The Glass Canoe (5 page)

MY THEORY

I worked out a theory about marriage after watching guys and knowing something about their women and home life.

The bum at work is usually the boss at home. The boss at work is most often a bum at home, picked on, vulnerable. Middle management and supervisory staff float round in a limbo: half bum everywhere, half boss somewhere.

The theory is: Status in marriage is inversely proportional to the surrender value of the marriage. That's for the men.

For women, it's the reverse. Their status is directly proportional to what they'd get from a surrender of the marriage policy.

SHARON

This theory didn't work with Sharon. She was the boss and would have been no matter who she married. She was the barmaid at the Southern Cross.

There were plenty of barmaids: she was
the
barmaid. She'd been there since Adam was a boy. Her husband was a little feller, smoked a pipe of sweet tobacco.

I don't smoke. Never been able to get the habit, though I've tried dozens of times. Just the same, I used to stand near him sometimes, to get the sweet smell of his pipe.

The sort of woman Sharon was, if you wanted to swear and carry on, that was all right but you had to swear with a smile if it was near her or she'd reach out over the bar and paste you one. She reckoned she had a duty to her old man and always made him feel he was number one. He got a chilled glass.

She christened the Koala Bear, who eats roots and leaves, the Rambling Rose, who roots against walls, and even made passing reference to Rosebud. If you remember, Rosebud was the last word on the dying lips of Orson Welles in
Citizen Kane
.
But in my pub rosebud means something different from a child's picture on the back of a cot. It's a kiss you give your bird fresh out of the shower. You just pull the cheeks apart.

Sharon looked after her sick mother twenty-five years crippled in a sitting position with arthritis, and that old lady spent her time watching birds, bright as a button. Sharon's old man was a bus driver, subject to the colloidal cyste that afflicts cops on bikes and taxi drivers from the bumping up and down, but he didn't die of that. When he dropped, they opened him up and found his lungs were set solid with dust and all these tiny fibres of asbestos through his air passages, from brake linings of cars and trucks and buses. The very things he earned a crust from. I reckon that's what it means, giving your life for your job.

I like Sharon. I think I'll give her a copy of my book.

YOUNG SIBLEY

He was the only one to call me Lance. I guess he was the only one remembered. They called me Meat Man ever since kindergarten. Or just Meat. The teacher called me Lance, but the kids forgot.

Sibley was success-oriented, as they say. His sister was a prominent child in the entertainment racket, and Dad an eminent butcher.

I always used to come out ahead of young Sibley in class and I felt bad about it. It wasn't as if I tried. But he knew and we knew, right from when we were very young, that all he had to do was get in the university quota after the Higher Certificate and he was on the way to a profession. His family expected it. I'd risen in the world too. But only up the hill.

After high school he'd drop in on us at the pub every few months, to see if we were still alive, have
one beer and beat it. He had strong healthy views on drinking too much piss and getting a beer gut and dying at fifty. We didn't mind. Sibley was Sibley. We took roughly the view that you can't blame a man for his family.

He dropped in a while back, got a beer without saying hullo to anyone and sat at a table, pulling out papers and things from his pocket and writing. It wasn't a form guide, so it was enough to get attention. Still, Sibley was Sibley. The guys round the Mead had a reverence for education, while not wishing to examine it too closely.

I thought it was a bit ostentatious, waiting till he'd finished writing before he took a sip of his beer. Drinkers all round the bar noticed and got that look.

‘Hey Sibley,' I said. ‘Still doing homework for the teacher?' I knew he thought of his activities at the seat of higher learning more grandly than that.

Then I remembered and hurried over before he called out Lance. He had pens that wrote red, blue, green and purple.

He didn't answer right away.

‘Working on the philosophy of the red bar?' I asked. Then he was ready to talk.

‘My thesis,' he said in the offhand way you say My new Mercedes.

‘What's it on, Sibley?'

‘It's an investigation.'

‘Sure. Of what?'

‘The red bar. Just like you said.'

‘No kidding.'

‘Lance, the mind of man can have no idea of the fascination this place holds, once you get into it.'

‘How are you into it, Sibley?'

‘I'm not yet. I'm doing my doctorate in Psych. As soon as I got the idea of investigating the psychology of the drinker I felt like the cow that jumped over the moon. Ten feet tall.'

He was not much over half that.

‘You mean your thesis is on the red bar.'

‘Exactly. I couldn't have put it better myself.'

‘So you'll jump off the red bar and become Doctor Sibley.'

‘Right.' His teeth showed, all of them, as he enjoyed the thought. ‘Let's say I'll jump
over
the red bar.' I felt like the little dog that laughed to see such fun. What would Sibley make of drinkers? A man that let his beer go flat.

Sibley started to give me a talk.

‘Mind you, when I talk of the psychology of drinkers, I'll be up against a sea of prejudice. Till now, they've been taken to be on one of the lowest rungs of the ladder of intellectual development.'

‘What?' I said. Then I remembered I was a drinker. My judgment had to be suspect. And how did I know what ‘they' thought.

‘Past observations tell us that after twenty their mental vigour declines. At forty it's extinct and only instinct is left.'

‘What?' I said again.

‘These are past opinions,' he said. ‘My investigations will update opinion on the subject.'

‘What investigations?'

‘Tests,' he said casually. ‘These old ideas can't be allowed to persist without proper foundations. Imagine—'

‘Wait a minute, Sibley. Who are you going to test and how?'

‘All the guys that drink here. I'm taking this pub as my sample.'

‘How are you going to get them to do tests?'

‘I'll be persuasive. Tell 'em it's research, which it is. Tell 'em their psychology will be in books at the university. I bet they never knew they had a psychology.'

‘Why don't you go to some other pub?'

‘They wouldn't know me anywhere else. They might do me over. Here, everyone knows me. They've seen me around, a lot of us went to the same school, live in the same suburb, breathe the same air. They'll be in it, they think I'm harmless. They know I'm harmless. I might have gone on to university, but they don't grudge me that. They'll tolerate me.'

‘Then you go away, then what?'

‘I'll get my PhD. If the thesis is good enough, it'll be published.'

I got another drink. Sibley wasn't halfway through his flat beer. He continued the seminar, ticking his points off on his fingers.

‘They've always been considered treacherous in their dealings with employers and non-drinkers. After they leave school, they return to the natural surroundings of their fathers. A sort of homing instinct, as in birds. Drinkers can survive in conditions where the non-drinker would perish. All respectable opinions last century.'

‘You'd better not tell them any of this.'

‘Of course not. And you always were a listener, never a talker. Anyway, to go on. With no history, they have no past; with no religion, no hope; with no forethought and providence, no future. Each drinker is a doomed case; all the civilised races can do is take care that their last hours are not hurried by neglect or cruelty.'

‘Hang on there, Sibley. What do you mean civilised races and last hours?'

‘They can't survive in our world and in the future, Lance,' he said kindly. ‘The non-drinker is a member of the civilised races: the drinker, no matter the language he speaks, belongs to one identifiable inferior race spread throughout the planet. But to go on, some past authorities say that to speak of intelligence in respect of drinkers is a misnomer; they present hardly any of the phenomena of intellect. They are unreflective and
averse to abstract reasoning and sustained mental effort.'

‘You're describing a drunk.'

‘Lance, baby, that's when a drinker's a drinker for Christ's sake.'

Sibley got up to go pee against the stained stainless steel through the damaged door. On the table in front of him were papers. On the top paper I saw a list. Porteus Maze, it began. Knox Cube, Thurstone Hand, Picture vocabulary, Form assembly, Ferguson Form Board, Passalong, Repetition of Digits, Footprint, Draw-a-Man, Pattern Matching, Block Design.

I
was worried about Sibley. He was right about not going to a strange pub. But.

He got back and began writing on his bits of paper with the blue pen. I went away to play pool. When I looked up next he was around among the dying race. He wasn't testing them, as far as I could see. Maybe he was explaining, preparing the ground, getting the natives used to the sound of his voice and the way he went on.

Then I saw he was buying them beers. Just like the early colonisers all over the world, giving beads and pretty nothings, which was what beer was to Sibley. I hoped he could grade the wheat from the horse-shit, in what they told him.

His coloured pens were stuck neatly in his pocket, his face lit with missionary zeal; he looked so alive and alert and cheerful it was hard to believe he was real.

Once I saw him tentatively explore the crack in the wall with his finger. He put a finger right in. The wall didn't close on him.

ALKY JACK

I used to try to get to talk to him early on in the day, when he came in for his heart-starter, but that was no guarantee he'd be sober.

When I say talk to him, I mean listen. I know a lot of his words were nonsense, but no more stupid than other philosophers.

Behind his eyes were stores of scenes and images. A lot of the images were words. His bottom eyelids had come loose and swung out, red and full of liquid. His hair was old ashes, hands crawling with frogskin, face dried out like plums bathed in caustic, left in the sun and wrinkling into prunes. When he turned his head the back of his neck wrinkled like a tortoise.

A graveyard of ghostly ideas flapped silently round his grey brain. His old tongue was his only weapon, the air from his grey lungs his only vehicle. He battled
invisible enemies in the wilderness where he stood, leaning against the red bar.

‘Think of the life cycle of humans. Compare it to a working day.'

Jack swept the pub yard, picked up glasses. General rouseabout. He was bent, as if the sun pressed heavy on his shoulders.

‘You're free in the early morning, this is the baby stage. At school and at work there's regimentation; this is youth and maturity. All of a sudden the children are let out at the end of the day, the workers go home; the senile are put out to die at leisure, retired. Each man each day lives out his life cycle in miniature.'

He stopped for a sip. He was on beer at that stage. Sunlight, soft as talc, spilled in at the door.

‘It's like me. What I drink every day is a story in miniature of my drinking history. Milk first thing to stop the pains, water to thin out my spit, a cup of tea, then a beer. Later I'll get on to the spirits, then back to the beer, then last thing some water to work against the dehydration.'

‘As for the end of it all,' he said, and hesitated.

‘You're not worried about it?' I said.

‘I'm not worried.'

‘Sure?'

‘It's not the dark worries me, it's the getting dark.' Looking to the bottom of his glass.

I didn't want to watch him face dying.

Next thing I hear this crazy old voice singing:

‘I feel no pain dear Mother

‘But Christ I am so dry

‘Please take me to a brewery,

‘And leave me there to die.'

I look up and he's laughing at me.

The pub considered him harmless, but a deep thinker. Dimly we knew he regarded publicans less than sinners. No one wanted to talk about the things Jack talked about, no one wanted to be a deep thinker, unless it was about the odds on the races.

‘Look, son.' He never called me Meat Man. He had no sex life himself. I wonder what old men with no women do? If it's that it's natural enough, but sad. Or maybe when you're old it's better than the real thing.

‘Say things from another planet got here and you were alone and tried to answer their questions. Like what's this and how does that work? How would you go?'

‘Well, Jack. I could answer some things. I know how electricity gets generated for a start.'

‘Yeah, well let's start with something simple. Say they point to the permanent magnet and the copper wiring and the insulation, then to a knife and fork and you tell 'em what they're used for and then they say how do you make them?'

‘Well,' I said after a bit.

‘Yeah, well. See what I mean. You couldn't tell 'em. If they were all destroyed, how do you start again? Where do you get the ore?'

He didn't have to hammer the point.

‘Never be ashamed of being an Australian,' he'd say. ‘There's plenty just as bad as us in the world. The Australian just wants to be left alone, he doesn't want to hear nasty things or be bothered by politics, he's not ambitious, he doesn't want too much fun. Look at the bar.'

The saloon bar was a shambles. Pools of beer lay on the red bar and on the floor. The barnlike structure was yellowed by smoke, browned by fly dirt. Doors didn't shut, glass was cracked. Someone had punched a hole in the door to the toilet.

‘The Australian knows life's short. Heat waves and the driest drought for fifty years can be followed immediately by floods that wash away houses, people, stock, crops. Anything can happen. We started off in chains, we do our best when we're not pushed, we pay back a good turn, say no to authority and upstarts, we're casual, we like makeshift things, we're ingenious, practical, self-reliant, good in emergencies, think we're as good as anyone in the world, and always sympathise with the underdog.'

I could think of a lot of people in the world that fitted this description and I could think of a lot of
exceptions among Australians, but I kept my mouth shut. Alky Jack was the only one that I'd listen to without a beer in my hand for more than three seconds even if he'd dug his words up from a past I didn't know.

‘The trouble is, this doesn't make him a good citizen in a democracy. Democracy is not for people who just want to be left alone so long as they do what they're told and don't answer back. The key people in the democratic process are critics, dissenters, reformers. If they're sealed off from the political process, the system grows tired and sick and turns into something else.'

‘God save the Queen,' I said.

‘She's not a bad little thing, the Queen. I wish the sluts round here could hold their grog as well.'

‘And their tongues,' I said.

‘True. And their tongues.'

Jack went into a fit of coughing. He rolled his own smokes—uneven looking things. They didn't smell all that good either. The more he smoked to recover from coughing, the more the smoking made him cough. But he either didn't see the connection, or didn't want to. He had more important things to think of. I could imagine him going to bed at night, last thing, holding up two fingers to death. But not beckoning.

‘Another thing. There's no greater encouragement to revolutionary dissatisfaction than the realisation that, more and more, only rich men or men with
access to riches, can hope to achieve significant public office. Either your own money, or the party's money, or—if you please rich men—their money, but political seats are impossible without a lot of money. Politics are beyond the ordinary man. While he's his own man, I mean. If you allow majority vote to determine what you say in public I think you're not worth pissing on.'

He never once stood on his age as if it was a throne. Never once proved a point by saying, ‘That's how it's always been.'

Alky Jack was a man of principle.

‘I could lie like a trooper if I wanted, son,' he'd say. ‘But I
will
not. Not for me, not for you, not for anyone. Not for gain or good opinion. I won't pretend, I won't take things that aren't mine and I won't do anything I don't want to do. The truth is one thing. Being yourself is another.'

I never knew what to say when he came out with principles.

‘Society is opposed to the single unit, man. The bigger it gets, the more production, the more individual misery there is.'

He came out with the thought he always ended on.

‘Why does the whole thing have to be built on cutthroat competition?'

He lapsed into silence after that.

Later he said, ‘Maybe equal pay's the answer.'

‘They've just about got it, Jack.'

He looked at me, disgusted.

‘Equal for all,' he said. ‘If people were fair dinkum they'd work for the satisfaction of their own competence, their cleverness, the position they attained. Not bloody cash. Not greed.'

I couldn't think of anything to say. He was silent again for a long time.

At the end of the day he'd stumble off to bed, his mind slow, language lagging. You had to be a dill not to know Alky Jack had a mind, but. With something extra he'd have been a great man. But I don't know what that something is.

I used to wonder what he was before he decided to become an alcoholic.