Harold Holt was eaten by a shark because he relaxed the White Australia Policy. The bloke with the shaved head sitting across from Antonio at a busted-up kitchen table in an old terrace in Tempe was explaining this to the others. He liked the idea of the sea reaching up in violent retribution and tearing Harold Holt to bits for beginning the country’s downfall.
It was Thursday, and although Antonio had been excited about coming here before, now he was not so sure. There was something about the place that unsettled him. The floors that looked like they were not vacuumed enough. The bust of Ned Kelly that had clearly never been dusted, the Eureka flag that had the faded shapes of rectangles permanently impressed on it from the light that shone in between the gaps in the thick bars on the windows.
The whole place had the look and feel of a cubby house for teenage boys. There were the two pasty-looking young men with shaved heads and bulky lace-up boots like boys playing at being in the army. There were three other men, more respectable-looking in chinos and collared shirts, and a woman who looked like the girlfriend of a bikie – she just nodded her head in agreement with everything and tapped her plastic orange nails on the table. But there was also John. John Solomon, who had appeared in front of Antonio’s house dressed in a black suit with a megaphone hanging off his arm. John Solomon who had quoted Arthur Calwell, William Lane and John Curtin in his firm and demanding voice to all the people gathered there. Antonio wasn’t quite sure who those people were, but from the gist of what John Solomon said they were great Australians and he thought Antonio was a great Australian too.
John Solomon kept on talking and Antonio went back inside himself even though it was a hard thing to do with him standing there, John Solomon just had this kind of voice, this way of standing so unwaveringly straight that meant you couldn’t help but pay attention to him. Antonio just didn’t know what he was doing here, or at home, or anywhere really. Nico had told him to paint that sign on the front lawn and then John Solomon had told him to keep it there. John Solomon reminded him of the Nico he’d known twenty years ago, built big and broad like a labourer in his prime, someone who people said yes to without really knowing why. Rose had moved next door, like she did all that time ago when she’d left him for a few years. He had grown anxious and tired and then he had scrubbed the concrete clean of everything he’d wanted to say. He was lonely but he also wanted to be alone. When he saw all those people on his front lawn, in his space, all he could do was take one of those pills the doctor had given him with a whisky and go back to bed until he woke up at some unidentifiable time of the night or the day and it was still too noisy but at least, at least there was John Solomon and he was helping him make some sense of everything.
And because of all this Antonio was wearing his blue suit. The one he wore when he wanted people to take him seriously. And because he wanted to show that he was a serious man he had armoured himself against the feeling that no one really took him seriously with a double-breasted jacket and pants that had a sharp crease down the middle.
John Solomon was also wearing a suit. He always wore one. He had a serious face, never smiled, spoke slowly, articulated every word, hung carefully off the vowel sounds so that when he said ‘elite lefties’ it came out sounding like ‘ah-leat lefties.’ He had a plump tanned-white earnest face to match his white hair and he had the body of a giant rectangular box. He was vain of his voice, had been a debating champion and a too-smart-for-his-own-good public nuisance who had grown up in a small town in the far west of the state. His family were some sort of small-business owners. What business they were in John didn’t specify to Antonio, but he was fond of saying they were hard-working, ordinary people. He was in fact more aligned to those grubby, leftist anarchists than they would like to think. He was fond of saying nationalism, true nationalism, had its roots in the union movement, in the working classes, in socialist democracy. Antonio was getting to know a lot about John. Yes. John Solomon liked to talk and he liked the sound of his own voice a little too much for Antonio’s liking, but he knew a lot of things and there was stuff going on here that Antonio wanted to understand.
When some young thug in a black anarchist shirt had tried to climb through Antonio’s window, John Solomon had pulled him out by the legs, just like that, like this young guy was nothing. He just slapped him to the floor and started lecturing him about public property and decency and respect. When he invited Antonio to this ‘meeting of like minds’, as he called it, what could Antonio say? He owed the man that much and besides, what else was there for him to do these days?
At John Solomon’s kitchen table they were having a meeting and the subject of this meeting was Antonio. The meeting began the same way that everything began with John Solomon. He talked about bees. More specifically, the Chinese and their bee-like properties as identified by Australia’s most prominent early unionist William Lane. ‘Nations,’ John Solomon explained, ‘have swarming populations like beehives. When nations reach a critical stage of over-population people mass-migrate. Lane said China had a swarming population of sixty-five million and that was the late 1880s. Imagine, now it would be the same for the Middle East. It’s happening every moment. We’re seeing the effect of those swarming populations sitting in a boat called Tampa, right off our own shores. They’re waiting, just waiting to swarm on in and start another hive.’ He paused for dramatic effect, pointed his index finger out and waved it around in a slow alarming spiral, before standing, placing his arms behind his back and pacing across the room.
The skinheads shifted restlessly in their chairs. Antonio imagined bees. One of the men in collared top and chinos (what was his name?) suggested that these swarming populations would probably get together with the Aboriginals, because they hate us too, and form some kind of militia and take over.
John Solomon nodded his head gravely, ‘We are a vulnerable, underpopulated island, ready for the taking.’ Everyone nodded their heads except Antonio, who was still thinking about it: Chinese bees, Aboriginal bees.
‘What do you think?’ John Solomon looked at Antonio and raised an eyebrow. ‘Are we offending you?’
‘No. Not offence,’ he said suddenly. Such a quick movement out of his thoughts brought out the Italian accent he had managed to suppress most of the time. ‘I guess mostly I am concerned that there are too many people.’
‘Too many people!’ John Solomon picked up his line before Antonio had a chance to finish it and threw it out to the room. The barred windows shook in a constant low murmur as cars zoomed en masse down the Princes Highway outside.
Antonio continued, ‘In Parramatta they are building everywhere, next door to my house, you should see there is this gigantic apartment building going up. Meriton. Made of shit. Everyone who lives there will be looking down at me all the time. They’ll be looking through my windows into my home. All those people.’
The same man in the collared shirt pipes up again. ‘There has to be a limit. We can’t take everyone.’
‘That’s the problem,’ the woman said. ‘They already have taken everyone, ’specially places like Parramatta. They took everyone.’
The skinheads shook their heads like they couldn’t be more disgusted if they tried. One opened a large packet of Smith’s Crisps and poured it into the plastic wood-coloured bowl on the table. The sound of his crunching filled the small room until John Solomon spoke again.
‘Exactly! Too many people. And when you tried to stand up to that you were bullied.’ He took a deep breath, looked at Antonio. ‘Your house was paint-bombed, the anti-democratic left showed up on your lawn and tried to shut down your voice.’ John Solomon sat down again then rose up for dramatic effect. ‘Now, nooow,’ like he was the king of everything. ‘What are we going to do about it?’
In the next few days, Antonio would lie awake thinking. He’d toss and turn and then leave the house at two or so in the morning because he’d feel as though he might stop breathing if he didn’t get out from between those walls. There was this something inside of him, this small pellet of disquiet growing bigger every day. Sometimes when he slept he was sure that he was being watched. When he woke up in the middle of the night he felt as though his sleeping-self had been locked in deep conversation with whomever was in the room and just at that moment, when the discussion had reached the point at which he was about to figure something out, he woke up before he could get any answers and he couldn’t remember what questions he was asking anyway. He was missing some essential information somehow, but the knowledge was there right in the back of his brain. One thing he knew for certain was that it was all connected with water. He lay awake thinking of waves, floods, tsunamis. He imagined people, slick like eels, being carried up on the white froth of turbulent water. He imagined them crashing down around him. He thought too of that boat sitting off the shore with its 438 people, just waiting there. Waiting for the moment when they could invade.