IT’S NO matter how urgent the Greek on the loudspeaker presses you onto the train, there’s always a wait while they shuffle the carriages. It’s like they couldn’t have assembled it beforehand, when it was empty. Like the engine driver needs an audience for his best shunt. We don’t applaud. We whinge and bitch about the time and the whiplash.
Then the train starts north. And it’s fast over puny cement backyards full of window frames and dirt-filled pots and fence-sat cats and train-frenzied dogs. Sometimes a stocky woman hanging clothes, always with her back to the train. Through these suburbs three shirts is yard wide.
It’s out to the wider backyards and the concrete-sided creeks before the zip-lock bags taped to my stomach get sweaty and I realise I forgot to double-fold a hanky between them and me. My stomach starts to itch under the plastic.
The old man sitting across from me doesn’t look any more at ease than me. His wife probably insists he wears those boxers she first saw on, or off, a GI in 1943 and still thinks are sexy, but that ride up and lock onto you with the sway off the badly laid tracks. She’s purple-haired and frocked. He’s in a cardigan and a forties tune, poised to launch a journey’s-length reminiscence on me at the first eye contact. I don’t give him that. I read the treacherous report. He hums, with the bounce of the train getting into his tune.
That’s public transport. And I’ve got to cop it when I’m working. Normally, in leisure hours, I’d cruise up the highway in my BM, just under their limits, alcohol and speed, and not care if the cops pulled me over and finger-jabbed my pectorals for me being unlicensed, fast and high. I’d open wide every compartment in my factory-smelling car that the star tattoo on my left ear-lobe told them to search. I’d smile and invite them to go fetch those specially sensitive one-man hounds of theirs that in a less evil world would spend their days sniffing for truffles.
But when I’m working, tripping a few grams into the outlying districts, I ride the rails with the pensioned-off, the freeway-frightened and the bowling-clubbed. Avoiding their eyes and thirties childhoods.
Margie will be weaving through Coburg by now, gunning the BM at the lights, impatient for the freeway. Always wanting the country running fast around her. Forever saying she didn’t know how I stood prison. It would kill her like stillness kills a shark, she says.
She’ll be in Seymour in time to take the white from me when the train rocks in to the station. We do it this way for the simple code that you never drive drugs up a major highway. Not with facial scars and a nocturnal pallor and when it’s the dream of every traffic cop to be in Vice and Nikes. I ride the copless rails and she connects with me in the towns and disperses what I’m carrying.
I’ve spent time in these towns. On nights in hotels, in bright streets that loom up out of vast irrigation grids, I’ve watched their local TV Seen their ads for farm machinery and concrete tanks. So I can see their need of a little cocaine, these country kids. Because when the urgentest thirty seconds the adult world can shine on you is about concrete tanks, then there is no good or evil. These kids know that. They’re not hanging out for the epiphany or full employment. They’re hanging out for me. For my drugs. And being at the end of a trade route they’ll pay top dollar.
Outside there’re green hills pitching and falling under red and white cattle. The morning sun is sucking slow currents of steam off their hides. I kick my feet up onto the seat across from me before the old girl thinks to move in there next to the window for the view now there is one. And I put the report up in front of me to cut eye contact.
It’s about me. A4s full of lies and libels with sad half-truths dropped in to make it stand up. It’s a confidential report from my parole officer never meant for my eyes. Photo-copied and smuggled to me by Lorna, his consulting psych, who turns out to be a passionate recreational user of drugs and crooks.
I can hardly believe my think-of-me-as-a-friend parole officer has penned this evil stuff about me. Ford is able to off-load guilt by strange and fanciful connections and attributions that show a layman’s knowledge of psychiatry.
Off-load guilt. An unfortunate thing to say about a man who just pleaded guilty and took a two-year stretch for an insurance fire on the chin.
The train goes from hum down to rattle and into Kil-more, where no one gets off in the quiet, but two soldiers get on. The old couple invite the soldiers into our compartment by smile. The older of the soldiers slides back our door.
‘Morning,’ he says, at my feet up on the seat. I drop them and push upright. The square of belly under the drugs itches wildly.
They put their duffle-bags in the overhead racks. The older, ranking soldier sits across from me with the view. The young one sits beside me. I’m the only one in the compartment not wearing a red poppy. I feel like a traitor. A fucking immigrant.
‘Off to Pucka?’ the old man asks.
‘Wreath laying in Seymour,’ the older soldier says.
‘Went through Pucka myself. Back prewar, I did.’ And here he has the door open for an old story or two that the soldiers couldn’t stop if they tried. He starts on New Guinea. Sails up to it aboard a zero-buzzed troop ship in his seventeen-year-old innocence.
The warship he’s on has Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda on the bridge. The young soldier’s happy to listen. But the older soldier isn’t copping World War II. He’s into his Vietnam stare. His glazed, hell-and-back boast. A jungle-cutting, been-there glare he’s been oppressing privates with for years.
I stare, too. Vietnam for me happened in my home town. But it happened hard enough to give me a stare.
In those days what was tipping me and my best friend Mick Eva to life being pretty fucking silly was our town getting officially nicknamed ‘Fruit Salad City’ and having to go festive all Australia Day weekend in a giant celebration of orchard produce. Our mayor dressed as a peach, certain professionals rigged out as pears, a fire-crew bunch of grapes, women wearing strategic leaves. And fruit piled high in the main street. Pyramids only days off fermentation, being boasted over and danced around.
And while these dances went on, someone in Canberra pulling my brother Gary out of a barrel for a tour of Vietnam. And him becoming quickly a hippy and a pacifist and not accepting what he called ‘their thoughtful invitation to slope opening’. And the fruit-dressed people looking down their noses at any Ford for miles. And me getting comments and fights at North Tech.
The only thing in our favour was the fact of my uncle Napper Ford being a war hero from another war. Napper was what we had for a father for story-telling and boxing lessons and shooting trips — and for nothing else. And despite he was a drunk and a mess he had the Victoria Cross. And with the disgrace of Gary, I used to head out the settlement side of town to see Napper and get him to tell me war stories. Link me up through blood to bravery. Him seeing I needed the link.
The other reason I went to see old Napper was to sell coke. Even in those early days me being beggared into dealing by a moral probity and a bad back that wouldn’t let me burgle houses. And alcohol having him so fearless in his outrageous atheist ways all these years, but lately not doing the job so well, he needed something else. And coke getting him strong enough to believe nothing again.
We used to sit drinking and snorting with him up on his sand hill. Looking down across box-thorn paddocks into the abos’ see-through houses. Cursing them for the gaps in their walls where they were known to pull off the boards to burn in winter. Burning up the tax dollars our Uncle Ray, who had a job, paid. And we’d have to pay too, if we got jobs.
The day of the war story I really needed, Mick Eva and Napper and me were out back of his house with folding chairs set up on the wooden floor of what used to be a shed until Napper was flooded in July of sixty-four and he found the frame and the walls were built of a eucalypt that would glow in the hearth all night. Now it was just floor. We had our shirts off, taking sun, gulping beer and doing lines. Swallows were cutting insects out of the air over our heads and dodging our occasional hip-fired shotgun blasts.
I was drunk and begging Napper for the story of how he got his Victoria Cross. A story he was famous for never telling. The afternoon went with him refusing to tell and me insisting he did tell. Until he could see I had to know, had to have some knowledge to counter the flak I was getting over Gary and his pacifist gene. He glowered down into his mirror with a hard-rolled fiver poised, twitching at the reflected swallows as they zapped across his lines.
He had Mick reach some beers out of the round-shouldered fridge that stood humming out in the sun.
The medal story is this, he said. When I was a prisoner of the Japanese on the Burma railway I had a pet monkey that had wandered out of the jungle. There was this one guard, Yukio, that used to come into our hut and steal our smokes and offer my monkey bananas. The monkey would reach out to take a banana and Yukio would burn its arm with a cigarette. Until I’d make my move to stop him and I’d cop a belting. But a belting that made me feel better.
He did it for months, old Yukio. Till he’d taught the monkey fear and me hate. Till he’d hold out a banana and the monkey would shrink and shiver and whimper … and I’d have to take another beating just to feel good.
Later that year everything started to get scarce and there were no cigarettes or bananas any more so Yukio’s bastard hand was stilled. But I knew there’d come a time for boot’s-on-the-other-foot bastardry. A time I could get back. So I hid a pack of Craven As away for then. For that time. And for two years I kept that pack buried. I listened to endless wailings for a pre-amputation smoke, and endless whimperings for a post-amputation one. And I kept those Craven As underground through it all.
Until, in 1945, we heard on our clandestine radio about the bomb. Heard the news long before the camp authorities. That day I dug up my Craven As and lit one up and its smell was pretty soon all through the camp. And Yukio turns up with his face twisted in fury and nicotine lust. And as he reaches for the pack, I ask, isn’t he from Hiroshima? Doesn’t his family own a printing press there? Isn’t his sexy little wife something of a calligraphy star in that town? Then I introduce him to the nuclear age. Turn his loved ones into footpath shadows.
Here Napper explodes a swallow with a lucky shot that was only punctuation for his story.
We don’t say anything. We usually communicate well with Napper. There’s no generation gap. So when we’re silent we’re saying that this thing is too big for words. We hold our memorial minute.
But eventually the question has to be asked. So I take a swig of beer and ask. But why did they give you the medal, Napper?
For having the courage not to smoke those Craven As, he says. And for poetry.
On the way back into town I ask Mick what he thinks of an awesome story like that. Mick says if they give medals for bullshit, poetry and monkey-love then Napper probably had one, but other than that, no.
I say I believe old Napper.
Mick says he has an announcement. The announcement is that I am finally snorting enough coke to be bullshitted by deros.
I tell him I’ve seen the medal.
He says he’s seen my death-before-dishonour tattoo with the snake around the dagger, and all it proved was I had money to pay a tattooist.
Then I feel lonely. And I feel the need for Napper to be real. And I love the way he avenged his monkey and hunted down his Jap. So I lean back and land a righteous punch on the side of Mick’s head. He goes down deep into the Paterson’s Curse where he has a lucky find of one of those beautiful Coke bottles of the seventies. As a weapon it is the real thing. He lays it across my face hard enough to make me see that I will take dishonour first.
Before we even get the shame of Gary off our backs, Mick spreads it around that the war-hero business is bullshit. Napper doesn’t argue. A week later he gets coked to the gills and burns down a camper van with a family inside. The van was Japanese. The family was Tasmanian.
I felt everyone had a case against me with old Napper a hero no more. I left town with forty-seven stitches in my face. The last I heard of him he sent me a bottle of expensive Spanish champagne from Pentridge for my twenty-first, which shows how thoughtful he was.
He sees himself as having survived a series of tense and dramatic storms.
Over the top of my report I see the old woman is holding out a tin of chocolate crackles to me. Pungent little things out of my past, when my old dear was alive and cooking and copying recipes off cereal boxes in supermarkets to prove she was a good mother underpaid. Everyone else is eating. A chocolate crackle has stopped the old man talking. I shake my head.
‘No, thanks.’
At Talarook four people get on the train. I look up and see dark eyes from my culpable driving sentence. They glow at me for a second from the passage before my scowl shuts them down. It’s Andrew Povey, grown an appropriate moustache. He often nearly forgets my contempt for him these days when I see him on the trains. I did two years in Barwon with him, but that’s all we share. I don’t even nod. He knows why I’m riding. I know why he’s riding. It’s business. He sees the young soldier. Slides the door.
‘Mind if I join you people?’ I do, but I say nothing.
Povey is what’s called a poof-rorter. That is, he seduces men still in the closet and then threatens to take them public unless they pay him hush-money. But in the years he’s been inside the homos have swelled up into a gay respectability that’s impossible to blackmail. So he’s hunting hard. Spending all his time trekking into northern Victoria, one of the last known habitats of the underground gay.
I wonder how far back-woods you have to go to make a buck as a poof-rorter these days. He’s carrying a mighty big suitcase.
He hoists it onto the luggage rack, leaning into the young soldier’s face as he does. It’s terrible to watch him work. He’s got a red poppy in his lapel. Baited for the Puckapunyal line. Happy that soldiers are still in the closet. He starts a conversation with the young soldier who’s been staring at him reflected in the window.
Like me, Povey’s wearing long sleeves buttoned at the wrists. I remember the smell of his burning skin, on remand in ’85, as he stubbed the glowing Marlboros into his forearms again and again. Me asking, ‘What in the name of fuck are you doing?’
‘Making myself some Evil-Stepfather scars,’ he explained through teeth. ‘They’ll earn you twenty-thirty per cent remission on a sentence if they’re done right, and they come with a good enough story.’
I was disgusted. Held him in contempt. Resisted Evil-Stepfather scars for another two sentences.
It can’t even be said he comes from a dysfunctional family. Though he knows the value of that line.
Margie will have overtaken the train by now. Probably parking at the Seymour station. Just time for a coffee and a flash of thigh at the station master before I arrive with the bag. At one time I would have punched a station master out for accepting that flash of thigh. Now I wink along.
We still love each other. But I love the her of the late eighties and she loves the pre-prison me. She loves the me I try to be when I’ve had a health scare. I love the her she denies she ever was. We often flare at each other for not being one half of that cool couple. And after a half city block of Happy Hours the nineties her has been known to take a wild swing at the post-prison me, who ducks, moves inside and uppercuts her into a wide-limbed splash onto the footpath. But on the footpath it’s always the late-eighties her. And standing over her is the pre-prison me, choked up and slowly shaking my head.
To be rehabilitated a felon must believe those trying to help know more about life than he does. Ford is too intellectually vain to believe this. He believes the opposite. He is trapped by his intelligence and his vanity. I don’t live in hope.
The hill with the red-flashing radio tower that is my cue to get ready for the Seymour drop edges past the window frame. I go down the corridor to the toilet and lock the door. I sit down. Carefully, with the blurred circle of road-metal and sleeper between my legs, I tear the Seymour bag off my stomach. I wrap it in a disposable nappy and put the nappy in a Myer bag and tie the top. I flatten the Shepparton bag back on my stomach, tuck myself in and return to my seat.
The old girl sees the Myer bag I’m carrying and tells me young people have no patience. I should wait till after Christmas for the sales, like she does.
‘I’ve got too much money to bother with the door-buster crush of the Myer sale,’ I tell her. She winces at my smile.
On the outskirts of Seymour a steward pushes a drinks trolley up to our door. It’s laden with trays of those thumb-sized bottles the airlines hand out. Chinking and chirping against each other about the fast-shivering country underneath, sounding like a hundred hopped-up finches.
‘Anyone care for a refreshment?’ he wants to know. No one cares except me, who asks for a double Jack on the rocks. As the steward is unscrewing the caps the chirping quells, like the sun is setting and those hundred finches are roosting, tucking their little heads out of sight under their wings. The train is braking onto the Seymour platform.
The soldiers rise to go. Povey heaves down his suitcase and starts to follow, talking to the young soldier about ceremonies. I’m stuck paying the steward, so I take a chance on Povey.
‘Would you mind putting this in the bin for me, mate?’ I ask. I point definitely to a yellow rubbish bin in a stand on the platform. Some kid has sprayed ‘TUBBY’ round its top. Povey knows what’s going on. But I haven’t interfered with him and his soldier, so he’s happy to make the drop for me.
‘Tubby,’ I say He nods and takes the bag. I give the steward a twenty and he digs for change. I sit at the window and watch Povey and the two soldiers cross the platform, him flipping the bag into the bin as they pass.
Margie is lounging against red brick and a Coca-Cola scene. A black wonder-bra under a see-through summer dress. Her body glowing beneath a bed of transparent perennials. Her idea of inconspicuous. Even the time-pressed lechers off the train miss nothing. She has one leg raised, the foot resting up against the wall behind her, thigh showing idle tan. She’s grinding Log Cabin between her palms. A roily paper butterfly-mad on her bottom lip.
Suddenly, the platform speakers are loud with bugle. Long, mournful blasts. I see by the station clock it’s eleven a.m. People everywhere stop their conversations and lower their heads and stand still. I watch the hush fall.
No one moves. We’re remembering war dead. All of us but Bob Noonan, who is leaning on the scales at the platform gate eyeing the frozen crowd. Bob is a vice squad detective with a string of nearly-wrongful-arrests in his past. Me being three of them. He is watching over the bin called ‘Tubby’, waiting for someone to step out of anonymity and make the pick-up. Povey already has a man too old to be wearing Nikes, but wearing them anyway, standing close behind him.
I have to yell to Margie. I have to warn her of the looming bust. I can do it without implicating myself. I can shout something that will ring bizarre across this still platform with only Margie understanding danger looms and everyone else thinking me heretic mad. I run a few choices through my head. ‘Seymour’s a graveyard for cowboys’ being my favourite. With that mysterious shout I could save her.
But we’re stranded in minutes of important silence. Because there’s my reverence for what the diggers did at Lone Pine. There’s what the old bloke opposite me boasts of on the Kokoda Trail. There’s my pride in how Napper avenged his monkey. And there’s the way Margie kissed Jim Legoe through two verses, tongue-to-palate deep in front of me as the purer of us brought in the New Year of ’87 with an unruly Auld Lang Syne.
This is a silence that magnifies my heartbeat and memory. A stillness that magnifies the waving of that Tally-Ho paper on her lip. Lest we forget, baby. Lest we do.
It’s a man-made sparrow’s-fart as the engine driver leans on the power of the locomotive and gets the platform sliding back behind us and the hundred finches in the drinks trolley wake and start to chirp again. It’s dawn.
We’ve slid off the end of the platform and I have my head out the window looking back when a bugle I can’t hear thaws the crowd into its future. I see Margie start her saunter for the bin. For the half-kilo that translates into four years with good behaviour. Margie, too naked and vain to wear the Evil-Stepfather scars that would shorten her stay. I hope, baby, they have some modern facility for you. Something a mover like you can be still in. Some enlightened institution with a sun-frock uniform and chromed appliances. And a spa. And soap operas always running, dulling you out, taking the pain from your stillness.
Bob Noonan pushes off the scales.
The train is up to hum. Inside our compartment the old lady is waggling a vacuum flask at her husband. The steward hands me my change and pushes the trolley away towards Shepparton.
I’m unemployed, riding north. The classic Australian arse-out-of-your-pants odyssey. Me making it again. Riding through gauge changes and dead stations and watching the country creep tropical. Riding until I’m under palm trees and I can almost hear those billion Asians in their creaky boats just off the coast. Lying my low under phenomenal skies.