Wild Cat Falling (5 page)

A brawny surf-lifesaver type passes along the sea front and her eyes follow him. The bitch isn't listening to me, not that I expect her to be interested.

“Well, where do you go from here?” she asks suddenly. “I mean — I suppose you've got to do something between this and your next time in.”

“Sure,” I say. “Get drunk, feed a few juke boxes, have a few girls till my prison pay runs out.”

“Then what?”

“I'll be lucky to be out that long.”

“You mean you've planned to do a job straight away?”

“I never plan ahead. I just wait for life to happen to me.”

“But they can't put you in until you deliberately break the law.”

“You haven't got a clue,” I tell her. “They make the law so chaps like me can't help breaking it whatever we do, and the likes of you can hardly break it if you try.”

“How do you mean?” she asks.

“For one thing. We make the only friends we have in jail, but if we're seen talking outside we're arrested for consorting with crims.”

“What's to stop you getting an ordinary job?” “Plenty,” I say. “The complete absurdity of it for a start — tearing your guts out in some mechanized rat cage. No thanks.”

“So you've never tried to get a job?”

“Sure I did, but I wasn't in the race. Who wants a shiftless native when he can get a big up and coming Dago to work for him? After a few tries I resigned myself. Prison was the only chance I had of three meals a day and a decent bed.”

“You know,” she says, “the trouble with you is you've got intelligence but no guts.”

This gets under my skin. “You reckon it didn't take guts to get where I am?”

“Does it take guts to get copped so you can bludge on the taxpayer?”

“I never tried to get copped,” I say, “not yet, that is. I suppose you don't reckon it took guts to pinch a car and leave it outside a police station?”

She laughs. “You can call it guts if you like.”

“I got clean away with that and a few other things and I worked my way right up with the gang.”

“I get the picture,” she says. “From outcast native to big time bodgie. Success story.”

“Sure.”

“And having climbed the social ladder to this dizzy height what now?”

“Who cares?” Which is what I always say when questions begin to bore me.

“The gang maybe. I expect they'll be glad to see you back.”

I shrug. “It was swell being in with them until I made it to the top. They looked up to me then because they had no brains and no ideas and now I'm bored to hell with them.”

“Well, if you've got any guts you'll give them away and start again.”

“I'm too old now,” I say.

“How old?” she asks.

“Nineteen.”

“Practically Methuselah.”

“Too old to laugh or cry any more. So old my bones ache.”

“That's inactivity,” she says. “Look here, you want to get yourself a pair of bathing trunks, get into the sea, run along the sand, lie in the sun.”

“And then,” I say, “something new will happen for me? A volcano of fresh hope will erupt for me? ”

“That's up to you,” she says.

I feel the old bitter taste of resentment in my mouth. Nothing ever up to
them.
Only up to us, the outcast relics in the outskirt camps. The lazy, ungrateful rubbish people, who refuse to co-operate or integrate or even play it up for the tourist trade. Flyblown descendants of the dispossessed erupting their hopelessness in petty crime. I glare at her with concentrated hate. I want to wither her glib white arrogance with biting scorn, but I can't find the words.

“Well you should know,” I say. “I suppose there's plenty times you've been cold and hungry and afraid. So I'll take your advice and join the Lifesavers. Maybe they'll teach me to swim so I can save myself.”

She glances at her watch.

“I'm sorry,” she says, “but my time's about up. I've an appointment in half an hour.”

“Important engagement with a golf ball I suppose.”

“Not golf,” she says. “I'm a poor slogging student at the University.”

“What do you study?” I ask.

“Psychology, as a matter of fact.”

“You'll go far,” I say. “Every post a winning post, even a neurotic jailbird on the beach.”

“Look here,” she protests, good-humouredly, “who forced this conversation, anyway?”

“I should have smelt the profit motive when you didn't knock me back. Well, you've about squeezed the lemon dry now, so that's it.”

“Have it your own way,” she says. “But there's enough juice left in the lemon yet to keep the profit motive interested.”

“You're kidding,” I say.

“Call my bluff then,” she says. “Meet me at the Uni coffee lounge tomorrow afternoon and meet some of my gang. It'll be a change for you, anyway.”

I stand up and watch her as she pulls on a sweater and skirt. She names a time and tells me how to find my way. I want to tell her to go to hell but somehow all the fight drains out of me. She has a swell body, a nice voice and what I can see of her face is all right too. She is a change from the ignorant giggling chicks I have known before and it might be worth seeing her again. Typical boy meets girl on beach.

The sun sprays blood as it drops into the sea. “Well, I'll be seeing you,” she says. She takes off her glasses and her eyes are wide and blue. She is about the prettiest doll I have ever seen, but she is as far away from me as the wide blue sky.

 

The girl has gone and I must move on again.

I make my way to the railway station, buy a ticket to Perth and drift about the platform like one of the stray sheets of newspaper waiting for a wind to blow it away. The lines hum and the train rickracks to a stop. I get in, find a place and lean back, propping my feet on the opposite seat. I notice there's a railway law against this (Regulation 166B), but I stay as I am.

A middle-aged couple enter at the first stop and look in disgust at my sprawling legs and my cigarette in a non-smoking compartment. They seat themselves as far away as possible and we ignore each other until the city lights jerk into view. The train pulls to a stop and I walk out alone into a roar of traffic and a dazzle of neon signs.

I wander down the main street, alone in the crowd. It is against the law to sleep out in the city, so I must find a room. I turn into an alley swaying with shadows and knock at a place advertising rooms to let. An old woman shows me up a flight of stairs into a small room where a weak ceiling globe reveals a bed, cupboard, table and chair. I take it and pay a week's rent in advance and she gives me the key.

I sit on the sagging bed and work out my next move; brood about friends for a time and find that friendship has no meaning for me. It is only a word, but I do have acquaintances and one of these will lend me clothes. I will go and see him now.

Out in the street again, I dawdle past a music shop from which comes the sound of a familiar song . . .
Trouble in mind. I'm blue.
. . . A solitary drummer beats a slow death beat behind the words. A single saxophone wails out in long drawn notes of pain. Blue shades of the sorrowing dark people, all with trouble in mind . . . The voice of an old-young negress singing into my heart . . .
Trouble in mind.

Always trouble in mind. “Don't make trouble, son,” Mum had said when I told her how the white kids laughed at me and kicked my case along the road. She hoped I'd make friends with them but I never did. They played with me at school when they had to, but outside the school gates they only picked on me. I didn't tell her at first until she got wild about the case and my torn shirts. One day I found her mending them and saw that she was crying. So I told her it was O.K. and I didn't care. “They're only jealous because I get top marks,” I told her. “And when I'm grown up I'm going to be rich and buy you pretty dresses like the white kids' mums've got.” She laughed and rumpled my hair and told me to grow up quick so she'd still be pretty enough for them. . . .

At the corner of the main street I pause for breath outside a cellar grating and stoop to peer inside. It's the storeroom of a shop, full of packing cases and parcels and long rolls of linoleum and material.

I grasp one of the bars with my free hand and notice that the grating is loose and the thought comes into my head that I could probably squeeze in at the side. There would be all sorts of wonderful things in there — things we looked at in shop windows but could never buy, like the dresses, and the sheets Mum is always talking about. Some day, she keeps saying, she'll have sheets for her bed. And I can see dresses too, pretty shop-made ones. Mum makes her own clothes as well as mine out of cheap material, but she would look real good in a shop-made dress.

I can see stairs from the cellar that go up into the shop. There would be money in there. I could go to the movies, buy heaps of comics and tell Mum I'd picked them up on the road. If I got a dress and some sheets I could tell her I had found them in a box that fell off a carrier's truck. Things did fall off trucks and she'd believe that. . . .

Saturday night. I lie awake in my bed waiting for the town to go to sleep. The pub should close at nine o'clock, but being Saturday it stays open illegally unless there's a mean cop in the town. I know when it closes because Mr Willy will come out then. Saturday is always a gay night for him and he stays to the end. At last I hear him come stumbling towards the house.

“Good night,” he calls out.

That means he isn't coming in. Too tired and drunk, I suppose, and rolling home to his own bed. His boots sound away.

I let time stream by for a while before I get up. The kitchen fire is dead and the street lights turned off. Mum is at last asleep and my bare feet make no noise as I slide out the door. There is no one about. I am scared but the thought of Mum's face when she sees the things I've got for her makes me brave.

I was right about the grating. I can get through quite easily. . . .

The big town cop shrinks the kitchen as he comes in the door. I look at Mum. Her eyes are scared and defiant. The cop grudgingly removes his cap, lifts an eyebrow as he looks about and clears his throat.

“I've come about the boy.”

“He's done nothing. He's a good boy.”

“There's been a breaking and entering job in town, and I've reason to suspect your son is the culprit.”

“It can't be him. He's never pinched anything. Never done anything wrong. You've picked on him because he's coloured, that's all.”

The cop shrugs. “I have a warrant and I intend to search this place.”

“Go ahead,” she says. “You won't find anything. He's not a thief.”

I stand in the corner, shaking with fear. The cop pokes around the house and looks under my bed where I'd put the money and the comics. I had given her the dress and a pair of sheets, but I was still working out the story for the other things.

“I'm taking these things as evidence,” the cop says. “I'll be back here soon.”

I look at my mum and see that her expression is no longer defiant. It is sort of beaten and servile.

He clumps out the door. Mum crumples like she has been hit in the stomach. After a while she comes over to me and we cling together. I cry because I am scared. She cries because she knows I will be taken away from her.

In the afternoon the copper returns to hand us a summons.

“On Thursday at ten o'clock you will bring the boy along to the courthouse. Ten o'clock. Understand?”

“Yes.”

The sky is overcast as we make our way along the gravel road and turn the comer into the town. It is as quiet as any week day in a small country place. No one notices a coloured woman and a boy. Nobody knows. We are a bit early as Mum does not want it held against us that we are late. She stops and looks in a shop window. On one side there is a flash bedroom suite and on the other dresses on hangers, all pulled in at the waist and the bargain prices marked. She looks up and sees it is the shop I have robbed and she hurries on.

The police officer is waiting in nervous expectation. The hands of the clock are just on ten and he probably thinks his birds have gone bush. His face relaxes as we come in and he shepherds us to our places. I cling close to Mum and we both wait for the worst. Up to now she has always protected me but I know that this is something out of her control. There are just the two of us against the world.

I look across at the long table and the white men around it who have come to decide my fate. I look down at the dusty floor and the long, dirt-caked cracks between the boards. I look up at the slime yellow walls seeking a spot on which to concentrate. My eyes rest on an enlarged photograph of the reigning monarch. Defender of the Faith. Whatever that means. The royal eyes look down coldly and accusingly. No hope there. I look away, quickly scanning the large stern men on their large pompous bottoms. They stare vacantly at the table top as the constable reads his statement.