Matthew Flinders' Cat (22 page)

Billy made his way round to the bottle shop but when almost there he turned back and hurriedly left the pub. He’d promised to visit Trevor Williams to talk about his daughter. If he was drunk, they wouldn’t let him into the ward. Billy needed to think and a bottle wasn’t going to help him sort out the mess he was in. He crossed the road and made his way up the Domain steps and back to the Botanic Gardens. His emotions threatened to overwhelm him. He had a growing sense of panic. The urge to retrace his steps to the bottle shop was tremendous. He found he was biting his lower lip. The two drinks at Marion’s Bar had barely been enough to steady his nerves after the incident with Sally Blue and the quarrel at the bank. Marion’s warning not to go near Ryan was a much larger concern. He couldn’t imagine how he’d managed to get himself into such a mess and he was afraid. He needed to stop, to think, to sit among the flowers and hear the sound of water over stone until the information whirling around in his head stopped long enough for him to make some sort of sense out of it.

Instead of making his customary inspection, Billy made straight for his bench beside the pool, where he could sit in the shade cast by the Moreton Bay. He’d heard that if you went to a certain office in the Town Hall, they’d give you a bus ticket anywhere you wanted to go as long as it was a long way from Sydney. It was something to do with the Olympics coming in 2000, and the city fathers were testing the idea of getting all the derelicts away from the city during the Games. He could go to Surfers Paradise, stay there until the boy had forgotten about him.

Billy went over the whole litany again, his abdication of all responsibility so that he owed nothing to anyone. He was a drunk, plain and simple, and was permitted to enjoy the rights of a drunk, which were to be completely unreliable and irresponsible. What did it matter to him whether the black man found his daughter or, more importantly, the boy was saved from a perilous future? Billy even reprimanded himself for thinking that he could make a difference or change the seemingly inevitable course of the child’s life.

‘For Christ’s sake, who do you think you are?’ he chided himself. If there was illness and addiction in Ryan’s family which seemed likely to lead to problems in the future, that was the concern of the Department of Community Services. This last argument, Billy knew, wouldn’t stand too much cross-examination. DOCS was known to be hopelessly inadequate and he’d recently read somewhere that it was in such a bureaucratic muddle it currently had some seven thousand reports of child neglect on its books that were uninvestigated. Almost every month in Australia a child was murdered through neglect or by a parent or a de facto while intoxicated or under the influence of drugs and usually long after the department had been made aware of the danger the child faced from repeated mistreatment or neglect. Ryan, with a mother and grandmother still alive, living under an apparently safe roof, with only a record of minor truancy and without reports of physical abuse, had no chance of even getting onto DOCS’ books.

Billy tried to persuade himself that while Ryan’s grandmother seemed very ill, perhaps in the terminal stages of cancer, his mother obviously still cared about him and gave him money for food. While it was not perhaps the ideal situation, the boy seemed to be coping and it was well known that some heroin addicts managed their addiction for years. He’d only known the lad for a few days, far too little time to forge a strong, caring and mutual relationship, so why should he take any unnecessary risks?

Billy had almost convinced himself that there was nothing to be concerned about except for the danger that threatened him. Derros were generally uninterested in the moral standards of society, being as they were on its fringes, but the one thing they would react to is paedophilia. They would hunt down someone in their ranks who was thought to be corrupting an innocent young boy and more than likely they would kill him. This was Billy’s first great danger. The second was, of course, the wharfies at the Flag, where he could very easily find himself wrapped in a length of anchor chain and dropped to the bottom of the harbour. And there was Marion’s warning to beware of Ryan’s mother and her associates, perhaps the greatest one to worry about.

Billy knew that the murder of a homeless person and, in particular, an alcoholic, was of no concern to anyone. In his case it might receive a few lines tucked away in the back of the
Sydney Morning Herald
and the
Telegraph
,
‘Once-prominent barrister found dead, believed to have been murdered, the police are making inquiries, etc, etc, ho-bloody-hum
.’

The uncaring nature of society in general was often talked about among the homeless and by derelicts in particular. They loved to tell the story of the time during World War II when the Japanese midget submarines came into Sydney Harbour and two of them were captured. It seems the navy was concerned that they might be booby-trapped and so a bomb-explosion expert was called in to examine the wiring. However, the navy weren’t prepared to take the risk of sacrificing a valuable expert, so they sent two navy policemen up into the Domain to find a couple of derros, whom they threatened with a fate worse than death and frogmarched down to the docks, where they were made to enter the submarines with instructions to tug on wires and generally crawl about. The reward, if they made it back, was a bottle of scotch each, a commodity in very short supply during the war.

The story had long since entered the folklore of the homeless and was often enough told for laughs among the derros. It would usually end with the statement that the navy never did come good with the scotch and, instead, substituted a kick in the arse and two bottles of cheap overproof rum. Billy had always believed that behind the laughter lay the recognition that society thought the two men weren’t worth a pinch of shit. He doubted that things had changed very much since that time. Killing him or, as in the case of Ryan’s mother, having him killed wasn’t a very big deal.

Billy could think of no other way out of his predica ment than to take the bus out of town and decided to make inquiries at the Town Hall first thing in the morning. He’d get blotto tonight and then book himself into Foster House and the drunk tank so that he’d be safe. He told himself that the primary reason for doing this was so that Ryan wouldn’t find him in the morning. He even managed to persuade himself that, because of the complications involved, the sooner the boy was rid of him the better. If he was murdered and the story got out, as inevitably it would, it might have a far-reaching impact on the boy’s life.

Feeling he’d at least made a decision, even though a tiny voice deep within him protested that as usual he was copping out, Billy now busied himself making poison pellets with the six slices of bread he’d garnered from the drop-in centre and shortly thereafter set out for the library steps to do his worst.

After this, Billy crossed the Domain and made his way up Bourke Street to William and up the hill, where he turned right into Victoria Street and headed towards St Vincent’s. Passing Cesco’s, he noted that the bicycle wankers were long gone and now an altogether more ordinary-looking citizenry occupied the pavement tables and the interior. Billy purchased four Florentines, remembering how surprised he’d been to see that just about the only part of Williams that seemed not to have been injured by Casper’s mob was his mouth.

Trevor Williams seemed both surprised and pleased to see him. ‘Gidday, Billy, how yer bin?’

‘Never been better,’ Billy lied, reminding himself that he was a whole heap better off than the Aborigine. He grinned down at Williams, ‘How’s the white-onwhite world treating you, old son?’

‘Could be worse, mate.’

‘Brought you a special treat,’ Billy said, resting his briefcase on the bed and reaching in for the biscuits he’d bought. ‘Florentines, fruit and nuts, a bit chewy, how’s your teeth?’

‘What’s left o’ them’s real good,’ Williams grinned.

‘When them mongrels had a go at me, all I could think was ter protect me ’ead and mouth. If I can think and sing, it don’t matter if they’ve broke me ribs and kicked me in the balls so there’s no more little Williamses gunna be runnin’ about the bush.’

Billy placed the bag of biscuits on the locker beside the bed and noticed that a harmonica lay on it. ‘Harmonica, eh? You play the harmonica?’

‘Yeah, well we’re a musical family, like. Me missus was Irish and she had this real good voice, contralto, and me little daughter’s even better. I sing a bit, you know, go along, harmonisin’ and that and . . .’ he nodded his head towards the harmonica, ‘use that for the accompanying.’ Williams smiled shyly. ‘I done them a little concert in here last night.’

‘Concert?’

‘Yeah, some o’ the old bush ballads and a bit o’ country, sister says they’re all askin’ that I do it again ternight.’

‘Mate, that’s great, you must be feeling a bit better?’

‘Ribs hurt a fair bit when I’m blowin’, but it ain’t too bad.’

‘You say your daughter sings?’

Williams’ eyes lit up. ‘She’s the one’s got the talent, jazz, the blues. A man don’t want ter brag, but she’s got a voice get yiz crying every time.’

‘Jazz, eh? I used to sing a bit myself, university revues and later at amateur concerts.’ Billy laughed. ‘More bravado than basso profundo, I’m afraid.’

‘Yeah? You sing, eh, Billy?’ Williams was plainly delighted.

‘No, not any more. Now, tell me about your daughter.’

‘You ever heard of Billie Holiday?’ Trevor asked.

‘Of course, the blues, there’s never been anyone better, not even Ella, tragic life though.’

‘Well, that’s me daughter, the new Billie Holiday,’ Williams said proudly, then thinking Billy might feel the comparison inappropriate, hastily added, ‘Well, that’s what this Yank at the conservatorium said.’

‘Conservatorium? Your daughter has a trained voice?’ Realising this might sound patronising, Billy quickly added, ‘That’s unusual in a jazz singer.’

‘Grazier’s wife, Mrs Johnson out Wilcannia way, she heard Caroline singing when she were twelve years old and put her in for the country eisteddfod. At sixteen she gets this scholarship. Yer know, ter go ter the Adelaide Conservatorium of Music.’ Williams paused. ‘Her mum were that proud, pleased as punch, me also, mate, our own little daughter.’

‘Don’t blame you,’ Billy said. ‘It’s lovely when the kids turn out well.’ He’d no sooner spoken when he realised he’d made a mistake. Williams, he now remembered, had come down to Sydney to try to find his daughter, who Billy guessed was in some sort of trouble.

The black man was silent and Billy was about to stammer an apology when Williams turned and picked up the harmonica and started to play. From the opening refrain it was immediately obvious that it was a blues number, a haunting melody that Billy thought he recognised, though he couldn’t quite place it. Trevor Williams withdrew the harmonica and started to sing in a strong and well-modulated voice.

Southern trees bear a strange fruit,

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root.

Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Williams picked up the harmonica and played the refrain, then continued singing. As his voice rose above the white curtains screening his bed, the ward grew silent. It was as if everyone held their breath so that they might hear his clean, strong voice.

Pastoral scene of the gallant South,

The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,

Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,

And the sudden smell of burning flesh!

The refrain followed and then Trevor Williams continued.

Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,

For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,

For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop,

Here is a strange and bitter crop.

A few moments of complete silence followed and someone started to clap and then more clapping followed and someone whistled, thinking the concert had started early. Billy saw that Williams was crying, silent tears running down his pocked and wind-roughened cheeks. ‘It’s her song,’ he said after a few moments. ‘Billie Holiday sung it first and then she took it up, she done it as her theme song. It’s what started all the trouble for Caroline.’ Williams grew silent, his dark blackfella eyes bloodshot and, although no sound followed, the tears continued to slip down his cheek and onto the white sheet. ‘She’s lost,’ he whispered. ‘She don’t sing no more, she’s gorn, been took away from us by the strange and bitter crop, our little daughter.’

The tragic song written by a New York Jewish schoolteacher, Abel Meeropol, as a protest against the lynching of Negroes by white Southerners in the thirties had been turned into a different lament, a black man in search of a child who had tasted the strange fruit and had been possessed by it. Billy reached out with his left arm, his Sally Blue plaster-cast arm, his blonde-andblue-eyed smiling arm, and placed his hand on the back of the black man’s. ‘You poor bastard,’ he said quietly.

Billy sat at the back of the bus going to Queensland. He’d arrived at Sydney Town Hall at ten that morning from Foster House after spending the night in the drunk tank, a windowless dormitory with twenty-six men in white beds a metre apart puking, hawking and crying out in their sleep. Although he had money in his pocket and could have afforded scotch the previous night, he’d chosen a cheap ’n’ nasty cask of moselle designed to put him off the air as quickly as possible. He’d taken the cask to where he knew the Mission Beat van would call and by midnight they’d dropped him, legless and forlorn, at Foster House. It was the only way he could face the prospect of spending the night in the safety and horror of a roomful of his own kind.

Cliff Thomas, the Salvation Army major in charge of Foster House, had given Billy the number of the office at the Town Hall to apply for a travel voucher. The office was the last in a row down a long, brown, polished corridor with the word ‘Travel’ hastily scribbled on a temporary sign outside it. Billy stopped to unlock the handcuff around his wrist before knocking. ‘Come!’ a voice called out. He entered to see a large, red-faced man seated behind a desk.

Billy stopped, unsure whether to approach. ‘Good morning,’ he said.

The official didn’t return his greeting but looked him over carefully before indicating the vacant chair opposite him. Without further preliminaries he asked, ‘Where to? Perth? Alice Springs? Not Tasmania, there’s no bus to Tasmania.’

‘Surfers Paradise,’ Billy replied.

The official shook his head and, as if talking to himself, said, ‘The derros and the Jews.’

Billy hesitated, he had a hangover and was not prepared for a confrontation. He’d taught himself over the years on the street to be obsequious. There seemed little point in reacting to rudeness or insults as he knew some officials gave vent to their frustration by abusing a derelict. Billy half understood this, the public could be difficult to handle and the appearance of a derelict often allowed a clerk to let off steam. Had Billy not been carrying the self-anger he’d felt when he’d let Sally Blue sign his plaster cast, he would’ve let the young bank clerk get away with his offhand manner. Billy had come to accept rudeness as part of being a nobody, but he hated racism. He accepted that while most people are covertly racist to some degree, the overt kind not only showed ignorance but also a prideful and belligerent attitude challenging people to contradict the perpetrator. He couldn’t let the man’s anti-Semitic retort go unanswered.

‘Are you also encouraging Jews to leave town?’ he asked.

‘Joke, mate, joke. Surfers Paradise, Jew-heaven,’ he said, not looking up, his pen poised. ‘Name?’

‘Joe Homeless,’ Billy replied.

The official shook his head and clucked his tongue, then looked up and asked, ‘Some personal identification, please.’ He held out his hand, an uninterested look on his face.

‘I have none,’ Billy said. He lifted his plaster arm and indicated the patch above his eye, ‘Mugged, they took my wallet.’

The official scribbled something on the travel voucher. ‘Your name’s Brown, Joe Brown.’

‘Thank you, that will do nicely,’ Billy said, satisfied that he’d gained a small advantage.

‘Don’t thank me, Mr Brown, just don’t come back.’ The official pointed to the wall on his left, ‘Now, will you stand in front of that little window, feet on the yellow line.’

‘Why?’ Billy asked, immediately looking anxious.

‘It’s for your travel voucher, your picture, so you don’t sell the voucher to another Mr Brown.’ The clerk shrugged, knowing he’d regained the upper hand. ‘No photo, no voucher,’ he smiled, ‘them’s the rules.’

‘Yes, of course, the rules, must have the rules.’ The system had got him after all. Billy’s paranoia told him that the picture would have more than this singular purpose. He rose, far from happy, and walked over to the yellow line, which was a strip of plastic taped to the floor. He wasn’t the first by any means, the tape looked scruffy and worn at the edges. ‘What about make-up?’ Billy asked facetiously.

The official didn’t respond. ‘Look straight at the camera, Mr Brown.’ Billy looked through the little window to see a camera lens pointed directly at him. A moment later a flash went off. The clerk must have activated the camera somehow, because Billy couldn’t see an operator behind the window. ‘If you’ll come back here, there’s one more thing,’ the official called out.

Billy returned to sit at the desk, where the travel clerk pushed a clipboard across to him and slapped a biro down beside it. ‘Write your name and the reason why you chose the destination, then sign it,’ he instructed.

Like all street people, Billy disliked giving his personal details to anyone, even if they were bogus. It was a question of principle, a freedom only the homeless enjoy. ‘Does it matter to anyone where I go and why?’ he queried.

The official sighed. ‘Are you being difficult, Mr Brown? Just sign the friggin’ thing, will you, use your new name.’

‘I’d rather not,’ Billy said.

‘Look, I don’t care where you go, providing it’s out of the metropolitan area and you stay away as long as possible, for instance, the rest of your life.’ He pointed at the clipboard. ‘The mayor wants to know your choice of preferred destination and it’s not my business to know why. If you fill it in and sign it, you’ll get ten dollars travel allowance.’

‘This about the Olympics?’ Billy asked.

‘Who told you that?’ the official asked, immediately suspicious.

‘I can’t recall, I heard it somewhere,’ Billy answered.

‘Yeah, that’d be right, little birdie told you.’

‘Is this a practice run?’ Billy persisted.

‘Practice for what?’

‘The Olympics.’

‘Yeah, it’s a new event, first time ever in the Olympics, a race to see who can get out of town the fastest, derros, alkies, druggies, psychos, schizophrenics, intellectually handicapped, the no-hopers and the useless, the whole shambolic. Finish line is, you guessed it, Surfers Paradise!’

Billy had to hand it to him, the man had a certain bizarre wit. His eyes met those of the official and held, ‘What about the Jews? They not included in the race out of town?’

The official looked surprised. ‘You trying to be funny?’

Billy placed the biro down on the clipboard and pushed it across the desk. ‘No, sir, there’s nothing funny to say about a racist.’

At that moment the door opened and a young woman walked in and handed the official an envelope. He extended his hand and took it from her without saying thank you or even glancing up. She left, an obvious look of distaste on her face. Billy noted that he wasn’t the only person to find the man odious.

The official held up the envelope. ‘I’ll ignore that last remark, Mr Brown,’ he said as he pulled open the flap. The light played through the back of the envelope and Billy could see three postage-stamp-sized squares showing through. The official dipped his fat fingers into the envelope and withdrew a single passport-sized photograph. He opened a drawer and produced a glue stick, applied it to the back of the photograph and stuck it to the travel voucher. Reaching for a rubber stamp, he pushed it into an ink pad and stamped the corner of the photograph, careful not to obscure Billy’s face. Later Billy would see that it contained the month and the words ‘Exit Sydney’.

The man pushed the travel voucher over to Billy. ‘What about the other photographs in the envelope?’

Billy asked. The official didn’t deny their existence. ‘Keepsakes,’ he said, smiling blandly, ‘to remind me of you.’ Then to Billy’s surprise he stood up. He was even bigger than Billy had supposed, the buttons on his white shirt straining fit to bust, the material between each button scalloped to reveal a thick matting of dark hair. He pointed to the door, ‘Garn, bugger off!’ he growled.

Billy shook his head slowly. Taking the voucher, he folded it carefully and placed it in the breast pocket of his shirt. Bending down, he clipped the handcuff back about his wrist, picked up his briefcase, rose from the chair and walked unhurriedly towards the door. As he opened the door he turned to face the official, who was now in the process of sitting down. Billy clicked his trainers together, shot his left arm towards the ceiling and shouted, ‘Heil Hitler!’

He went directly to the interstate bus depot at Central Station to discover that the bus for Queensland and Surfers Paradise was leaving in three-quarters of an hour and he’d arrive there in the early hours of the following morning. He had time to kill so found a railway cafe, ordered a takeaway coffee and bought six Mars bars to keep up his sugar level on the journey. Paying for them and the coffee, he asked the bloke behind the counter for a large plastic milk container. Billy knew these were readily available, all cafes used them. Con always had them on hand. But the proprietor was meanspirited, or perhaps just weary of the many derelicts who made their home in Central and begged him for money or goods. ‘No got! You go now!’ he said to Billy.

Billy was quarrelled out, so he crossed the road to Our Lady of Snows, the government-funded restaurant that dispensed food to the homeless. The lady there, grey-haired with a pleasant face, produced a plastic bottle and Billy explained that it would need to be a two-litre milk container so he could grip the handle with the fingers protruding from the plaster cast. She found one in the fridge and transferred the milk from it into the bottle she’d originally offered him, washed out the container and filled it with water. Billy thanked her. ‘You’re welcome,’ she said, then, noticing his takeaway coffee, added, ‘You could have had a coffee here, it’s free.’

Billy grinned. ‘Thank you, I don’t wish to seem ungrateful, madam, but even free it’s not a viable proposition.’

The woman laughed. ‘You’ve been here before then, it isn’t very good, is it? I think it must be the urn, they boil it. Taking the bus out, are you, love?’ Billy nodded. ‘Cold weather comin’, you’ll be better off up north,’ she said, then added, ‘You’ll need some sandwiches to take with you.’ She produced a used plastic bag and dumped into it five thick-wedged white-bread sandwiches, each pre-wrapped in gladwrap. ‘There you go, peanut butter, two jam and a cheese, that should see you through. Wouldn’t mind going with you, my rheumatiz plays up something terrible in the cold weather.’

Billy laughed, affected by the woman’s chatterbox cheerfulness. ‘You’re a fine-looking woman, madam, I take that as a compliment.’ He put the sandwiches into his briefcase.

She left him to take care of a couple of street people who’d come in for an early lunch so Billy sat quietly and finished his coffee. He rose and called over, ‘Thank you, madam,’ lifting the water with his left arm in recognition of her generosity.

‘Cheerio, then,’ she called over. ‘You know where to find me when you come back, name’s Gracie Adams,’ she laughed, ‘unmarried and ready to be kick-started!’

Now as he sat in the bus, Billy thought about the man at the Town Hall. With his background in criminal law Billy had spent most of his adult life thinking about why people behaved in certain ways. Over the years he’d observed how attitudes were built out of an accumulation of small incidents and influences. If a series of negative influences resulted in making a criminal, would the same idea work within a society?

The official at the Town Hall wasn’t really a Nazi, but given the benefit of the doubt, he was probably an unthinking racist, a Jew-hater, possibly without ever having experienced any harm to himself from someone who was Jewish. Ryan’s attitude towards Aborigines and his bias against the imagined sexual preferences of Greek men was a first planting of the seeds of racism, the tiny beginnings of the merry-go-round of hate.

Billy now turned his attention to the coming Olympic Games, whose largesse he was currently enjoying in an airconditioned coach flying along the Pacific Highway. When it was announced that ‘Sid-en-nee’ had won the bid for the Games the nation had gone wild with joy, which was shortly followed by a great deal of officialdom waxing lyrically and much pontificating.

It seemed to Billy that the Sydney Olympics weren’t just the usual bread and circuses designed for the pacification of five billion people locked into their lounge rooms for two weeks, but was instead the opportunity to show the world what Australia had to offer. Its major purpose was to attract new overseas investment and increased tourism. If the original purpose of the Olympics had been to create a celebration of youth, this didn’t seem to merit too much current mention in the newspapers. The main objective seemed to be to add infrastructure and hence increase potential wealth for the city.

The city of burnished light was already encouraging its citizens to practise wearing their ‘nice’ faces, to become perambulating smiley badges. Sydney wanted the world to see it as the cleanest, neatest, sunniest and most welcoming destination in the world. Not for what it mostly was – a deeply divided and superficial city concerned at the top stratum with individual greed and the carrying-ons of a social pecking order dictated by personal wealth and largely consisting of cultural airheads, while at the middle and bottom strata there was a growing sense of anger and despair.

With his bum ensconced on a plush coach seat heading for Queensland, he was now playing a part in the clean-up, with the evacuation of the hopeless and the senseless from the streets of the city. Billy hadn’t the slightest doubt that, as the Olympics drew closer, what he was doing willingly would eventually become a ‘highly persuasive’ exercise.