True Stories (22 page)

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Authors: Helen Garner

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BOOK: True Stories
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‘But the techs were fantastic. Someone said, “Come over here. I'll make you concentrate on one small area.” I did, and then I was all right. But it took me a while till I could step over that red bench into the lab without thinking, “What am I doing here?” '

She laughs, sitting there quietly with her hands folded in her lap. She is not what you would call tough: she's got a rather sweet, open face, with intelligent eyes; but she has the firmness of someone who's had to work out a few important things earlier than your average Australian twenty-five-year-old. She commands respect without having to try.

‘Staying detached,' she says, ‘is hardest with the kids that come in. The cot-death babies, or kids that die in accidents or fires. It's terrible. With every grown-up case you can manage to convince yourself that there's a reason, but with kids—they're innocent. They haven't done anything. One day I was working with Barry, who's got young kids. We opened up the little coffin, and when we saw the baby in there, so young, wrapped up and holding a furry toy, we looked at each other and we both had tears in our eyes.' She shrugs, and drops her glance to her lap. ‘We quickly started work. You can't afford to feel those things. You'd go crazy.'

‘With the SIDS babies we take extra time. We wash and powder them. And during post-mortems we're really careful not to damage them. You feel they've been through enough. We rebuild and reconstruct them really carefully. Funny—when you're holding a dead baby in your arms, you know it's dead, but you still have the instinct to support the head, and not to let it drop back.'

‘You've got death at the back of your mind all the time,' says Barry. ‘Like when you're backing out of the drive, you're extra conscious. The child that gets crushed by a car in the drive is always after a toy that was under the car. It's always a toy.'

‘You realise how easily death can happen,' says Jodie. ‘And there's a certain case for each of us—something you see that you relate to in a way you don't…like. It might be a shoe on someone that's brought in, a shoe like ones you've got at home, or the sort that your brother wears. Only a small thing…but it can trigger something in you. You have to keep a split between your natural feelings and what you do.'

Everything the technicians say stresses their mutual respect and their sense of being a team. I ask why they appear to be doing all the cleaning of the mortuary, as well as their scientific work. ‘There's a lot of weird people in the world: says Jodie. ‘People you wouldn't want to trust around dead bodies. And other people refuse to come in here. Sometimes we can't get tradesmen to do maintenance work. They won't come in unless we can guarantee they won't see anything upsetting. Still, our floors are shinier than the ones in the rest of the building—did you notice?—shinier than the ones the contract cleaners do.'

To spend hours in the eight-bay lab, standing at the elbow of Barry as he works in silent absorption, or beside David, a pathologist and assistant director of the institute, is to realise that it's a place of study, of teaching and learning, of the gathering and organising of information. David is a natural teacher. He chatters to me as he works on a body, wanting me to notice the creamy-yellow, waxen globules of subcutaneous fat, or the weak, exhausted-looking muscle of a damaged heart, or the perfect regularity and beauty of the striations of windpipe cartilage. ‘Exactly like reinforced garden hose —look!'

The radio is on softly in the far corner of the room, spinning out a long, dated guitar solo. Someone in the corridor whistles along to it. Somebody else, going to the shop, calls out for lunch orders. It's not so different from the outside world after all.

‘After I'd been working here for a while,' says Rod, ‘I found I'd lost my fear of death. I don't know what the soul is—that spark—and no one knows what happens to it at death. But it's certainly gone before people reach here.'

‘You have to realise,' says Jodie, ‘that what we deal with here isn't really death. We see what's left behind after death has happened—after death has been and gone.'

For days after my visits to the mortuary my mind was full of dark images. At first I kept thinking I could smell blood, on and off, all day. Once I tore open a paper bag of pizza slices which had got squashed on the way home, and the dark red and black of their mashed surfaces reminded me of wounds. My bike helmet knocked lightly against the handlebar as I took it off, and the sound it made was the hollow
tock
of a skull being fitted back together after the brain has been removed. In the tram my eyes would settle on the wrinkled neck of an old woman: she'll soon be gone.

There is nothing so utterly dead as a dead body. The spirit that once made it a person has fled. But until I went to the mortuary I never had even the faintest inkling of what a living body is—what vitality hovers in its breath, what a precious, mysterious and awesome spark it carries, and how insecurely lodged that spirit is within the body's fragile structures.

1992

Sunday at the Gun Show

ON A SUNDAY
morning, hours after a man was arrested for the knife-murders of three young women near the bayside suburb of Frankston, I went with my husband to the twenty-sixth Melbourne Gun Show.
Australian Shooters Journal
promised ‘250 tables of antique and modern firearms, Edged Weapons and Militaria'; its editor depicts this extravaganza as ‘often the favourite of many due to the intimate atmosphere of the venue'.

Entry cost nine dollars fifty each. Just inside the door, a Salvo lady, middle-aged, smiling hard, was rattling her tin. As I dropped in my coin I remarked, ‘You're a bit out of your element here, aren't you?' She made no comment, but intensified her glassy smile and murmured, ‘God bless you!'

The organisers in the vestibule had safety-pinned official Gun Show ribbons onto their chests, just over their hearts. As they walked briskly about or paused near the open door, the blue and white ribbons would flutter merrily. These spasms of bright movement made a striking contrast with the carefully controlled male faces above them. One might speak, another might briefly smile, but, on the whole, expression was at a premium.

My husband plunged through the main doors and I followed him into the big auditorium. Intimate atmosphere? Maybe, compared to a wind-swept parade ground, a waist-deep swamp at dawn. For intimate, read crammed, muffled, dimly lit. The palace of weapons was packed with men. Blokes of all ages were shuffling, hands in pockets, along rows and rows of trestle tables, on which flat glass cases held displays of medals, daggers, drill manuals, stained desert maps, ancient bullets, firing pins, mysterious screws and springs, and other treasures. Bizarre assortments of second-hand books were sprinkled about; unread hardbacks with titles like
Dentist on a Camel
lay alongside well- thumbed paperback copies, at three dollars, of reputable Australian novels such as
1915
and
My Brother Jack.

In here, facial expression was outlawed. The social tone was blank and affectless. Moustaches were plentiful, in a narrow range of styles: barbered grey, Civil War, semi-reformed bikie. The universal response to ‘Thanks' was ‘No sweat'.

My husband, who is as interested in guns and warfare as the next fifty-two-year-old erstwhile air cadet, moved smoothly past the sentimental memorabilia and into the area where the handguns began and the vibe darkened further. He seemed to be able to read the weapons, to get a distinct meaning out of each piece—though, like all the other men in the room, he was keeping strict guard over his facial features.

‘Look,' he said, pointing to a double-barrelled shotgun in a battered case. ‘A Hollis. That's what Hemingway shot himself with. Or was it a Purdy?'

To me the displays were just a lot of lumps of metal. I concentrated hard. Yes, that one was pocket-size, and this one, by an effort of the imagination, I could call ‘pearl-handled'. Caught in the slow-flowing river of men, I kept shuffling sideways. Two buffs behind a table were talking. One of them, who had a big gut and drooping whiskers, was saying, ‘I don't have friends. I get emotional when friends let me down.' The other nodded, stone-faced.

I came to a display of knives, very slender, gleaming, about eight inches long. They looked as if they were designed to slide neatly between some poor bastard's ribs. I picked one up. It was terrifically sharp. The fat blond in the dark blue tracksuit who was selling them kept his eyes on me. To make conversation I said, ‘I wonder what you'd use these for?' Holding my eye, he drew in a huge sigh, let it out slowly, took two beats, and said in a voice that was at once toneless and heavy with irony, ‘Opening letters?' I put it down hastily and shuffled on.

In the next part of the hall a sort of bottleneck had developed. Men were lingering over a particular glass case as if spellbound. I squeezed through, but it was only another spread of handguns. Were they better, cheaper, made by someone more famous? It was as baffling to me as if these men had been contemplating relics of some god whose name I didn't even know. I accidentally caught the eye of the man in charge of these guns. Like the blond knife-seller, he maintained eye-contact in such a way as to lock me into his level, hard, challenging stare. He, too, let fall a significant pause, then said in a low voice, without the slightest intonation, ‘G'day. How you going?'

‘Good, thanks!' I piped. I actually blushed.

I caught up with my husband at a table where bundles of bumper stickers were on sale. He was reading them with grunts and clicks of incredulity. ‘
Annita has one—Paul is one.
Look at this, will you?
Take my gun? The contents come first!
It's paranoid. It's bloody moronic. It's pathetic.' The sticker-seller, a callow youth, glanced up. My husband stepped towards him, then changed his mind and walked away in disgust.

A girl knelt beside her boyfriend, who was sitting on a folding stool behind his display. She was watching him open a little present she had brought him. ‘It's Chinese,' she said. He glanced at whatever it was, quickly rewrapped it, and sat unmoved while she threw her arms around his neck and passionately kissed him on the cheek. She let go, and knelt there, gazing up at him, exuding speechless adoration. He glanced nervously behind him. No one seemed to have noticed. He eked out a narrow smile.

We passed a video of a burly backwoodsman in a landscape of snow. He was casually dismembering the corpse of a large furry beast. Paying close attention to the screen was a young Vietnamese man in full camouflage gear. His eyes in his blank face were unnaturally bright, almost blazing. Beside the video screen a thick strip of leather hung in a wooden frame. One was invited to slash it to shreds with a sample of the same knife the backwoodsman was using to skin his prey. We both had a go. Ooh yes, it was very sharp indeed, and cleverly shaped into a vicious, chunky little curve.

Round the next corner, in the Ultimate Arms stand, hovered two young women dressed in blacktie, and caked with make-up, blusher and vivid lipstick. Their sparkling smiles, as they referred inquiries about the importing of weapons to their less attractive male colleague (also in evening dress) came as a shock in this cavern of grimness. Closer in, we saw that under their swallowtail jackets the girls were wearing black leotards and towering heels. The counter was exactly low enough to reveal them from the crutch up. Around this stand ran a hectic little frisson—but only in the movements of eyes. Faces remained frigid.

Shuffle, shuffle.

A silver-haired old man ear-bashed his fellow gun-fancier about security: how not to look like a tourist, where to carry your money, how to react when mugged, how to park your car so you never have to walk to it alone at night. ‘I tell my kids,' he said, ‘and I think as they get older they're starting to listen. I say, “Listen to your old dad and you'll live longer.” '

Is that what this is about—fear of death? ‘They're all brooding on death and destruction,' said my husband. But there was another quality in the silent, tense concentration of the shuffling blokes. They were as scrupulously expressionless as men you see in adult bookshops, contemplating sex aids and pornography. The air was thick with suppressed anxiety, a sort of dull belligerence.

I went out to the vestibule and waited there for my husband. Near me, also waiting, stood a young woman with frizzed blonde hair holding a small girl by the hand. The three of us shifted from foot to foot, glancing occasionally back into the slow, milling stream of men. Several times the young mother caught my eye. Once she tilted up her chin and opened her mouth, as if she had something she wanted to say to me: but no words came, only nervous glances and smiles.

To get out of the hall we had to submit to a metal-detector, and a man inspected my bag without meeting my eye. We drove home in silence. As we rounded the corner near the Aberdeen Hotel, my husband gave a sigh and said gloomily, ‘But there
was
some craft. Some people were better than that mob—like those two blokes who made the beautiful stocks, out of good timber.'

While the dinner was cooking, I sat at the kitchen table and flipped through
Australian Shooters Journal.
A chap from Queensland called Mr C had written in with an idea. ‘Frisking passengers by means of an electronic gizmo at the departure lounge is not the way to go. On the contrary, no passenger should be permitted on board who is not armed or at least willing to defend himself. Picture our terrorist who has boarded at an intermediate stage and doesn't know the rules. In mid-flight, the maniac stands up and says he is taking over in the name of the Mongolian Mother Molesters' Movement. Next thing there is the sound of three hundred hammers being cocked, and the following day the Japanese tender for the mineral rights to the last hijacker!'

‘This bloke' commented the
Journal
's columnist, ‘has a delightful turn of wit. Why this little yarn made me chuckle all afternoon is hard to say…Was it because, like you perhaps, I am well and truly fed up of [sic] being kicked around by scum?'

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