True Stories (7 page)

‘When the migrants came, after the war, they put 'em into a place with holiday shacks and little cubbyholes. There wasn't enough room for 'em up at Bonegilla. They were putting them anywhere they could find. They can't have known what hit 'em —they got out of here as fast as they could.'

I remember the migrants coming. They must have arrived in a rush: in my memory it seems that they all arrived on one day. At Ocean Grove School No. 3100 we sat in double desks; when the migrants came we were suddenly three to a double. We called them Balts. We had no idea where they came from. They were all blond. They had names like ‘Wossle', ‘Olger', ‘Rocksanner', ‘Beela', that even our teachers couldn't say. Years later, in books and films, when I came across those mysterious names properly spelt and pronounced, I felt sobered and ashamed, as at a lesson taught too late. We had never heard of garlic, let alone smelt it. We watched them unwrap their lunches: slices of bread an inch thick encasing slabs of high-smelling sausage. The girls wore their white-blonde hair divided into sections with the top bit rolled and pinned into a hollow tube that ran back from brow to crown, while we had ours, which was plain brown, cut short behind and held in a ‘bunch' in front by a rubber band and a ribbon.

‘Rocksanner' sat next to me. Under her skirt she wore what I thought were her pyjama pants. I felt sorry for her: so cold and so poor that she had to wear her pyjamas under her clothes. Nobody I have spoken to remembers this. Was it a folk costume? someone suggests, now, too late. Didn't anyone explain anything to us? Maybe our parents and teachers were like the soldiers in Ben Lewin's
The Dunera Boys
: essentially good-natured but profoundly ignorant. Wasn't it in the papers? As with the Sheepwash, I have a stubborn, sore reluctance to find out. I don't think it's laziness. If I poked even one rational hole in the thick skin of that closed-off world, who knows what would come squirting out.

The sea is still there, under everything else I saw and remembered. This goes without saying. There are no ugly bits of ocean. But I can't understand why it hurts so much to look at Ocean Grove. Other people in the streets don't seem bothered by its power lines, its desolate bareness of ground, its hideous shopfronts. They are going about their business unperturbed. Perhaps it's not really anything special, this ugliness. Perhaps it's no uglier than any other modernised town on that featureless coastline. Perhaps I've brought the ugliness with me. A clear hot day might have dispelled this cloud of sadness; or is there an Ocean Grove-shaped desolation that lives inside my head? Either way, when I get to Ocean Grove, I am not surprised to find the sky thickly covered and a fresh wind blowing, in early December.

We used to walk everywhere. So I leave the car at the motel (still no pub) and start to put one foot in front of the other. When I stick to the sealed road the colours seem all wrong: the ground should be yellow, but it's grey. I cut into the scrub and find a dirt road, badly eroded, leading up the hill in what I think must be the direction of the school.

I get to the school just before 9 a.m. Cars driven by women half my age are unloading small children. They are
driving their
kids to school.
What's the matter with them? Is it too far to walk? Are they weak, or crippled? Has some danger unknown to me invaded the streets?

The old timber building is still there, but extensions have been built and stagger away down the sloping site. The dunnies, where we wiped our bums with pages torn from old copies of the
National Geographic
donated to the school library by parents, are nowhere to be seen.

Once I forgot something and my father had to ask the teacher to open the school building for us during the weekend. Several of my sisters came too. I was let in, and ran to get my cardie or my project or whatever it was while the others waited outside. I could hear the two men talking and the little girls shouting further down the yard. I became overwhelmed with a dreamy curiosity in the empty schoolroom by myself, and stayed much longer than I needed to. When I woke up and went to the outside door, it was locked. I ran to the side window and saw them all walking down the road. How did I get out? I forget that too.

I walk from the school to our old house. Looking Both Ways to cross Presidents Avenue, I wonder where we used to cross in 1948. Cross? We didn't have to. We used the road. There were so few cars that we walked right down the middle of it, and it wasn't a road anyway, it was a
track.

I pass through the shopping centre. Back then it was called The Shops: Kong's Bakery, Skinner's General Store, Miss Dorrie Wilson at the Post Office. Now there is a kind of mall and the street has been made one-way, for no reason that I can see. There are foreign restaurants: Chinese, Mexican. Back then it was exotic to drive over to Barwon Heads for fish and chips.

There used to be a milk bar called The Doo Duck Inn. The word ‘duck' in its title was not written but represented by a head of Donald Duck enclosed in a golden and blue circle. I loved this and thought it clever. Later, bodgies and widgies used to loaf round outside the shop. One was called Wogger Whitfield. He looked like Elvis Presley and we thought of him as grown-up.

The street is now a string of real estate agents and takeaway food shops. I go into the one I think must be the old Doo Duck, and order a steak sandwich from a Greek woman. A Greek! When I lived there the only Greeks I knew about were Theseus, Procrustes, Medusa. The woman, who looks exhausted, greets me with a beautiful, ironic smile. I sit at the formica table and eat the steak sandwich. I can hardly swallow for the lump in my throat.

Eight minutes from the school (not counting the steak sandwich) I am approaching the corner of The Terrace and Eggleston Street, where our old house used to stand and probably still does. An SEC truck blocks my view: some men are fixing the power lines. I slip between the truck and the thick tea-tree scrub, and there's the gate. The gate is still there. It is the same gate. It is so real, so much the same, I'm afraid that if I touch it I will get an electric shock. It is a wide metal farm gate that digs a little curved trench in the dirt with its corner and has to be hooked shut with a chain and a loop. We used to swing on this gate, four of us in a line, waiting for my father to come home.

The SEC men are watching me. I feel embarrassed by the state I am in, standing like a robber with one hand on the gate post.

Something funny has happened to the house. It has become confused, and uglier. It is divided now into two parts: the left side has had a second storey built on, and the other, though still fully part of the same building, has its yard divided off from the other's garden by a horrible brush fence, and has been allowed to Go to Rack and Ruin. Its weatherboard walls have been painted aqua and it looks hovel-like, with mean louvred windows and a low door, which I do not remember, halfway along the side wall.

The cement paths we used to rollerskate on are crumbled and overgrown. My mother's garage is a heap of tin under a cypress tree, and somebody seems to be living in the shed: a TV antenna droops feebly on its roof.

The SEC truck drives away. There is nobody about, though the door of the house's lower side stands open. People are going to ask me, ‘And did you go in?' Why would I go in? It's just an ugly old house. If I went in my father would shout, ‘Shut the flaming door!' and my mother would say,
‘Go outside.'

So you'll just have to believe me when I tell you that, standing at the gate, I remembered part of a poem called ‘Answers to Letters', by the Swede Thomas Tranströmer:

Time is not a straight line, it's more of a labyrinth,
and if you press close to the wall at the right
place you can hear the hurrying steps and voices, you
can hear yourself walking past there on the other side…

Except that I can hear not footsteps but the grinding of roller-skates with metal wheels, a gritty rolling; the feel of travelling on metal containing ball bearings; skating, skating for months on end, four knobby-legged girls, totally absorbed in our traffic lanes, our rules, our clumsy arabesques, our struggles with physics, with gravity; and the particular kind of jarring caused by a fall on concrete.

1985

At Nine Darling Street

IN 1960 I BELIEVED
that all Jews and homosexuals lived in New York. I was eighteen years old, dux of a provincial church girls' school. To my eternal shame I was dumb enough to let them railroad me into being head prefect: I was a miserable, lonely boss's stooge. I hit a tennis ball against a brick wall and despite my elevated status was always picked last in sporting sides.

I did not read the paper. I did not know what the word ‘politics' meant, and none of my teachers saw fit to enlighten me. I was foxed by the faultless aplomb of our sixth-form English teacher who declared, as we pored mystified over Byron, that ‘
sensuous
means
of the senses:
but
sensual
is a bad, bad word.' I didn't know anything.

Our headmistress, who frightened me, spoke at assemblies (after the doors to the recessed altar had been trundled shut) about the goodness of the Lord. ‘Think of it!' she cried. ‘He made grass and trees green for the resting of our eyes. Imagine our discomfort, had He made them red.' This Valkyrie also informed us from the dais that people with backhand writing were untrustworthy. My mother wrote backhand and was of a transparent truthfulness.

In the gloomy dining room smelling of floor wax and neanderthal sausages we fifth and sixth formers gave one dance a year. I was a frump, a breastless creature barely past puberty with hair that wouldn't curl up at the bottom, who blushed in agony when addressed by man or beast, who was clad stiffly in cotton while others floated divinely in chiffon with the coveted shoestring straps.

Before the event the headmistress summoned us into the assembly room with its gold-littered honour boards (I always scanned them for Norah Linton, Saint Norah of Billabong, but stopped each time, incredulous, at someone called Daintry Gillett) and inspected us for
commonness.

She dragged me out to the front in my square-necked, high-necked, frump-necked, flat-necked horrible cotton dress with wattle flowers printed on it, my ugly white shoes whose sandshoe polish was already showing cracks. ‘Now why can't everyone be like Helen? Modest and plain.'

The boarders, strapping Western District girls with bosoms, sneered. I burned. I had a mole on my lip and my mouth was too small. I think that woman is dead now. Did she make us wear those long white gloves, or did we bring it upon ourselves? We were all in anguish, one way or another. Did I have a friend? I can't even remember. Under that sort of stress, friendships could be little more than temporary alliances.

So those innocent, patrolled affairs on school premises prepared us poorly for what happened at the end of the year in the great metropolis Melbourne forty-five miles away, in that supposedly magic time between exams and Christmas when anything seemed possible but nothing in particular was.

What use to us now were the counsels of our elders, distilled in whispers down the ranks of girls? ‘Don't wear patent leather shoes: boys see your underwear reflected. Don't wear red: it excites them. Don't wear white: it reminds them of sheets. Don't smoke: it's common. Don't drink: there is no more disgusting sight than that of a woman drunk.'

We were going to the City of the Plain, where Merton Hall girls talked to boys in their drawling voices (we knew in our provincial hearts that they were more desirable than we were) and wore slinky dresses and had long voluptuous black hair and black eye make-up without being common and had probably been to jazz clubs, and one of them had even had an abortion, her cousin told us, because once you start doing it it's like a drug and you can't ever stop, you have to do it again and again.

Everybody knew that in the public toilets of Melbourne, girls from the country were injected with something and taken off to the White Slave Trade. Whatever that was.

‘Get a guernsey, did you?' said my father, cruelly deflating me as I ran in the back door with my expensive embossed envelope. Who paid for those End of Year dances? For the printing of the invitations, the suppers, the bands of old men in dinner suits who could play ‘The Golden Wedding'? The hiring of the Dorchester, of Nine Darling Street? There were strings of these dances, each school gave one, and it was rumoured that some girls had a different dress for each one. For mere children schooled as we were, kept in dumb ignorance, it was the massacre of the innocents, those hot December nights.

My mother had told me that Pimms No. 1 cup was ‘what they call a leg-opener'. I only dimly visualised what this could mean. I was too scared and prim to drink, anyway, even if anyone had offered me any, which they didn't.

At Nine Darling Street, the steps were carpeted in red, as I recall them now, but perhaps I'm confusing this with the entrance of the stars to the palace at the Cannes festival. The tinselled significance was the same. My feet and hands in white were too big and the rest of me was too small. Who were those parents in the doorway? Where were the toilets?

My partner was a lumpy boy whose mother knew my auntie. We sat side by side, not touching, and discussed the exams and blushed during the long silences. He said there was an ice sculpture in the other room, with oysters in its crevices. We edged through the crowd to look at it. Everyone else seemed to be laughing. What would I do with an oyster, in these white gloves? I pretended not to be hungry and we returned to our seat.

He asked me to dance. I placed my pristine white glove upon his dandruffy shoulder, he seized a pawful of the back of my dress at the waist and away we clomped, enveloped in a malodorous cloud of Clearasil which even the piercing perfume of the gardenia (stalk wrapped in silver paper) pinned to the place where my bosom ought to have been could not disperse. Up to the end, turn 180 degrees, head back the other way, like a man mowing a lawn.