded tenancies in Brokendown Street, as it had become known to one and all.

Tommy O'Hearn, the ex-soap-factory shop steward, Half Dunn's nemesis, he of the water-polo and scuffed patent-leather shoe incident, was now the state member for Balmain, his seat won uncontested in the recent election of the Cahill Labor government. Danny had watched as O'Hearn soap-boxed in all the pubs with a swagger and a smug smile that he was aching to wipe off his fat face. The bad back that had prevented O'Hearn joining up had miraculously come good after the war was over. Funny that.

Danny had discussed with Half Dunn the prospect of taking the council to court over the blatant violation of the
Landlord and Tenant Act
but his father was quick to put the kibosh on the idea.

‘Danny, this isn't just a few councillors getting a backhander from a local developer – they're simply the small fry. Tommy O'Hearn's not a lot bigger. This goes all the way to the Premier's Department and the Police Commissioner. Too many windmills to tilt at, Don “Nifty” Quixote. Take my advice: bide your time, son. I haven't spent thirty years on a bar stool at the Hero without learning that every dog has his day; sooner or later these bastards will get what's coming to them. Something will happen, just you wait and see, mate.'

‘Jesus, Dad, how long does a man have to wait? I used to think we were the salt of the earth here in Balmain – tough, strong, independent, working class and proud of it. I believed that there are only two kinds of people: those who come from Balmain and those who wish they did. But now I realise it's all bullshit. It's the place where the Labor Party was born, but what good has that ever done us?'

‘Fair go, Danny —'

‘The bloody coal depot, the power station belching smoke into the air so that most Balmain kids can be heard coughing half a block away! The soap factories, chemical factories and any form of dirty industry nobody else wanted were all welcome in Balmain, right along the harbour's edge. The Balmain part of the harbour has more effluent and crap poured into it each day than anywhere else in Sydney, Dad. I should know. Some mornings when the twins and I go out on the harbour it's like rowing in a cesspool.'

‘You seem to forget people needed jobs, urgently. The factories, Mort Dock, coaling ships, the power station – they were jobs for the workers,' Half Dunn argued.

‘Sure, that's why we have the lowest per capita income of any suburb in Sydney. They brought all the lowly paid shit jobs to Balmain. All the fucking misery! Child abuse and wife abuse are bloody endemic. If it wasn't for the “Shut up and put up, you're from Balmain” ethos, I'd have the battered wives and kids of Balmain queuing at the front door every Monday morning all the way to Rozelle.'

‘C'mon, Danny. We run a pub. You know that kind of thing happens everywhere. Balmain doesn't have an exclusive on wife-bashing.'

‘You're right, but low pay, unemployment and drink go hand in hand with abuse and violence. During the Great Depression and right up to the start of the war we had the highest rate of unemployment in metropolitan Sydney.'

‘Don't I know it,' Half Dunn said. ‘Your mother and I took over the Hero at the worst possible time. It's down to her hard work and brains that we survived.'

‘Well, you'll be happy to know we're still bottom of the list. Yet we still vote Labor. As far as the Labor Party goes, we grant them permission to shit on their own doorstep! We're taken for granted and exploited and we cheer every time we get kicked in the teeth! Up the fucking toothless Tigers!'

Half Dunn grinned. ‘Son, I wouldn't be calling them that in the main bar; the mighty Tigers are struggling a bit this season.'

But Danny would not be distracted. ‘Now they're dumping the wretched of the earth in Brokendown Street and getting a kickback from a slum-landlord syndicate, and once again we're letting the bastards get away with it.'

‘You sound like someone who's preparing to go into politics, Danny. You planning to take on the Tommy O'Hearns of this world, eh?'

‘Nah, bullshit, Dad. I'm a criminal lawyer. But I tell you what, mate, I've defended some of the truly bad boys in the last few years, and yet the real crims are in state parliament in Macquarie Street and at police headquarters – the sycophantic bastards that follow the flash money from the so-called respectable families and city syndicates that have the real power in this city.'

‘I don't disagree with you, son, but what would you do to change things? Finding fault is easy – we're all experts at pot and kettle calling.'

The days when Half Dunn, fuelled by eight or ten schooners, had a theory about everything that amounted to bugger all of nothing were long gone. His native intelligence had surfaced, once his brain wasn't addled with drink, and these days his opinions were usually worth careful consideration. His reformation had started with the war, when he began to listen to war news on the radio and traced its progress on a map of the world. He'd always read Danny's university essays, a habit he continued throughout Danny's law degree, acquiring an education of sorts.

Half Dunn, unlike Danny, loved to listen to Helen talk about Ancient Egypt and seemed never to get enough of her stories. He recycled them in his own pub yarns until half the drinkers in Balmain had a nodding acquaintance with at least one pharaoh. Half Dunn could draw a crowd in the pub when he talked about the dwarfs that were buried close to the pharaoh and the role they had played in life and in court. The sex lives of the Egyptian nobles was another favourite topic. Half Dunn had an excellent ear and he'd spent so many years propped at the bar that he'd become a bit of a chameleon, shaping his stories to his audience. When he told stories to the twins, who learned much more from him on the subject than they did from Helen, he spoke simply, in language small children could understand and enjoy, but when he regaled the drinkers in the pub, he used their idiom. Danny, dropping by the pub to visit his parents, once heard him tell an entire story in the voice of one of the regulars at the Hero. ‘Lemme tell ya, those pharaohs didn't fuck around, mate. They shacked up with their sisters and daughters, even married them, the dirty bastards,' Half Dunn began.

‘Yer jokin'. That for real?' Davo, one of the regulars, asked.

‘Yeah, fair dinkum,' Half Dunn said, adding, ‘They also had as many wives as they wanted in their harem, kids everywhere, wives and concubines, plottin', even killin' each other and havin' a go at the old man himself when they got half a chance. Tell yer what, it weren't no friendly atmosphere – it was on fer one an' all in them royal harems.'

‘What's a concubine?' Bullnose asked.

‘A whore, only exclusive! The palace was crawlin' with real good-lookin' sorts.'

‘So what's the dirty bugger doin' screwin' his sister and his daughter, then?'