True Stories (31 page)

‘That was mine,' says the young conductor suavely, not missing a beat.

A station attendant hurries along the platform carrying in his bare hands a dripping lump of ice the size of a shoe-box. We slide away to the south. The sky is covered by clouds the colour and texture of a Carr's table water biscuit. So alienated from the world does one become on a train, as afternoon draws into evening, that one is not entirely sure through which window to look for the sunset.

‘Mum, are all the trains getting old now?'

‘I don't know, dear.'

‘Mum, when trains get too old to go, what do they do with them?'

‘Shhh. Shhh. Sit down. Shhh.'

1982

Beggars in New York

IN 1993, WHEN
I worked for a semester at New York University, I was standing one morning at the corner of Seventh and Christopher waiting for the lights, holding in my hand a plastic bag containing a sweater I had just bought. I was dreaming about the word
merino
, how it sounds Spanish but always makes me think happily of the bleached grasslands of Western Victoria. So, when a man's voice murmured something in my ear, I was not prepared.

I jumped and looked around. It was a young black man. He looked me right in the eyes and said again, huskily: ‘Can you give me some money so I can buy something to eat?' Before I could even think, I felt my face snap shut and my eyes go blank. I didn't speak. I turned and walked quickly away.

Halfway across the avenue, shame struck. It had a hollowing effect. What had, a moment ago, been me was now an arrangement of warm, newish clothes encasing a me-shaped moral vacuum, just a volume of air in the centre of which floated a shrivelled heart, hard as a nut.

You'd think that the entire housed, fed and employed population of New York would be walking around hollow like this, a host of echoing voids wrapped in impervious skins. But the relationship between the housed and the homeless of the city is much more complex than this. It's a subtle dance of surprise, challenge, demand, seduction; and its fluidity springs from the imaginations and personalities of the beggars, from their various styles of appeal, as well as from the constant fluctuations of guilt in the begged-from.

Mood is everything. Each encounter takes place in a rich context which neither partner can control or predict. Timing, facial expression, tone of voice all matter—also how deep your purse is stowed in your bag, and whether you can be bothered, at that precise moment, dragging it up to the surface.

For example. One lunchtime, I bought a cheese roll at a deli and went for a walk. When I opened the bag, I found that the roll was stuffed with half a dozen slices of cheddar, a week's ration—no way could I gulp down such a quantity. I culled it and ate one piece in the roll. This left me with five slices of perfectly good cheddar in a paper bag. What to do?

Along Sixth Avenue I trotted, carrying my little burden. The fact of having something to give away, something I
wanted
to give away, paralysed me with shame and awkwardness. What if I misread somebody's signals? What if I copped a scornful knock-back? What if a black person laughed at me?

As it happened, the first beggar I came to was white. He was a young man with long, tangled hair, sitting in lotus position against a building with his hands resting lightly on his knees, and he was chanting, with his head thrown back in histrionic ecstasy, ‘Jee-sus! Jee-sus! Jee-sus!' In front of him, he had propped a cardboard sign that said, ‘I'm hungry.' I stopped. He kept on chanting. I waited. After a few moments, he became aware of my presence and opened his eyes. I held out my paper bag to him and said, ‘Would you like this?'

An irritable look crossed his face. He clicked his tongue, reached out one hand for the bag, and peered into it with his neck on the aggrieved angle of a child expecting a boring birthday present. He dropped the bag on to the pavement beside him and, without another glance at me, resumed his posture and his chant.

I slunk away in a ferment. Had I expected
gratitude
? How grotesque. But still, I felt cheated of something. The encounter was unresolved.

One night, as I was travelling uptown to a concert, a black man in bedraggled clothes and broken shoes worked my subway car. People heard him coming, and became intensely interested in the patch of floor between their feet. The woman beside me addressed a very intellectual question to her companion, and he answered with gusto: this manoeuvre gave them somewhere to look other than at the beggar, who came sidling along the carriage, pouring out his accusing monologue: ‘Can't anybody gimme some money? I ain't eaten.'

No response.

‘How can I get a job and become a member of society if I ain't got no money to eat?'

Good question but no one moved.

‘Well,' he said with a heavy sigh. ‘I guess this must be my day to
die.
'

‘Jesus,' muttered the woman next to me. ‘This is a bit over the top.'

It had worked on somebody, though: I heard a jingle of coin. A ripple of relief ran through the carriage. No one looked up to see who had cracked. Our feelings towards that person would have been too complicated to express in one glance: thankfulness, for having been let off the hook, but also a tinge of contempt. Soft touch. Mug. This is ethically appalling but psychologically fascinating. The beggar's style was wrong. All he provoked was irritation and boredom. He could not make us like him. Something about him soured what little selflessness we still had. The very sound of his voice filled people with resentful aggression.

When I came out of the concert, it was raining. I walked down Lexington to the subway. On the concrete steps to the station, a black woman was sitting, without an umbrella, on a folded sheet of cardboard, fully exposed to the drizzle. She heard me coming and held up a cupped hand to me, with a smile of quiet, charming sweetness, and murmured a plea. Perhaps it was her manner, or the music I had just heard, or the rain: without a thought, I pulled out a note and pushed it into her cup.

I jumped on to the first carriage whose door opened and sat down. My Gahd! It was like a party. The car was full of people talking loudly in different languages. Everybody seemed to have been drinking. A white man who hadn't shaved for days borrowed my pencil to write down his phone number for someone. A moment later, he plonked down beside me, reeking of beer. ‘Don't be scared,' he said. ‘Who's the ex-cop on the subway?—the guy sitting next to you! I'm a member of the Merchant Marines. I'm a devout Catholic! So don't be scared.'

The door at the end of the carriage flew open and a beggar strode in. He was black, with dreadlocks and in rags, but his face was shining. Talk stopped. Instead of hiding their eyes, though, people looked up at him. He struck a pose, beamed round the carriage and began to sing. Close to his waist he was holding not a dirty paper cup, the traditional New York begging receptacle, but a little, brown, round, woven, African-looking basket: the shape of it gave you an urge to put something into it.

He moved along the carriage between the passengers' outstretched legs, not proffering the little basket, just carrying it near his waist with both hands. He was surfing down the car on the wave of his own voice. People gazed up at him while they burrowed in their pockets and bags. When he broke into ‘Hooked on a Feeling', a white boy sprang up and joined in; the beggar beamed and hi-fived him. The whole motley crowd of us burst out laughing. Any minute now, we would all get to our feet and start dancing and twirling and clapping our hands. Money flew through the air.

It seems so unfair. What does it mean? That even so low on the ladder of fortune, charm and sweetness of nature are rewarded? Or does it illustrate that unbearable remark from the Bible, which preachers have such a hard time explaining: ‘To him that hath it shall be given, and from him that hath not it shall be taken away'?

1994

Marriage

AT THE OLD
Royal Mint in Melbourne, where civil marriages are celebrated, it is hard to be an inconspicuous observer, for many of the wedding parties are small, some no bigger than four all told, and although I take my place at the very back of the huge Victorian room, wearing what I hope is an unobtrusive black suit, I can't help worrying that my spectre will show up in the background of the photos, a small grim figure with a notebook and a cold. Who was that woman? I feel I have turned into the Fairy Blackstick herself: sceptical, ironic, but still I hope, benevolent.

There's a cold wind and a weak sun on this Saturday morning. The Mint car park has savage little square speed-humps, and the building is still shut tight at nine o'clock. The pretty garden at the back has a sign that says, ‘No confetti to be thrown in or outside this building'. The plane trees do not observe man-made rules and are letting their big claw-like leaves lie about all over the grass. Round and round the building I roam, keeping my hands inside my cuffs, looking for an open door. One has an unfortunate sign, which must have occasioned its share of manly jocularity: ‘Please enter: Sentencing Committee'. I peep through a window into an office. Some wag has tacked up a poster saying, ‘Cows may come and cows may go but the
BULL
in this place goes on forever!'

Nobody around. I lean over the stone wall and find myself looking down on Little Lonsdale Street. I see a couple emerge from the front door of the Peter MacCallum Cancer Institute opposite. The young woman has a white dressing over one eye. Her husband is leading her by the hand. She is wearing a parka: her arms are not in the sleeves but the hood is on her head. She is weakened, stepping feebly. Her mouth is set in a line. Soberly he opens the back door of the car and helps her in. All this is done without a word or a glance passing between them: they have been here before.
In sickness and in health.
They drive away. Two parking officers chalk the tyre of the Alsco Linen van parked in front of the hospital.

The Mint doors have opened. The first wedding party has arrived, and is gathering its forces in the lobby. A little boy cranes his neck at the ceiling. ‘How hoi is it?' he asks. His mother doesn't answer. She is a beefy woman in a synthetic dress and high-heeled ankle-strap sandals. She is getting her camera ready for the bride. The boy, bored, trots off to the splendid staircase and scales the ornate banister. ‘Giddown off there,' says his mother without looking up, ‘or I'll smack you down.'

Ah! the bride. Her tender face. Her name is Kerry and she is marrying a man called Sergio. She and her attendants are carrying ethereal little bouquets. She gives instructions in a quiet, pleasant voice. They are waiting for the men. A few children cluster round the bride, getting in the way of the photographers of both families. ‘Now can we have this little devil out of the way?' says another strapping member of the sylph-like Kerry's family, smiling through clenched teeth.

How short a civil ceremony is! The celebrant, a Maltese Australian with serious eyes, a sweet expression, and the faint remnants of an accent, does his best to make it warm: he manages to utter formal phrases like ‘solemn and binding nature' and ‘by being in a prohibited relationship' as if they were drawn from the vernacular.

Australians are not much good at ceremonial behaviour. We have no public graces. An event seems to be that which a camera may record. There must be half a dozen of the big photographers now, galumphing about in their unsafe shoes, snapping from this angle and that, bridling and whinnying.

Sergio's grandparents sit quietly on their chairs.

The best man has a plain, naughty face: he is curly-headed and cheerful, with a mobile mouth and lively eyes, the kind of man who has looked like a grown-up since he was ten. He keeps wanting to laugh out of sheer high spirits. He grins and nods at everyone, including the Fairy Blackstick, who mentally crosses him off her hit list.

The high room echoes, even to the shy voices of Kerry and Sergio as they make each other vows which, on paper, are so breathtaking in their solemnity and import that if any of those present should turn their full attention to what is being so lightly promised, they might be unable to hold back a cry of warning.

But it's done, and now the kissing starts. Kerry has been around Italians long enough to pick up the habit of kissing on both cheeks. She is flushed and charming. Sergio wipes a cousin's lipstick off his face, turns to one of his large female in-laws and asks, ‘What' appened to Kev's van?'

There is nothing worse than a wedding for bringing witnesses out in a rash of sentimentality. Even crabby old Fairy Blackstick in the back row gets a lump in her throat, ten times for the ten marriages. What struggles have the protagonists gone through to arrive at this point? And what further battles lie ahead of them?

Some have made the booking and don't turn up. Today it's a real estate agent and a boutique manageress, both divorced and living at the same address. Was it a whim half acted upon? ‘Looks like a no-show,' says the celebrant. ‘Actually you'd be surprised at the number of couples who put the same address on the documents.' This is the way the world is going—at least for people who marry at the registry office.

Some couples (though none today) shock even the celebrant with the inappropriateness of their union. ‘I remember one couple,' he says, ‘or rather, I'll never forget them. The lady was beautiful, but the man was an absolute pig.'

‘On Saturdays,' says the official Mint photographer, ‘they're usually pretty good. But during the week you get all kinds. No shoes. One goes this way afterwards, the other goes that way. All kinds. But it's improving.'

Once the thrill of watching strangers sign their lives away has worn off, there remains the feast of tiny human dramas available to any idler in a public place.

A divorced woman remarries, with her small daughters behind her. The woman's face is as stiff as a schoolgirl's with shyness and nerves. She is wearing a really chic suit; pinned in her hair is a piece of pink fluff like what comes in a box with an Easter egg, and she has fixed to her lapel a dashing little twist of net, as if to symbolise the veil she wore the first time round. When she turns and smiles at her girls, she screws up her face and sticks out her tongue as embarrassed children do. The girls, in tartan and pearls, try to sing ‘Here Comes the Bride', but nobody joins in and they fade out after the first few notes. A relative takes a picture. The girls stand cheerfully in front: ‘Bob down! Bob down!' cries the photographer.