Quipu (12 page)

After a time, one of the hazards of Curtin Square puts in its regular appearance. A gaggle of thirty or so council oafs heigh-ho past, brooms at the camber.

“Haw hullaw,” they cry. “Yuk yuk snort.” They bash one another about the back and shoulders, bugging their eyes at the revealed flesh, grabbing manly arses of opportunity and beating their hands up and down for each other’s information and amusement in the vicinity of their crotches. Adding to this sport, one rogue hollers, “Watch that bloke on the grass perrrrvin’ on yuz, girls. He’s up to no good.”

This was all your doing, Wagner.

The whole thing irritates me while it happens, primarily because stupid people scare me and secondarily because the charge is vaguely justified. So I become acutely uncomfortable.

In fact none of this ugly buffoonery attracts attention to me from the women, either favorable or the reverse. “Piss off, arseholes,” yells the younger woman in a gravelly voice. They continue their studies (several unidentifiable books,
Cosmopolitan
, a
Women’s Weekly
for godsake).

I crush my carton and toddle across the grass to deliver its remains dutifully to a bin, then find a bubbler and fire some water in after the milk, wash the coffee stains off my chin and the sweat from my brow. I stroll back to my bike.

Now it is important that you understand the next point, Brian. My emotion is not, and has not been, predominantly lustful. It is your failure to grasp this general fact that makes your sex-drenched scenarios so irrelevant. The propinquity of these wenches has lulled me with a soothing boojwah sense of God in his Heaven and ratepaying Carlton wives lethargic in their municipal park.

However, since I have been called on perving, and in line with your advice to strike up conversations with nameless strangers whenever possible, I decide that I ought to be civil and address my person to these ladies.

So up I hop. The older of the two is in shade, meager though it is. I’d prefer to speak to her (the direct rays of the sun tend to roast my skull, precipitating migraines and burning my nose) but that would call for an extra couple of steps and a self-conscious about-turn. So I sit down on the grass near her friend, who is facing me reading an enormous black academic volume. She has got to about page xi.

“If you started in the middle,” I say, “you’d get through it twice as fast.”

Certainly she’s registered my arrival. There is no reaction whatever. But I cannot just get up and leave. I feel like a flustered flasher. After a loooong pause she looks up and says, “I beg your pardon? Did you say something?” You sniveling boorish turd.

This was not the way you described the procedure, Wagner.

Trapped. The other woman has not turned, or even lifted her head. Lamely but doggedly I say, “Well you see, I noticed that your book is still hardly broached.”

But by now she’s back to studying the black marks on the pages with fierce scholarly intensity. After another stomach-crampingly attenuated interval she looks up and says, “I’m sorry. What did you say?” And is instantly back to staring at the page.

There is no overt hostility, no piss off arsehole, not even a killing snigger or shared look of disdain between them.

I sigh. “I see that you fully intend to disregard my specialist speed-reading advice.” No response at all. I groan slowly to humiliated feet. “Aw shit,” I say, “and a very pleasant afternoon to you both.”

To my bike, through the fence, across the footpath, over the lefthand side of Rathdowne St, up and across the median strip, on to the other lefthand side of Rathdowne St, boiling with rage, and away.

It was a great plan, Brian. Next time I’ll just stay home and blow the top of my head off.

::Joseph, Joseph, what a heartbreak old nervous nelly you are. Leaving aside the question of your abysmal dialogue, which no doubt you polished to a gleaming edge during those Edwardian longueurs while you gazed at the leaves and the spare unsucked straw in your Big M carton, hardly crucial since, if it were, the jocks who mumble their lips as they read would have been snookered out of the Darwinian Pool Game long since in favor of those of us or some of us at any rate with rather more advanced horsepower, no the trouble Joseph is that you waffled off there at the end instead of standing your ground.

::Suppose you’d hit your dreary interlocutor with a line like this (and you could have spent some time getting it straight, since she was patently as tongue-tied as you, and it hardly matters whether by genes or design):

:: “Surely you’re not actually a mental defective,” you could have told her. “Your head looks too big.”

::Naturally, this tack could lead to nasty bruising.

::Why not the blunt, candid approach: “Don’t be a bitch. I’m just being friendly.”

::Actually, old chum, as you say it was my mistake. You’re a natural bleeder, Joseph. We need to toughen you up.

::Seriously, Joe, it’s good to see you back to quipu activity. You’ve been hiding in your tent too long.::

1970: a flying fuck

Rozelle

Chez Contentment

11 March

My dear Joseph

Thank you for the plane trip back to Sydney—it was better than acid. And a lot better than hitching all that way.

Alone in yet another house (not Lanie’s and mine, I mean) and quite happy to be alone, listening to the ABC—nuclear power stations, state of engineering, and now the gentle abyss of musical notes…

I’m staying in Alan’s peaceful old terrace, sitting on the balcony regarding the breathtaking view of the harbor. It won’t last, though I would be glad to live here alone forever. But Alan will not be in America forever, and in fact his wife Jane will be moving back in here next Saturday. Nothing like the arrival of strange bird of alien plumage to bring the estranged wife flapping back to the nest.

So really I’ll be glad to leave. Alan’s domestic upheaval is only now starting to bite. There’s nothing placid about Jane—she’s rung here twice in his absence.

My room at Rozelle will make me happy. It’s small, narrow, with a sink and cupboard under a window looking down over the backs of shops. I hope for peace and good study. Lanie has the best room, fireplace and balcony, but noisy with street clatter. We haven’t moved in yet—get the key on Saturday. Sarah’s not coming in after all. We’ll have to advertise in the
Sydney Morning Herald
.

Actually my trip to Melbourne devastated me. A butterfly with maimed, scorched wings. Will I ever be able to fly? Why why why. It was okay the first couple of days. A little tense. I suppose it all fell in on me when I got back from my parents. They do it to me every time. It’s so dreary and boring—I’m sorry, Joseph, I’m really sorry. I hate what I do to you, what I
make
you. It’s pointless seeing me. I’m dreary, draining, dragging-down dead-end person—also I’m becoming extremely ugly—at the best of times wretchedly plain. This is literally true, not paranoid. The moth who used to be a butterfly.

Sorry about all this but I don’t care what I say with you, I have no pride, in fact I don’t give a flying fuck. That was good, lying on your bed reading to the rhythm of your typewriter, gazing out the yellow curtains, looking at you typing some silly thing for Brian’s quipu and you not knowing and not caring and the air warm and touching my skin, the ceiling high and the door closed just you and me and that typewriter holding us together.

You thought I was bored and wanted to go out—it wasn’t so. I’d have liked to dance for an hour maybe with you, with music blasting from all sides. You should try dancing, it’d help loosen you up. You’re not as clumsy as you think. So what else is new?

I’ve started at university and still don’t know anyone there. This pleases me. To be a shadow is a good feeling. To be lost is to my liking.

The lectures are disappointing, if you can be disappointed about something you expected little from. The staff are drab, humorless conservatives, “academic” scored all over their blank, flabby faces (thinking they’ve walked out of C. P. Snow). So what’s new?

Spent an evening with Antony and his new lady, Iris. Dinner, tuneless talk from both of them about people I’d never heard of. He played two of his own pieces on Iris’s guitar, pleasant enough. I started talking about how devastated & excited I’d been by the Pram Factory performance I saw in Melbourne (Antony knew one of the actors) and he responded with reticence. We used to talk so freely. His humor was stale where once I found it fresh and inventive. Iris, though, is a likeable person who tried very hard to make me welcome. I wish I was free to like her. So much for that evening.

Well, my dear, that’s it. There’s no point in sending this letter (or any of my previous ones) but I will, because there’s no point in not sending it.

11.42. You are a ghost afar.

Most of the time you are real, and I believe we have lived together. Other people are smoke always, once I haven’t seen them for a few days.

I’m not depressed or suicidal. I am living amazingly realistically. I don’t cry, I don’t lie around dreaming, I don’t clutter the room with continuous stupid remarks—I’m very alert most of the time, always on the ball in company.

I am beginning to adjust to reality. To really watch my face in the mirror and not deny it’s me, to affirm it is, that it always will be. This physical change is strange too. I can’t express it yet but I’m not lying about that either.

I visited a business friend of my father’s over the weekend—they’d rung him up, I suppose, fobbed him on to me, make sure I was eating. We talked and talked about the 1940s, had omelettes and claret and talked some more until 1:30 in the morning. Very satisfying. I slept well that night. Would they believe that, understand it?

Well distant star adieu until another night.

Caroline

J.—

Can we turn our faces to the wall and die?

Can we turn our faces to the wall

Can we turn our faces

Can we turn

Can we?

C.

1971: pack-raped by political bikies

In a tone of gentle logic Tom Nourse tells his daughter, “The police don’t start these things. They’re just ordinary family men with an unpleasant task. The only reason they’re out there in their hot uniforms on a Sunday afternoon is to protect the public’s order and property.” He puts his empty glass precisely on the wet ring it had left on the table. “I’m sure they’d much rather be at home with their kiddies, tending their gardens.”

Ray fills the glass and pours one for Marj. He sees violence in her. “As far as you’ve gone,” he says rapidly, “you’re right, of course. None of us thinks the cops are psychopathic bullies who thrive on sadism—”

“Like hell,” says Marjory.

“—or if we do get that feeling about some of them, we know it’s due to the larger context.” Curiously, the older man raises no objection; he looks on benignly. “You know and I know that some cops are thugs. It’s always been that way. One reason for having a police force is to give the hostility of brutal men a social function, buy them off if you like. That’s a truism, surely. But what role is the police force playing tomorrow? Look, this is Australia, not South Africa. Public protest goes back to the goldfields and beyond. Teachers make their primary school pupils memorize it all. It’s legitimated, almost part of the parliamentary process.”

Doris Nourse is less happy to hear this than her husband. She is clearly agitated, but says nothing. Ray argues: “If demonstrators did rush about this country looting and raping and killing, one might understand the law being out in force. Heavens, you’ve just got to watch the TV. When trouble does break out, the principal reason is that a few police have lost their heads and done something inane like riding horses into a crowd. And pretty minimal crowds at that, usually. You’ll have noticed that the politicians kept the police under tight restraint during the big Moratorium marches.”

“Ray, you’re a grown man. You know as well as I do that the police have to be on hand in case anything does flare up.”

“Flare up?” Marjory shouts. “We’re all too bloody comfortable. Are a bunch of bourgeois students and middle-aged unionists going to tear up the paving stones outside Parliament and burn down the Stock Exchange? You’re as out of touch as the baby Maoists.”

Is Tom Nourse a trifle discomfited? “It’s not that. You have to remember, they’re constantly being manipulated by the communists and the anarchists.” Ray and Marjory stare at him. “Those people’d stop at nothing if the police weren’t there to intervene. Look what they did in Czechoslovakia.”

“That’s exactly right.” Ray notices how calm he is. My God, he thinks. “All those communist students and workers coming out of the offices, factory-hands with flowers in their fists up against invading tanks. Really amazing. But surely you’re not saying that we too should—”

“No, no, I meant—”

Marjory begins very noisily explaining her dislike for Stalinists of the kind in power in the Soviet Union and its satellites; that she has read a number of history books; the distinct immunities to duped brainwashing that are imparted by a tertiary education of the post-Cold War variety.

She goes on in this vein for some time. Hungry and now post-coitally sad after all, Ray broods on the meeting at which Jan and Peter must even at this moment be drawing up their tactics by reference to Lenin and Mao and Debray. He shrinks on his garbage lid at the sincere dishonesty of what Marjory is saying. Vietnamese are burning and starving and being shaken apart by concussion, and the binary fallacy rides myopically in old Sydney town.

Beside, he thinks, she’s responding blindly to blindness. Marjory’s father is a stockbroker, competent and well-regarded by his peers. How can one reason, Ray asks himself hopelessly, with a person whose entire way of life has conspired to deform his values?

“Marjy,” her father says patiently, “these young bucks we’re talking about are still impressionistic, still going through the adolescent phase of revolt.”

“Terrific,” Marjory says scathingly. “Really terrific. You’ve been keeping up with the Heart-Balm column. Look mate,” and she leans toward him, stabbing her chest with a finger, “I’ve just done three solid years of psychology, on your money.”