Relations with the radio operators are scratchy, their wisecracks flying over my head. I annoy them back by refusing jobs not so far out of my way. Switch them off whenever I can, stuck in the mid-city crush, Hoddle Street gridlock or the infernal South Eastern Freeway. As the communication gulf widens, my passive English comprehension more and more resembles the fiddly dial on my father’s ancient radio. Sometimes it shuts down altogether and will not be coaxed back. How can I explain that, child of a one-party state, I rebel from the depths of my soul against the softest surveillance?
For a taxi driver I make a good unpublished poet. One licence grants another – to imagine Melbourne in vividly idiosyncratic ways. In cold two-dimensional, a huge deformed tooth. The northern suburbs are worn enamel over a compacted crown. Hypertrophic roots – Frankston, Cranbourne, Pakenham – burrow southeast. Another Melbourne, pivoting on its longitudinal axis, admits subtler hues corresponding to my moods. So, in need of soothing I gravitate to the bay, or the attenuated S-bend of the West Gate Bridge. Initially it mimicked my life’s flattening trajectory. Until one moon-drenched evening the estuary treated me to a synchronized Olympic display, flipping a million scintilla.
I’m a boy from a landlocked city; I sense things others don’t. I inhale Port Philip Bay’s vaguely female smell, know every cove, wrinkle, glow worm waggle from the far or lee shore. How many locals can say that? She shares jokes – the two cannons on Williamstown peninsula pointing at Tasmania, primed to repel the coming 1867 Russian invasion, a pincer manoeuvre launched from Hobart and Beaumaris. I itch to strip their brackets and rotate their barrels one hundred and twenty degrees to Vladivostok.
Conversely, Melbourne Airport jogs my complacency, its enigmatic rhythms stranding the unlucky and improvident. Midnight to dawn is when new migrants, Russians among them, often arrive on the red-eye specials. For thirty-five dollars or thereabouts I deliver these forlorn exiles, luggage jam-packed into the boot, to their two or three-star hotels. Here again my motives, high and low, dovetail. Ministering to their silence – or terrified garrulousness – plays to my vicarious nature, grants a kindly condescension, to dispense advice on everything from markets (Queen Victoria – there on your right), to rental prices (Clayton, for example, is cheap but a bit out of the way. I’d try my area, Richmond), all the time reminding myself how far I’ve come, and have to go.
Crown Casino is the improbable fulcrum, an insomniac hub tilting over the riverbank, cocking cantilevered snooks at the CBD’s old-money skyline, its lit-up champagne logo spurting skywards. I trawl the exits for happy punters brandishing wads of notes that would choke a horse. Towards shift-end the Friday before last, a tap on my window. I motioned to the passenger seat and the fellow lurched in, a fiftyish businessman in a floppy suit and loosened tie who had drunk into his winnings. An interstater staying at the Melbourne Hotel. I turned into Collins Street, where the run of green lights continued… King and Collins… William and Collins… Queen and Collins… left into Queen… Queen and Bourke… to the lobby, all the while my passenger lolling back in his seat like a VIP in Boeing first-class. When the meter stopped at five dollars eighty the man handed me a hundred bill – ‘Your lucky night too, mate’ – and slid his bulk out the door as I fumbled for change.
Did a runner entered my lexicon that night. Still in beneficent glow, I picked up two skinny boys outside the Parliament building. Brothers I guessed, around twelve and fourteen. Too young for nefarious alleyway business. They directed I stop in Russell Street. On turning my back they alighted and sprinted off. I lunged after them half-heartedly. Four dollars thirty was bread and milk with change. Another pinprick initiation rite.
Tonight the radio is quiet. My Russian passport – an encumbrance in a country where you are who you say you are – chafes my pocket. I am airport bound, swooping by slumbering warehouses, piping carved in air, candy-cotton plumes over chimneys, their naphthalene tang. Counting four billboards I pull over at a fifth, erected last week – the beaming face of the Victorian Premier exhorting departing visitors to DRIVE SAFELY. HOPE YOU HAD A GREAT STAY.
At Anna’s urging, after three cabbie hold-ups in a week were plastered over the news I attended a public forum on driver safety at Hawthorn Town Hall, organized by the Victorian Taxi Drivers’ Association. The Premier was invited to address. I sat near the end of the front row, within assassin range. A heavy-limbed man with a Brylcreem quiff that could launch intercontinental ballistic missiles, the Premier exuded a cocktail of aftershave, adrenalin, fear and – I could only suppose – power. Several moles clustered by his right cheek. Why are leaders, from Lenin onwards, so prone to disfigurement? Pockmarked, airbrushed Stalin. Khrushchev the Ukrainian dumpling. Gorbachev fallen asleep under a mulberry bush.
The Premier paused until the silence was absolute. Then, with a conductor’s sublime timing, he began speaking without notes, big chin wagging to the flourishes of his hands. Pale skin, puffy and battered from the trials of public life, hid tiny eyes oysterish like Yeltsin’s. But Yeltsin gorged on acclaim until you feared he would splatter all over his bodyguards. This was charisma inverted, flowing over the audience in emollient baritones. I was mystified by some of the jargon, nevertheless clapped along to phrases built around “global competition, world’s best practice, occupational health and safety going forward”. Applause came early and loud. Hands thrust up, carrying motions for compulsory uniforms (I’d already fitted myself out) and perspex screens shielding drivers. Hands gripping the lectern, brow creased with fatigue, the Premier stared at a chandelier.
The billboard went up the next day. Scrawl-and-riposte began within hours. Swastikas appeared, duly erased. The graffiti-ists struck back with: YOU ARE LEAVING A POLICE STATE. Next, a phallic carrot alongside the Premier’s head with caption: NUTRITION QUIZ FOR VISITORS. WHICH ONE IS THE NATIVE VICTORIAN VEGETABLE?
I recalled my father telling me about a Radio Liberty broadcast featuring David Cherny the avant-garde Czech artist, variously feted or reviled for painting a monument of a Soviet tank rose-pink in Prague’s Kinska Square – in 1991, two years after the Velvet Revolution. He was arrested for hooliganism, after which supporters led by a coterie of parliamentarians took up brush and palette in his stead. To break the impasse the tank was finally removed, prompting a military historian to assert that it wasn’t even the right tank in the first place. Neither the pink tank nor its prototype had got within five thousand kilometres of Prague during the 1945 liberation. The monument committee responsible for its mounting had misread the turret label. Ergo, no moral or historical justification for preserving it. Citizens three – State two?
Tonight the billboard and obscene appurtenances are blackened. Victory for the State? For the graffiti-ists? A three-three draw? Who cares?
Liquid, you’ll find your level. I thought my father was referring to my standard of English. Now I realise he meant in general.