Spinner (34 page)

‘That's what I did. That's the thing.' Michael was talking to himself, not David. ‘O'Toole finally told a truth. Not all of it, of course. There are layers in your brain, says Freud, and the layers can lie to each other to protect other layers ... you can go a little bit mad so you don't go really mad. That's the theory. And that is also what I did wrong. I went a little bit mad.'

David was back against the chipped wall watching his uncle smile. He was like an actor on the movie screen, changing his voice to become a teacher, then a storyteller and then a sad old drunk, all by turns and sometimes within a sentence. It was like his uncle wasn't even out there, but inside David's head, imagined. Like the lady David also watched as she started walking into the water of the dam, her loose white dress spreading out on the surface of the water.

‘I promised your father I'd look after you and your mother ... only my foot developed an infection. Big flap of skin full of mud and bits of other men. Helen was looking after me. Her husband had just died. Solace. Soul-less? That's the thing I did wrong. That's the broken thing, there. I bludged. I stayed in hospital for longer than I needed to. As long as I could. I stayed back from the front and in a warm place where I slept and slept on dry sheets under warm blankets. I fed. Caressed. Slept.'

Michael looked at David, suddenly real again and open and raw. ‘She killed herself. I had time to get back to help her and I didn't and she killed herself.' He closed again, and with a lazy smile went back to making a story of it. ‘She couldn't take the loss of him. She died of a broken heart.
I had promised him I would ... and I didn't. The news of her death came by cable. That is the moment. Then, not before. I did go mad.

‘Insanity. It is enticing. Like drink. You can give yourself to it. It's like sleep. No pains. No chores. It's like falling, falling up. Hellie joined me, and we went mad together and shut everything out except what we felt with our skin and tongues. Wine and cheese and skin. They found us of course, not at Stonehenge, but in a cellar. I was discharged. Not honourably, but my missing toe misled folk. I was and am a coward but not in the way they all think. I stand falsely accused of a couple of crimes and guilty of the ones left uncharged. It's all fake. All chaos and random and meaningless. There, my whole confession.' Michael drank more brandy.

David said, ‘I don't believe you.' He leaned his shoulder into the wall and tried to push himself up.

‘Don't believe?'

‘I don't believe it's meaningless.'

‘It'll be true whether you believe it or not. Wake up.'

David stood, leaning against the wall to stay up. ‘I don't believe you. I won't believe you or any of your story.' David took some steps towards his uncle. ‘You. You're the stupid cow just waiting to die. We're going to get out of here and we're going to help Australia win. And we're going to be all right.'

David was shouting. The shouting brought the men.

Blackie and the other man crunched into the room with their bottle of sleeping stuff.

David ignored them. He shouted again at his ugly, drunken uncle. ‘I don't want to die. I want to live.'

His uncle said nothing and did nothing except look
emptily at David as the men grabbed him and held him down while they pushed the rag of horrid smelling stuff into David's face.

Black.

I didn't drink much that day and not much during the night either. I pretended to drink. I'm good at that, both drinking and pretending. I pretended to drink but would tip most of it out, so they'd think I was as drugged in my own way as David was with the chloroform. I had to hope they didn't overdo the chloroform, while I dried out enough to be able to manage some glorious, doomed, limping attempt at rescue. Perhaps I'd have more success than the last time I tried such a thing.

Me. Had you guessed? Yes, it's me doing the telling. Michael. And not as you'd imagine, not sitting in the front bar getting free drinks while I spin a tale, and maybe auction a few old cricket balls with dubious D.D. signatures, which I confess, I have done. Not then, but later, the survivor yet again who is fated/feted to look back and set out the exploits of his betters. I'm telling David's story for him, trying to get it in his words, from his point of view. You must admit, I was uniquely placed.

By the way, and for this record, I was not magically changed in the wee hours of the morning by my confessions to David about the various ways I had let down every person who mattered to me. I wasn't cured, after lying on that straw-filled couch in the abandoned house in The Rocks,
pouring out my brain pus to my twelve year old analyst. No.

But even I, the ugly, drunken uncle, saw they would kill the kid. As I'm sure you will have noted, repeatedly perhaps, I do not believe the world is just or fair. It is a Dickensian melodrama with a fair measure of Thomas Hardy thrown in. It is, of course, much worse than that, if we take out the irony. Even so, I felt David deserved the chance to live. Maybe it was the crack about me being the stupid cow, thrown back in my face. You gotta admit The Kid had pluck. So, fuck Blackie and fuck them all. It was worth a crack.

I tried to wake him in the last moments of night. This appeared to be when the anaesthetic was closest to wearing off, and also when Blackie and his offsider, Wally Timlinson, were at their least vigilant. I couldn't rouse him.

As David has observed, or at least me through him, the door had been locked, but increasingly less so as the Test match progressed and we behaved more like sleepers than escapees. I grabbed him under the arms and draped him over my shoulder, holding his arms with my left hand to keep him secure, but leaving my right arm free, in what was to become known as the fireman's lift.

The bedroom door was not locked. It was merely latched, and only took a perfunctory bump of my shoulder to click and swing inwards. I moved carefully onto the landing. There was a window there, unbarred, and mostly unglassed. I got over the ledge and found a small portico-like roof of corrugated iron. It bent and groaned under our weight, and I had to lean into the post of the next building's upstairs veranda in order to lessen our downward pressure. While I leaned there, with David on my back, I had time to look at the new day sky. Dark clouds were gathering off towards
dawn, like an army pregnant with intent.

The Rocks had had a long and inglorious harbour history, even back then, and had developed into a pretty ramshackle and condensed inner city suburb of long ill-repute. However, the old was making way for the new as they had started to build an impossibly long bridge across the whole of Sydney Harbour. They had torn down houses and moved on the poor, to make way for the big towers that would hold their bridge. The Rocks, that I looked down on, holding the post grimly, had all the look of a mildly bombed village in France.

I managed to keep hold of the post and inch us to the rotted wood of the next veranda. By leaning my left shoulder into that post to prop us both there, I was able to pull away the rotted rail enough to allow me to step across. Even so, it was a little dicey swinging us around the post, hoping it would hold, and hoping I wouldn't drop the dead weight of David. He was still breathing. And easier to hold than Earnest had been.

Ernie never had any arms to hold him on by. Both of them had been blown off at the elbow, when for once in his life his timing was off and he misjudged that grenade. Even though I got the tourniquets on, to stop the great gush of his blood, it still ran out all over my chest in a constant drizzle of his life. I'd tried to push his shoulders down onto mine and I'd tried to bend enough to carry him, but my foot kept catching and slipping on the duck-walk boards. Half my boot hung down like a the mouth of a dopey dog. For a long while he whispered demands for promises and declarations of love. I should have told him that I loved him back and I never did. Not a thing to occur to a lesser man. The whispering stopped before I made it to the field hospital, but I'm not
sure when. Or if it ever has.

I put David down when I reached the veranda. He had long skinny arms that kept on going to these fingers that kept on going too. If he hadn't had such long skinny legs, then his fingers would have dragged on the ground behind like some primate. I touched his cheek, finding it warm. He was alive. I thought of some mild endearments, but couldn't make them come aloud. Funny the few things that I can't say.

I took his arms and swung him up onto my back again, then kicked in the piece of corrugated iron that was nailed into the doorway of this veranda. It made an awful din, but gave easily. I ran with him down the stairs and out the back.

I headed uphill, away from the giant pillar that was part of the new bridge. It looked like a huge cenotaph that morning and I was looking for some living part of the city. I must have made more racket than I thought, because as I neared the end of the lane I heard Blackie shout and turned to see him coming out from where we'd been imprisoned.

I reached the corner, but there was Wally tracking us along another road, so I turned up the nearest gap between houses away from both of them. Blackie Cutmore, of the self-fulfilling surname, was later to shoot Squinty down in Melbourne. No honour amongst thieves either, it seems. Wally Timlinson was to later become Katie's lover. Katie was one of the two Queens of the Underworld of Sydney. Then Wally got shot in some other altercation over some other patch. But those pieces of colourful historic trivia had not yet come to pass. This day they were two fit young thugs steadily gaining on David and me.

There was a vacant block with neatly piled old bricks
and a parked lorry. I went the other side of the lorry and stepped magically into a normal street. Cars were parked on the road and milk bottles parked on front verandas. Smoke climbed from cooking breakfasts. It was as though we had spun from one time into another out of an H.G. Wells' time machine.

Across the way at the next corner was the Hero of Waterloo, a pub, illegally open at five or six in the morning. I kept running, trying to sense whether there was a heartbeat in the lad I was carrying on my shoulders.

There are small mercies in the world if you can just time your run to come upon them as they pass. For instance, although they hadn't yet brought in the concealed weapons laws that drove some of the more avid crims of Sydney to start carrying razors instead of pistols, neither Blackie nor Wally seemed to be ‘packing,' as the Americans say.

The second dubious mercy was the open pub. In an era when early closing was a major issue, and sly grog the beginning of many a dynasty including Katie's and Tilly's, it seemed that The Rocks continued to follow its own legal system, an independent principality in Campbell's Cove.

I ran into the bar where the men reacted instantly. A navy type pulled out a knife. A man near the back jumped up, knocking four beers from the table, his mates yelling their anger at him and me. The barman pulled out a big piece of well-worn wood, suitable for splitting a skull or two.

‘I gotta get this kid to hospital,' I yelled, still moving towards the back, looking for other doors that might lead out and not into the dead end of a dunny.

‘What's wrong with 'im?' someone eventually asked.

Before I could answer, Blackie and Wally came through the door. They looked straight at me, but then nodded
around the room, smiling. They knew a lot more men in here than I.

‘Phew, mate you stink,' yelled someone else, and I knew it to be true. I was rank and stinking and unshaven. As a potential saviour I presented badly.

‘This is David Donald and I'm trying to get him to the cricket.'

‘It bloody is,' said an old soak, peering at David's face.

‘It's the last day today,' said someone.

‘An' Australia are batting. We're three down for forty-nine. Got no chance.'

‘England have batted twice?' I asked.

‘Where you bin?'

I kept watching Blackie. He was the dangerous one. Although for David it might have been his scarred face and missing ear, he gave no credit to Blackie's eyes. Blackie always watched you like he was deciding what you tasted like. His eyes had not the least ounce of sympathy or spark of humanity. On the other hand, Wally was quite handsome. His face was unmarked, least of all by many thoughts. He looked very much the happy grocer.

‘I'm his uncle,' I said to the bar. ‘I'm trying to get him to the cricket.'

‘You killed his father.'

‘What?'

‘Says in the paper. Over in France.'

‘Nonsense,' I said, with perhaps too little conviction.

Most of the men in the bar seemed to be standing now: ten men in this illegal opening before breakfast.

Blackie had his razor out. He flicked it so the blade swung free from its protective sleeve and flashed nicely as it caught light. ‘I read that. Me 'n' me mate are tryin' to rescue the
kid, see. From this bastard.' He smiled around the room.

Wally nodded. It was as clumsy a piece of lying as I have seen.

‘Blackie, you don't need him any more. Didn't you hear? Australia are batting. They've already bowled twice, right? He can't bowl. It's over. He's not going to be able to bowl.'

I could tell I had Wally, because he kept trying to glance at Blackie to see what he thought.

‘Gentlemen, please. If you don't believe an old digger like me, fine. But get this lad to hospital.'

‘That's not my orders, Donald,' said Blackie, advancing.

I swung David onto the bar, where he lay like a roo carcass waiting to be butchered.

‘David Donald! You blokes are gunna let Blackie Cutmore and Wally Timlinson kill David Donald? Are you bloody drongos?' I looked Blackie in the eye. ‘Oh, golly gosh. I mentioned your names. A lot of witnesses to whatever you're going to do.'

They were thinking. So was everyone in the bar now. ‘Just get the kid to hospital,' I yelled as I ran at the crims, screaming like a banshee.

Wally must have been very busy thinking about the points I'd raised, because he wasn't paying much attention to me. I caught him a beauty right on the jaw with my first swing.

But Blackie was already slashing downwards, slicing through the jacket and shirt and into my left forearm. I grabbed him in a bear hug, stepping forward and trying to smash my forehead into his, as O'Toole had done to me. I could feel light cuts on my back as we fell, and I opened my mouth to bite his nose. He pulled his head back just in time, banging it hard into the floor. I swear, I would have done anything. But, there was the crack of something woody
hitting my own skull.

Black. But not nothing.

You may have noticed an awful lot of waking and sleeping in David's story. Such a lot dozing, and semi-consciousness. It made me wonder. Is he lying in the Dungarin road after falling off his bike? Is he lying in hospital there, dreaming the whole impossible thing? Or is it me? Am I lying in France, my brother dead, having a crazy guilty adventure, delirious and off my head? Am I dreaming David or is he dreaming me? Or both or neither.

I get up from my typewriter all these years later and I go to my bookshelf. I could choose from many cricket books, but pick a favourite that opens to a well-worn page. ‘D. Donald. Twenty wickets for one run. Melbourne...' I touch the print as though it is him. Then I know the truth again, beyond doubt.

He woke to find Mr Scully looking down at him, his face too big and craggy. David closed his eyes.

He heard Mr Scully say, ‘He's back.' He heard another voice which sounded like Mr Richardson's, but he couldn't make out the words.

When David woke again he saw more men. He was lying on a bench in a change room and Richo and Chalkie and Beardie and Tinker were all around.

‘He's awake,' called Mr Scully.

Mr Biggins came in, but before he could talk, Ten Ton pushed through the group.

‘Davey!' he said, coming forward in his batting pads.

David tried to sit up as the big fast bowler reached out for a hug, but his head suddenly hurt and he fell back groaning.
Mr Scully pushed some water at him.

‘Get the doctor again,' said the Australian captain.

There was a huge groan from the crowd outside and Mr Jackson came to the door. ‘They've donged Maudy and he's been caught at mid-off.'

Mr Richardson looked alarmed. ‘I better have a word to Legal then.'

‘He's already on his way out there, Cap.'

Ten Ton knelt down next to David's bench. ‘I just gotta go get my eyes ready in the light, Davey. Then we'll talk, okay?'

David said, ‘You must have bowled well.'

‘Yeah. Got more in the first innings when they were still a bit frightened you might suddenly appear from the change rooms. Bit harder work in the second. Buggers got over four hundred.'

‘Mostly Longford and Windsor. Windsor loves batting when you're not around, Ol' Man,' said the young opener, Beardsley.

David watched Ten Ton leave. He suddenly remembered the dark room that smelled. ‘How did I get here?'

Mr Johnson said, ‘Apparently some questionable types brought you in. One of them knew a bloke at a gate, who knew a sheila at a pie stall, and in they crept, bearing you like the ark of the covenant. Apparently.'

‘He said apparently because Chalkie was out in the middle so long, he missed that action.'