Something Special, Something Rare (21 page)

Dad was halfway down the drive. ‘Don't you fucking drive away, Kev!' he yelled. ‘He's my fucking son, don't you dare fucking drive—'

‘Just go!' I screamed. I stood up and started pummelling Kev's shoulder. ‘Go, go, go!'

Miss Munro was standing up. Her face was white, lips pink like the underbelly of a shell. She stared at Dad through the window.

‘Go, Kevin,' she said, quietly, and then louder when he didn't respond. ‘Go, for Christ's sake, Kevin! He's got a fucking
axe!
'

With that, the accordion doors squeezed shut and we lurched forward. Dad was running beside us now and he swung the axe into the side of the bus. The sound of it made me want to vomit. A strip of metal tore and was flapping furiously as Kev put his foot down on the accelerator. Miss Munro and I looked through the back window at Dad who stopped, threw the axe onto the road and then picked it up and threw it into a tree where it stuck.

‘You're dead, Gerard!' he yelled at us. ‘You too, Kevin! And you too,
you fucking bitch!'

*

I began to shiver. I was still standing, holding onto the back of Kev's seat. My arms shook. I wanted a cigarette. I'd never wanted a cigarette before but now I wanted one. I closed my eyes and imagined one in my hand. Felt its heat lick my fingers. Miss Munro came up behind me and put her hand on my shoulder. I jumped and she turned me around, sat me down.

Kev wanted to call the police. It was a one-cop town so that meant he wanted to call Gary. The thought of Gary hauling Dad down to the station made me wish I'd not run and simply laid my neck down on the wooden block for Dad. Miss Munro looked at me and then back at Kev. ‘Can you hold off calling him?' she said.

Kev jerked his head angrily. ‘How am I gonna explain the side of my bus?'

When we were sure there was enough distance between us and Dad, Kev pulled over on the road and got out to inspect the gash. Dad had managed to swing the blade right through the panelling and had torn a strip of it away.

Miss Munro shrugged. ‘Look, the last thing Gerry needs right now is Gary.'

Kev spat out his window, shifting the gears down as we took a corner. ‘Yeah, and the last thing I need is a bloody gash in the side of my bus. What the hell have you got against Gary?'

I curled my hands into fists and leaned forward, letting out a moan. Dad had a run-in with Gary not long after we'd arrived when Gary had pulled us over. He'd made us sit in our car beside the road waiting for ten minutes or so, not getting out of his patrol car, lights flashing until Dad got jack of it. He got out and stretched, relaxed and easy like a cat. Then he lit a cigarette and strolled up to the police car, leaning in Gary's window as if he were the cop. ‘You got a problem, mate?' I heard him say. Gary was furious. Mum and me watched as the cop pushed his door open and sprang out, yelling so much we could see the spray of spit from where we sat. Dad loved every second of it. ‘Best thousand bucks I've ever spent,' he said later that evening, Gary's traffic fines proudly stuck on the fridge.

Oh God, not Gary. My knees jerked up and down they were trembling so hard. Miss Munro put her hands on them and forced them still. She looked at me, bending so her eyes were level with mine and I could see Kev watching us in his mirror. ‘Gary's a shit, Kevin. He'll make things worse for Gerry.'

Kev sneered. ‘And you? What are you going to do for the boy? Getting cosy?' Miss Munro reddened and pulled her hands away from my knees. When Jackson and his sisters got on, we rode the rest of the way in silence.

At recess I was sitting on the bench next to the drinking taps when Miss Munro came and got me. ‘Gerard, can you come with me?' She tried to smile at me but I could tell something was wrong. When I followed her back into our classroom, I froze in the doorway. Gary and Kev were sitting in there, Kev talking fast and his hands flailing. ‘My bus, it's bloody ruined, the bloody psycho—'

Miss Munro coughed. ‘That's enough now, Kev, Gerard's here.' Both men looked at us, Gary's eyes running the length of Miss Munro, then me, then back to Kev. ‘Keep going, Kev,' he said, ignoring us. I felt Miss Munro stiffen as Kev picked up where he left off.

‘So bloody Colpitt, he fucking put his axe through the side of my bus. Tore the panelling off. Going to cost me a thousand at least.'

Gary raised his eyebrow. ‘An axe?' A smile ghosted around the corner of his mouth. He turned to me, his blue leather police jacket squeaking as he twisted in the desk he was sitting at. ‘An axe?' he asked again. I shrugged. I had liked it on the bus when Miss Munro emphasised
axe.
Kev had kept saying, ‘Man, what did you do, kid?' But Miss Munro would correct him each time, ‘It was an
axe,
Kev, no kid does anything to justify an
axe
.' But the way Gary was saying
‘axe'
made me nervous. He was excited. He was practically jumping-out-of-his-seat happy.

‘We were just mucking around,' I said quickly. ‘It was just a joke.'

Kev snorted. ‘A joke? A fucking joke?' His voice was high and whiny. Miss Munro put her hand on my shoulder. ‘Gerry, you don't have to—' I flexed my arm, made it hard and tense and shrugged her off. Gary thinned his eyes, slats of grey in his small face, acne scars like rat bites clustering around his mouth.

‘Well, your dad's a pretty funny guy, isn't he?'

I nodded. ‘Sure is. Made you laugh a couple times, hasn't he?'

It went quiet when I said that. No one said a word and scraps of the schoolyard came in through the window. A group of girls were singing the lyrics to a song I'd heard a hundred times on the radio, then started screaming at one of them for getting the words wrong, a boy kept yelling, ‘Here, here, here,' and the sound of a footy being kicked, the boy still yelling, ‘Here! I'm here! Pass it to me!' And then Mr Thacker, the school maintenance man, and his dog wandered into view. A bunch of kids ran a wide berth around him and the dog, a brindle with clumps of its winter coat still hanging off its ribs. It was mean to everyone but Mr Thacker and he kicked it and it still loved him.

‘Gerard?' It was Miss Munro. It felt like she was calling to me from a very long way off. ‘Gerard?' she said again. The classroom sucked back into focus. Gary was standing now, his fists clenched at his side. Kev was staring at me. ‘Gerard,' said Miss Munro, her eyes pleading, ‘tell Sergeant Henning why your father was chasing you with an
axe.‘
And I started to laugh. I thought it didn't matter why, I thought that because it was an
axe,
nothing else mattered.

‘You rude little prick,' said Gary and suddenly his face was right there, his mouth with its teeth all overlapping as if crowding for a better view. I breathed it in, the taste of his uselessness, and laughed harder.

‘Stop grinning, you little shit,' he spat. I bent over, holding my ribs it hurt so much, and when it didn't stop hurting, I turned and ran out of the room. It was dark and cool and hushed in the corridor, jackets hanging off hooks, bags piled into unlocked lockers, an open packet of orange Twisties strewn and stamped into the carpet. In the classroom I could hear Miss Munro and the men start to talk, their voices muffled; I couldn't make out what they were saying. I touched my face. It was wet. I walked over to my schoolbag and took out the apple.

*

In the yard I stood near Mr Thacker as he dug out the dirt from around a fence post, swearing each time his spade got stuck in the clay. The dog sat a metre or so away, eyes on his master. I stepped a little closer to it and it lowered its bottom lip, baring its yellow teeth. I rolled the apple in my hands before shining it on my shorts. I took a bite and spat it out. The apple was bad. It was brown and floury. I took another bite to check and spat it out again. I looked down at the apple in my hand and held it out to the dog. It looked at me, then warily over at Mr Thacker who was engrossed in the fence. Getting up on its legs, the dog stepped towards me and the apple quivered in the flat of my palm.

THE INTIMACY OF THE TABLE

DELIA FALCONER

I was twenty when I met the great poet. It seemed to me then that I would always live in a narrow flat in a street between two steeples, that there would always be a bright arm of the harbour glimpsed sidelong through the eye's corner as I read in trams or trains. All that year I wore a shabby cream suit with a crimson handkerchief folded at the breast and a hipflask in one pocket. This day I had a nervous quiver at the corner of my mouth, my hair was brilliantined and combed. Is it possible that I also clutched a sheaf of my own poems, in a buckram folio, marked with the date and place of their composition, in the hope that he might notice them? I admit I did.

It was late on a summer afternoon when I climbed the steps to the Journalists' Club at the back of Central Station. The bar was dark; the sun squeezed in transverse cracks of heat through the edges of the blinds. The air was close and thick, as if it had been strained through dirty corduroy.

I saw him immediately at a table in the furthest corner, the thin neck and browless eyes I recognised from photographs, that broad and wizened head, the blue bow tie. There was a claret and a paper and a jug of water on the table. He wore a double-breasted suit, fastidiously buttoned. He made notes as he read the paper with a crabbed hand in a tiny notebook. From where I stood, ten feet away, I could hear the sharp, swift indentations of the pencil. I leant at the bar and sipped my schooner for now that I was here I had no idea how I should approach him. Although the temperature was less fierce than it had been outside in the street I seemed to sweat more. I had walked the full distance from my lodgings.

I wonder now exactly what I expected from him. I still imagined then that each writer knew himself as part of a club, that one great writer would always recognise another. I had come across his famous poem for the first time in my school reader where it had been placed, miraculously, among the work of well-known, foreign poets; I could still recite it. I knew that he had rarely published another poem since.

At last he put away his heavy spectacles and came up to the bar where he placed a pound note folded neatly into quarters on the counter.

‘Which do you think is quickest transport up to the University, the train or bus?' he asked the barman. ‘I believe I'm to deliver a paper there at the English Department in an hour.'

‘No you're not,' I said.

He turned; his glare was quick and blank, the appalled expression of the recognised and put-upon which to my shame I feel sometimes flash across my own face if some reader taps me on the shoulder while I am standing at a festival with my literary friends, or if I meet a student in the street. His mouth was the same grim line which I saw on the faces of my father's friends, and I also recognised something of their brittleness, which, with some fear, I considered a symptom of the office life, as if the atmosphere of heavy ashtrays and high-backed leather chairs had permanently pressed itself upon them.

‘It's next week. You can take my word for it.' I fished the crumpled flyer from my folio with shaking hands. I could not stop. ‘It's true. I study there. Believe me, if there was a change of date I'd know about it.'

He nodded as he read, then shook my hand and thanked me. His palm was hard and surprisingly boney, for he was not a small man. He smiled faintly as he appraised me. He had the formal kindness I was later to associate with men who spent long periods of time alone, the outback reserve of country gentlemen or mining engineers. ‘I've been dying to read your next collection,' I said.

‘Not dying, I hope.' His eyes had lost a little of their flint. ‘I'm sure there are better things to die for.'

We moved to the table he had just abandoned. ‘Do you drink claret?' I nodded although I did not. ‘Good,' he said, as he waved the bartender over. ‘Rituals are the great comfort of growing older. It is important to remember that eating and drinking are also a kind of life. Some toast, or sandwiches? I knew a man once, a barrister, whose great pleasure in life was to go to the Lawyer's Club in Bridge Street – do you know it? – they served up English boarding school food, quite dreadful preparations: tapioca, sago, trifle with the hint of the stale and confiscated cake about it. The rest of us would amuse ourselves by making up new names for the dishes: Matron's Surprise, willow sausage, flannel soup. They were sold at tuckshop prices, the menu was scribbled on a blackboard mounted on the oak walls, between the portraits. My friend was a rather wealthy man, but I have never seen him happier than when he suggested we make an excursion there for their threepenny tart with custard.'

I could only nod, faced with the scrupulous mechanics of his conversation. The club began to fill. Occasionally, one of the men, with the lines of his hat still imprinted around his forehead, would greet him loudly, looming at our table. He responded quietly and introduced me to them as his ‘friend'. Yet I could sense his eyes move across the backs lined up at the bar and felt that I would be soon dismissed. And I had not shown him my poems about flying foxes and Moreton Bay figs, or spoken with him about the cramped parks with their palms and memorial arches near my flat, or heard him speak about his great poems of the Harbour, or asked him why he did not write.

He asked me where young people ‘went' these days. I said I did not know; that I was fairly solitary ‘by choice' because I was ‘too busy writing'; that I did go to the ‘usual' bars around the university and the Greek cafeterias in Castlereagh Street; and that I went sometimes with my friend Robert who was a student politician to the branch meetings to which he was so frequently invited. He had no particular political calling, but had calculated that by this means we could save ourselves the price and preparation of around three meals a week. He had chosen the Liberal–Country Party because the women tended to be richer and the catering of a higher standard. The disadvantage was that we had often to travel up and down the North Shore train line to Lindfield or Wahroongah. We travelled to Willoughby only if the necessity was very great, for this required a bus, and the hostess at this particular branch lived in a house filled with uncleared mouse traps. She served without fail guacamole on a lettuce leaf balanced precariously on a piece of toast.

He had a charming way of laughing. He chuckled gently with his hands placed across his belly, bending back slightly, as if he took pleasure in gauging its vibrations.

I seized my chance. I told him where I lived, next to the Deaf Hospital in a pink federation villa which had been divided into bed-sits. I told him about the bathroom with its view of the railway tracks and the long ferny garden, the toilet pressed at an ungainly angle in the corner, the cantankerous water heater which I lit before each shower. I had been talked into minding a friend's axolotl which hung suspended in its green tank on the washstand and regarded my ablutions with the single lugubrious eye which remained in its possession.

‘Is there a trombonist?' he asked. ‘And an old lady with two sycophantic Pomeranians and an addiction to Epsom salts?'

There were no musicians, I said, but there was a thin American cartoonist who went out each Saturday evening and who, if he returned alone, played Mario Lanza on the gramophone and sang until the early morning. And once, I said, disturbed by his music which drifted unimpeded into my always-open windows, I had looked out of the bathroom at the grounds behind the Deaf Hospital and observed in the moonlight a game of naked rugby played in perfect silence.

The claret bottle was empty. The conversations around us seemed to have settled into more long-distance rhythms. ‘Let's go to Holderigger's,' he said, and stood and wiped his eyes.

Outside the evening was diffuse and golden. The station steps had emptied and a molten calm crept down the hill from the back of Foys to Belmore Park. Above us the golfer on top of Sharpie's Golf House began, endlessly, to guide his bouncing neon chip shot along its illuminated path towards the nineteenth hole.

He was not as robust, I noticed with some surprise, as he had appeared inside the club. Once he paused at the window of a shoe store and dabbed with his handkerchief at a thick vein in his forehead. He walked slowly, and did not talk much. He hummed instead from time to time.

At last, off a lane at the far end of the city, we entered a chilly portico of sandstone and passed through a set of double doors into a restaurant. Leather club chairs gave way, beyond the bar, to two long alleyways of tables. I could smell the starch of the tablecloths, the sweet and desiccated scent of breadsticks. The mirrors were deep and edged with brass, the walls panelled with some dark unshining wood which still held the thrill of polish. The maitre d', an older man with thin red hair, greeted him by name.

‘And how is Madame Holderigger?' he asked the waiter.

‘She's very well, sir. Her grandson graduated this afternoon, an engineer, so she won't be coming in this evening.'

‘That's splendid news. Please convey my congratulations.'

He sat, without glancing backward, in the heavy armchair as the waiter, in one smooth action, pushed it in and draped the napkin across his lap. My own descent was not so graceful. I hesitated when the waiter gestured; I perched on the chair's edge, then readjusted it myself. He asked if we would like a pre-dinner drink. Knowing of no other types I requested a gin and tonic. The poet ordered another for himself.

‘I have known Madame Holderigger', he said, when the waiter left us, ‘for almost forty years. She is a Swiss, originally. She must be nearly ninety. You will no doubt have seen her at some event or other. She wears her hair scraped up into a tiny lacquered topknot like a cocktail onion. Many years ago she used to run some private clubs – when I was a young journalist she still had a reputation for sly-grogging.' He smiled faintly; the word pleased him. ‘In the thirties she would go about looking for husbands with her daughter, an over-ripe spinster who tortured light opera. Gilda had the same broad décolletage and indelicate complexion as her mother – I used to think, when I spotted them in Martin Place, of two packet boats in full sail, rigged with lead crystal. Lindsay detested them, they always made him shudder. He used to say, each time they passed, “There goes the butcher's wife and daughter.”'

Although I smiled I had begun to panic. I had imagined, when he first suggested it, that Holderigger's was another bar. I realised now that I had not enough money for this sober restaurant. I began to say that I should be on my way once we had shared our drinks, that I was not particularly hungry.

If I had another appointment, he said, he understood, although he had hoped that I might permit him to shout me dinner.

‘May I show you something?' He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket, opened a leather bill-fold on the table, and produced an uncashed cheque for five pounds. It was a royalty, he said, for his last collection, published twenty years before, which had been recently reprinted. It was not much, he told me, for a lifetime's work, but it was the kind of thing I must get used to if I was to make poetry my life. One should regard writing as a pleasant hobby, he said, and never a career. In this way, any reward or word of praise would come as a surprise, rather than one's due. The trick, he said, was to enjoy each windfall when it came. It was his great pleasure, when those cheques turned up, to buy dinner for his friends.

Our meal arrived which he had ‘taken the liberty' to order. I had never tasted oysters on the half-shell. Later I would also see for the first time a salad tossed at the table and a fillet steak girdled tightly by a piece of bacon. We drank a bottle of red wine. I did not say much. I remember that he spoke – as he forked and cut methodically with his dry white hands – of the managing board of the
Bulletin
and its effect on various journalists unknown to me, which I could only, dumbly, nod at; of other restaurants where I had not yet been; of his cadet days covering pet shows and sewing fairs and go-kart races where young boys with cunning faces lashed fox terriers and pugs like Mawson's huskies. He spoke fondly, too, of the architecture of the Harbour, although he did not mention his own great poems set there: of Beare's Stairs – he liked the rhyme – with their graveyard pillars made of sandstone above the stovepot roofs of Darlinghurst; of Miller's Point and its sailors' homes before it was levelled by the hefty stanchions of the Harbour Bridge.

As the food came he pointed out the rituals of the service, the way the waiters wheeled out another, smaller table and placed it by our own, the way they plated out the vegetables from a serving platter. In this way the labour of the kitchen remained invisible but the hospitality of the cook was performed before us, recreating what he referred to as the ‘intimacy of the table'. He also made me observe the function of the furnishings and linen. The salmon-coloured tablecloths and napkins created, along with the brass and wood, the atmosphere of a cruising liner. The pale green menus which the waiters carried worked like a contrasting thread which relieved and lifted up the orange, he said, wound by their constant movements through the room.

Towards the end of the meal he ordered another bottle of the claret. I had been drinking cautiously but I still felt flushed. My eyes were vague and heavy. He sat upright in his chair. His spine did not touch the plush back, a posture I have come to think of since as the mark of a truly dedicated drinker, movement conserved, the body held in a state of relaxed anticipation. He seemed, if anything, to have become more pale and grave.

I do recall that a younger waiter about my own age arrived and dug ineptly with his corkscrew at the lead above the cork. The poet flinched and snatched the bottle from his hands. He opened it himself with a single turn and twist and poured out two full glasses. He spoke, more slowly now, about the flash Kings Cross landlords he had met as a cub reporter, about the best brains and tripe that he had eaten in greasy spoon cafés around the Rocks, about scandals involving politicians whom, again, I did not know. He disappeared for some time to the toilet while I waited. The wine stand and serviettes were whisked away.