Butcher Shop

On a green island across the seas, naked women, tall and supple, laboured in the fields of a tea plantation—or so it was said. But it was later said that the women were not entirely naked. They wore bright sarongs tied at the waist. A few other details were also changed. I began to fear that the women would turn out not to be naked at all. It was important to me that the description of their breasts as ‘full, very full’ should not be altered. Their smiles flashed an invitation. ‘Kiss me. I am yours, blue-eyed Aussie soldier, visitor to our shores. Kiss me, and my sister, too.’

I came to know of these generous women when I was eleven years old. My father told me about them. He’d met them during the war, somewhere in the Islands. Successive episodes of his encounters with them provided more intimacy. ‘My Aussie darling,’ they said as they undressed him. On occasion, three sisters would vie for his attention. They were always sisters, never just friends. Sequential sexual adventures with women related by blood seemed to gee my father up.

The story of the bare-breasted women was the most wonderful story I’d ever heard. But I was careful, always, to make sure that my attention did not betray anything lickerish. That would have been the end of the stories. I looked interested, I smiled, I sometimes laughed. But I never embarrassed my father, never said, ‘Wow!’ or, ‘Boy oh boy!’ My expression said, ‘Thanks Dad, fascinating stuff.’ Nothing more. He was educating me, he allowed himself to believe. I was eleven. I needed to hear stories like this.

With fiction, the audience is everything. The idea of authors writing to please themselves and no one else has always seemed crazy to me. You write for people who are just a little bit more difficult to please than yourself. My father’s fictions (as they surely were) took proper account of his audience. I was a little more difficult to please than he. I liked detail, and he gave me detail. One of the women had a silver filling in her tooth. (A worker on a tea plantation?) Another played the mandolin while her sister sang. His story-telling manner was nonchalant, yet conscientious. We would be fishing down on the river or up at the lake. He always sniffed twice before he began, as if inhaling the little extra air needed to prepare his narrative voice. ‘I dunno if you should be hearing this,’ he would say, and then he would tell me. I loved him for it. I loved the lies. If none of this happened to my father, I thought, it must have happened to someone.

Any child can pick up a yarn that draws together fragments of daydream, threads of ambition, only to find much later that it has become the initial paragraph of a life story. Those first few lines of story may determine who you marry—your choice puzzling those who know you. They may reverberate when you choose the names for your children, find yourself in bed with your best friend’s wife, invent an amazing system of airborne travel, shoot yourself. The opening paragraph will act as more than words, as a wax holding together the feathers of homemade wings. The green island of absurdly complaisant women became the opening of my story, which is a new version of my father’s story. Passing on your genes is said to be a formidable imperative of species. To pass on your fantasies, to have your children act out a new and possibly improved version of the yarn of your life, might constitute a more subtle tactic in the quest for immortality.

I was fifteen in 1963, and dim. I should go further and say that even amongst a crowd of dim fifteen year olds, I would have stood out. I had left school early, more or less because my father had expected that I would. He saw no virtue in education beyond the subsistence level. I could read and write—what more did I want? What I wanted had only partly formed in my mind at that time, but through the mist I could make out an edenic island, white sand, palm trees, small but well-made huts grouped beneath the trees and, nearby, a library. The library was important. I enjoyed reading, but on the island, so far as I could tell, it would be difficult for me to earn much of an income for the purchase of books. I would probably have to be kept as a type of pet by the beautiful and salacious women who were the only other inhabitants of the island—or the only ones I cared to bring into slightly sharper focus. But that was in the future.

For the time being, my father had accepted a job for me, offered in the pub by Bertie Fisher, the butcher in my home town. I was to become Bertie’s apprentice.

‘You’ve got to do something, y’ know,’ my father explained. ‘You’ve got to do something for a living.’

‘I know.’

‘Well, what’s the matter with it? It’s a good job. Make money as a butcher.’

My sister Marion, now living in the city, had gone to work at the age of fourteen. My father had always spoken proudly of her initiative. It was important that I measured up to my sister, gave my father equal cause for pride.

‘Okay,’ I said.

My father had lived through the Great Depression. Employment to him, and to every other male Australian of his class and generation, was victory. He didn’t trust life or anything about it, but if you had a job, you’d had a win. It wasn’t possible for him to study me for a minute or two, with all his prejudices put aside, and ask himself if this slight and dozy boy with pink cheeks and a girl’s eyelashes could comfortably take his place behind a zinc counter in a striped apron. It was a good job. It was a victory.

I was worried about Bertie, more than anything else. The island—well, I would still get to the island. But Bertie was a tough bastard, that was what everybody said, and he scared me. He was short and ugly with a powerful chest and over-developed forearms. His nose looked as if it had been chewed by something—human, animal, machine—then partly repaired. It tapered to an unnaturally flat tip. It was his hands that properly frightened me. He could lift things with just one of his huge, club-like fists that most people would struggle to hoist with two. He would take hold of a pig’s carcass and toss it along the butchering slab with a nonchalant flick, and once I watched him sink a spade into a pile of offal, lift it horizontal with a single hand (he had a Lucky Strike in the other), study the greyish-pink mass for a minute or more, then heave it into the copper.

I worked in the backyard of the butcher shop most of the time. The furnace and copper were kept there. I would load offal and offcuts into the copper, rendering it all down to lard. The stink was awful. I could gaze up to the hills that circled the town, and set my soul on routes of escape. The near hills had been cleared root and stump by squatters in the old days, and in the spring glowed green in the sunlight. In summer they took on a tawny wheatfield colour. Beyond, the mountains climbed into the sky. I had roamed those hills, climbed the mountains. I knew of cool, shaded valleys bedded with moss and ferns.

Staring up at the hills from the backyard of the butcher’s shop while the offal boiled, I dreamed of the special colony I hoped one day to found up there. The colony would accept women almost exclusively. And not just any women. I was thinking of maybe a dozen women, all like Jenny Macrae, a soft, blowsy girl from my fourth-form class with yellow hair and cushiony breasts and lips that always looked slightly bruised. Other pretty girls, teased by boys at school, would respond by dobbing to Mrs Spencer, who looked on all males as swamp life. Spence would push a boy against a wall and savage him until tears dampened his cheeks. ‘If you’ve got something to say to that lass, you say it like a gentleman. Do you understand what a gentleman is? Of course you don’t, it’s a mystery to you, you ugly little chap.’ But Jenny, taunted, would call musically over her shoulder, ‘Anus face!’, not with much malice, and go on her way.

I never hoped for a dozen copies of Jenny in my colony. I hoped for mature women—older versions of her. I never asked myself just why twelve beautiful women, mature and experienced, would wish to live in a secluded valley with a fifteen-year-old butcher’s apprentice. In any case, I didn’t wish to spend a great deal of time with the colony women. I wanted to have sex with each of them a few times a day, then ride my bike into town and go fishing with my friends, or maybe kick a football around. During my recreation time—a large part of each day—the women would be free to please themselves. They might cook, or read magazines, for example.

From the back of the shop, I could hear Bertie singing. He had a sweet tenor voice with a nice quaver. He sang Hank Williams’s songs: ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart’, ‘Jambalaya’, ‘Hey, Good Lookin’’. He was cheerful, as most butchers are, and kept up an effortless banter with the customers:

‘Six mid-loin mutton, no problem with that at all.’

‘Trim the fat, Bertie, but not too much.’

‘Be capable of that, Dulce.’

‘And some mince. Not too fine. Don’t like it too fine.’

‘Sounds reasonable, Dulce. Anything reasonable, I’m happy to do.’

‘Too fine, it falls to bits.’

‘Wouldn’t want that. Wouldn’t want your rissoles all over the place, Dulce.’

Bertie employed a second butcher, Eric, an Aboriginal with a curious handicap for a man who’d chosen to cut up animals for a living: he sickened at the sight of blood. The pink and red of the meat didn’t trouble him, but blood on the move made his knees turn to jelly. He must have kept this weakness to himself when he was offered the job, because I was in the shop to hear Bernie complain of the extra work that Eric had loaded on him.

‘Got a cow out at Taggerty to pick up tomorra. Y’can do that, hey?’

‘Load it on the truck for yuh, bring it back here,’ Eric apologised.

‘What the fuck’s the good of a cow to me? I want it shot, I want it chopped!’

‘Can’t do that, mate.’

‘Why fuckin’ can’t yuh?’

‘Don’t like it. Never have.’

Eric made up for his squeamishness by taking a conscientious role in my education as a butcher. He’d bring me in from the copper to demonstrate the skill of the sausage maker.

‘Y’ know what you call this, Bobby?’

‘Skin?’

‘Yeah, it’s skin orright, it’s skin when it’s on y’ sausage. But it’s called ‘casing’ when y’ take it outa the box. ‘Casing’, right?’

‘Casing,’ I repeated.

‘Right. Now, y’ slip y’ casing over this thing here, y’ tap. Y’ call it the ‘tap’. Right? Whadda we call it?’

‘The tap,’ I said.

‘Now, y’ mince’s inside here, y’ sausage mince. Put what y’ like in there, mince it up, out it comes from the tap into the casing. Y’ don’t let him run f’ too long. Don’t wanna snag a mile long, hey? Don’t want that, do we? So whadda we do with him?’

‘Make it into smaller sausages?’

‘Good! Good on yuh, Bobby! Make it into smaller snags. Twist it here, here, here, make a string of ’em. That’s how y’ make y’ sausages. Wanna have a go?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘’Course y’ do! Have a go!’

My father had felt it his duty to tell Bertie that I was ‘a bit vague’. I was standing beside him when he gave out this information, and I remember that he lowered his voice, and seemed embarrassed. Anything about a person that reduced his value to an employer made my father uncomfortable. He went on to tell Bertie that I might need a boot up the arse occasionally. I was shocked to hear him say that, because he never laid much of a hand on me himself. Some of my friends fared much worse. I noticed that whenever I was chastised for daydreaming, for not paying attention to the here-and-now, there was always a further suggestion of shiftiness, as if my daydreams were subversive.

‘Full of secrets, aren’t we?’ my stepmother would say, one eyebrow raised. ‘You don’t fool me.’

‘I’m not trying to fool you.’

‘Yes you are. Yes you are. But it doesn’t work with me.’

Gwen had developed a smug vigilance whenever she was alone with me, giving me sidelong looks and smiling quietly. It was as if she were saying, ‘Right, there’s no one here for you to work your way around, only canny old me—so don’t try anything.’ She had become suspicious of me since I’d revealed that the slightly supercilious Adam Cartwright was my favourite character on Bonanza—a hugely popular television western.

‘Yes, well you would, wouldn’t you?’ Gwen jeered. ‘Moody, just like you. Hey, Frank! Who do you think Bobby likes best? Adam!’

‘Adam! Jesus!’

My father had just come in from the kitchen. He’d been making the tea during the ad break.

‘Sneaky,’ said Gwen. ‘Just like Bobby.’

‘I’m not sneaky!’

‘Yes you are! You’re a sly little bugger, the way you get those blanks.’

Gwen was referring to Scrabble. She was bitter. It meant a great deal to her, winning at Scrabble. Her entire recreational life was devoted to Scrabble, crosswords, detective stories and fishing. She required an adversary. When she read, she had to discover the killer before the author revealed the name. When she fished, she would gloat for days over landing a trout. She believed that trout were sly, too. The entire population of the town was divided between the disingenuous and the candid, so far as she was concerned.

I don’t think Bertie believed that I was sly. I don’t think he believed that I had the brains for it. Certainly he took no pains to conceal his political feints and dodges from me. For the butcher’s shop was also the unofficial headquarters of the town’s conservatives. Jim Naylor, who owned almost all the land from the Goulburn River to the mountains, would call in a couple of times a week to nut out shire council strategy with Bertie. Neither Joe nor Bertie sat on the council, but they controlled it through stooges. They spoke of their puppets with contempt, despising them, so far as I could tell, even more than they did their Labor enemies. I was a communist. The politics of the council interested me.

Whenever Joe lumbered into the shop, I’d find myself something to do not too far away. Bertie and Joe, each side of the counter, leaned toward each other over the spread sheets of newspaper used for wrapping. Joe made me think of an ancient turtle, his head drawn into his shoulders, his face blotched with dark melanoma in some places and bleached white in others. Wrinkled yellow crescents hung under his eyes. While he was talking with Bertie, his head would thrust forward as if spying out opportunities for malice, then draw back. I considered both Bertie and Joe my political enemies. My acts of subversion extended to writing ‘MARX’ in red crayon on the inside of the coarse, white butcher’s paper I used when wrapping orders of sausages.

Eric, watching me as I stirred the offal in the boiler one morning, gave his head a worried shake. I glanced away, then looked back, and Eric still seemed worried.

‘Hey, Bobby, y’ wanna do this for a livin’? Y’ don’t, do yuh?’

‘It’s okay,’ I said.

‘Yeah, but y’ oughta go to school. What y’ doin’ here, Bobby?’

‘I left school,’ I said, vaguely ashamed.

‘Y’ oughtn’a. Y’ oughtn’a left school. Fuckin’, y’ don’t wanna do this all y’ life, Bob.’

‘I’m going to an island,’ I said. ‘I’m saving up.’

‘Island? What island?’

‘The Seychelles,’ I said.

‘Seychelles? Where the fuck’s that, the Seychelles?’

I knew where the Seychelles were. They basked in the Indian Ocean off Mombasa. I imagined the Seychelles to correspond in every feature to the green island of my daydreams. I saw myself stretched out on the yellow sands of the Seychelles beaches. My body would fill with warmth, like an apricot ripening on a bough. I would wear a sarong. My father had told me that both women and men wore sarongs on such islands. Mine would be blue and yellow, the colours of the sky and sand. The native woman who was my special love (I would call her Jenny, with her consent, though her native name would be quite different, something like Ooguma) would stroll down every so often to ask if I were ready to make love in our grass hut. I might lazily reply that I would be ready in another hour or so. I would say this gently, not carelessly, for the fact was that I loved Jenny/Ooguma and, even more importantly, she loved me. Jenny/Ooguma’s love for me was an innovation in my daydreams. Previously, I had only required her to desire me.

I didn’t mention any of this to Eric. His worried look frayed the edges of my daydream. I realised that he was not simply worried about my future as a butcher; he was worried about my whole life. He had more to go on than the voyage to the Seychelles. Once when I was stirring the offal in the boiler he had overheard me calling, for an imaginary radio audience, the magnificent over that saw me bring up the twenty runs I needed for my century in a deciding Ashes test. The intensity of my call, and perhaps also the insistence on verisimilitude, would have troubled him a fair bit. (I had described the bowler as ‘swarthy in appearance’—unusual for a Englishman, but the word appealed to me.)

I was not entirely insane, but a boy who relies too much on the imagination to decorate the bare halls of his life is in danger of seeming so. It requires steely handling, imagination, and I was just barely in control at fifteen. Eric had caught me in only a mild mood of escapism. What if he’d studied me playing ‘Two Goals Down and Ten Minutes to the Siren’—my favourite game of all? I played that game in the backyard of an empty house in Fourth Street. Thirty-six individual surfaces—chimney, fences, garage, walls, verandah—became the players of the two Australian Rules teams that took part in the game. My role was to bring all these inanimate surfaces to life by racing around and kicking a tennis ball to the players, then catching the ball when it rebounded. I also provided the commentary, preserving the immortal clichés of Saturday afternoon radio calls on 3UZ, 3DB, 3KZ. Gavin Hallet, a friend of my father’s, stopped to watch me one time. I was encouraged by the smile on his face to keep playing—he apparently didn’t see anything odd in the game. But he later asked my father if I was ‘all there’, and I could tell by the way my father reported this that he wanted reassurance.

My great ally in my battle for freedom from the town and the life it could offer me was my incompetence. I did everything badly. My sausages came out of the machine too long or too short, lumpy or leaky. And without knowing how it happened, I always managed to coat myself in mince. ‘You’ve got ten bob to wash off that friggin’ apron,’ Bertie would tell me. My incompetence—as a butcher’s apprentice and in every other situation—grieved my father deeply. He was a legendary worker in my town and could turn his hand to anything manual or mechanical with complete success. He had a deft touch, too, so that his success never appeared laboured. I watched in wonder once as he calmly repaired the clutch of our Morris, coolly selecting each piece of the puzzle that lay spread around him until the whole apparatus was rebuilt and re-installed. It worked perfectly, though everything he’d done had been based on a few brief instructions from the garage mechanic, Arnie Wold. At such times my love for him developed a fine, well-oiled hum. He would glance across at me, smile, and with that smile forgive the whole catalogue of my failures.

It was a pity that I disappointed my father so consistently, because I doubt anyone more admired him. And I admired him in the way he wanted to be admired. Pencil-thin as I was, and too pretty for a boy, I was thrilled by the sheer masculinity of my father. He had a graceful, laconic physicality. When he went to work with an axe on a pile of wood, fat chips of redgum flew through the air and the muscles of his forearms bulged and glistened. Every so often he stopped to catch his breath, and he’d grin at me and wink, light up a Temple Bar. It was best for me to remain silent, just express my awe with my wide-open eyes. I mucked it all up one day when I told him he looked ‘indomitable’. He grunted, just barely accepting the compliment.

I was forever trying to impress my father in the only possible way that I could impress him—by giving him evidence of my willingness to work hard. Once I’d reached the age of ten, he took me with him on weekend jobs he’d pick up all over the district. The extra work was important. Like most working-class families in the early ’sixties, we were always short, always trying to sniff out the extra two or three pounds that stood between worry and a clear run for a few weeks. The job might be anything—clearing bracken and ti-tree for the cockies; re-roofing a bungalow with iron; clearing drains down at the caravan park. A new source of work came along when people with money from Melbourne began building weekenders on land around the more remote inlets of the huge lake above the town. It was always cash-in-hand work, the price rapidly negotiated in mutters down in the shopping centre. Listening in, I’d hope for work arduous enough to let me show my mettle, but not so hard that it left me knackered.

‘Been told you’d be right for a day’s work, Frank.’

‘Yeah, could be. What’s the job?’

‘Laying concrete.’

‘Have to be cash in hand.’

‘Too right.’

‘What’s it paying?’

‘Dunno. Say fifteen bob an hour? Might take you five, six hours?’

‘Make it eighteen bob, won’t go over five hours.’

And then, when the man had departed: ‘Get you to help me, Bobby.’

‘Okay.’

‘Four-and-a-half quid. We’ll tell Gwen three, okay? Ten bob for you, an extra quid for me. You got that?’

‘Yep.’

I think there must have been a network of deceit amongst working men all over Australia at that time. Because it was not just my father who kept a bit back from the money he made, but all of his mates. They backed each other up. If my father and two mates had taken on a job, an agreement was made about the amount they’d report to their wives. Without a bit held back, there’d be no beer at the end of the job, no bet with the SP bookie, no new oil filter for the car—no reward for the sweat and toil. My father and all the other fathers I knew feared or hated their wives and looked on them as wardens. The hostility was always there, with the wives’ eyes permanently narrowed, and a soft, spaniel-ish, wounded expression in the husbands’ eyes. The women were battling on their children’s behalf: shoes to replace a pair that wouldn’t see out another fortnight, trip to the dentist, football boots promised for a couple of years now. But if a little windfall came along—God knows from where—all the spite and suspicion evaporated. Husbands and wives smiled, goodwill returned, passably generous things were said by each about the other.

As for my pay, I would never see that. I would have preferred my father to say, ‘Can’t pay you anything, sorry.’ It embarrassed me to hear my father make these promises he had no intention of keeping. Of course, he would have hated to admit that the promise was fantasy. He wanted to pay me. It wasn’t miserliness that made it impossible. In any case, I was glad of the money that came into the household from these occasional jobs. The money brought peace.

The regular arguments of my father and stepmother often made me doubt my sanity. For they despised each other with a hatred that was inexhaustible. Each had a catalogue of grievances so detailed and cross-referenced that any accusation would instantly be countered by an accusation from the same section of a parallel list. They would circle each other in the kitchen like a pair of enraged baboons, leaning forward from the waist with teeth bared. Anything that could wound was used. Neither was capable of restraint when the anger was strong enough—not even the presence of me or my two stepsisters. Listening, I would wince when one of them left an opening for the other, certain of what would happen. A gloating look, the advantage seized, then venomous words would hiss from a crooked mouth.

My stepmother’s most deadly line of attack had to do with why my mother left my father—his ‘stinking temper’; he ‘couldn’t hold his liquor any better than a kid’. Once on top, she was relentless: ‘What would make a woman do that, run off and leave two kids behind? Jesus, she must have hated you, Frank, you must have made her life a living hell.’ My father would scream that she was a slut, but that only made Gwen laugh.

At his worst, he would menace her with the story of her younger son’s death in a car crash a few years earlier, telling her that Jeffrey was better off dead than growing up with a mother like her. When he had her on her knees, he would torment her with the sort of cruelty you would normally associate with the torture chamber. Since it was he who had dragged her dead son from the wreck—and me, with just a few cuts—he was in a position to describe the boy’s horrible disfigurement, and threatened to do so, toying with her until she screamed in pain. On most days, my stepmother treated me with affection and humour, but my father’s taunts could so derange her that she would cry out in despair, ‘Why couldn’t it have been Bobby! Why couldn’t it have been him!’ In a fit of melodrama, my father once held a carving knife across my throat, daring my stepmother to repeat what she’d said. ‘I’ll take his fucking head off for you—is that what you want?’ I wasn’t frightened; only ashamed for myself and my father. Later, he would regret his temper, but the regret could only be borne if he was drunk, and that would start a whole new round of arguments.

I must have decided without quite realising it that six weeks would just about do me at Bertie’s. Once those six weeks were up, the urge to reach the Island harped in my head every hour of the day. My town seemed so exhausted of novelty that it existed as components—as if I had taken it apart and put it back together countless times. There were its ordered rows of houses, the creek, High Street, the shopping centre, the oval, the Progress Hall, the Catholic church on top of the hill, the Presbyterian at the bottom of Eighth Street, the old bridge, the new bridge, the river, the lake, the spillway, the dam wall, the pastured hills, the mountains.

All were saturated with experience: fishing in the Goulburn, yabbying in ponds with the soft, greyish-yellow mud oozing up through my toes, riding my bike down Skyline Road with my eyes shut, opening a gash in my head when I crashed, persuading an adorably ripe cousin to kiss me open-mouthed in a bush hut we’d made, collecting books and magazines from the tip, swimming languidly a mile or more across the lake, descending abandoned mine shafts with my back against one wall and my feet against the other, watching my father cast a spinner into the seething white water below the power house, walking dazed and wretched in no direction and every direction when my mother left, forming a club with my friends dedicated to communism, murder and the fleecing of the rich. The town could absorb no more of me.

So it must be the Seychelles. But before the Seychelles, Melbourne. I would need a job, maybe as a steeplejack, maybe as a motor mechanic (I’d seen my father rebuild that clutch, after all), or maybe—yes, maybe this, right here on the sheet of newspaper in which I was wrapping a customer’s order: Situations Vacant, Junior Sales Assistants, Ladies’ Shoes, The Myer Emporium, Bourke Street, Melbourne.