Three wild knuckle-knocks on the door and there stood vengeance, a fist-clenching ape-man, our cleaner’s husband. ‘If that boy ever comes near my missus again, then I, Stan Muller, will cut his nuts out like a pig’s.’
He lifted his shirt to show his hunting knife holstered. His black-haired gut hung down like a carried animal.
For the first time my father said fuck in front of my mother. ‘Our Caroline?’ he rasped. The old boy’s eyes had filled with water. His puckered lids were red from it. ‘She’s almost twice your age. She’s got grown-up children.’ He added fucks and Christs to the sentence and doubled over as if I’d hit him. He’d raised a home-wrecker for a son, he groaned. Had I no decency in me, no shame? He told me to get out of his sight. It made him sick to utter my name. I’d never amount to anything, it was plain to him as day.
I tried the line that I was practising cads for acting. That just made him chase me to knock some sense into my skull. It was the kind of sense he called ‘some medicine’.
My mother turfed my bed sheets in the rubbish, though I confessed that we never did it there. It was four times in the garage; three in the garden shed; twice on the cellar stairs. She had the carpet dry-cleaned and vowed never again to ride in the Statesman. ‘How can we ever show our face in town again!’ She poured Beefeater after Beefeater, and fell asleep in front of Coronation Street.
Chapter 2
If I was practising with Caroline, I was practising for Tilda.
They say we’re ninety per cent water. But that’s only our bodies. It’s the other ten per cent that causes bother. If we could x-ray inside there we might see a person’s thinking, spy out the bits of feeling in them that apply to us.
If I learned anything from Caroline it was the basics of taking x-rays.
I learned a blouse is not just a piece of clothing, it is a signal of information. If it Vs open to halfway then it’s for my sake. Between hoovering and brushing the loo she reapplied makeup: my sake. Her rump of jeans was filled tight but not too fatly. When she kicked off her shoes she had glisten-gold toenails. Her skin was many colours, from mottled pink on her ankles to oak-leaf brown on her arms. I didn’t desire girls the same age as me. They wanted to get pregnant and call me husband. Caroline had done all that. She wanted lust with me, not a family. I learned I had a thing for older women. Pleasure with no responsibility.
When she got sweaty from scrubbing she stripped to a bra-less frilly top—my sake. She cooled off at the clothesline hanging washing. Always my clothes first—was she giving them extra handling? Her nipples showed out like two permissions. At least, they read that way to me.
I recited my audition for RADA for her—all that clever-sounding schoolboy Shakespeare: the put money in thy purse speech; the why should a rat have life? She called them heavy and a little over her head. ‘You must be so smart to remember such old words.’ Smart. When had I ever been called smart! It’s like being looked up to, and having the right to look down your nose.
Whatever stewy part of our ten per cent works out the rights and wrongs of our actions it didn’t qualm us from starting kissing. She had the use of me, and left her wedding ring on, and twenty-one’s too young to have morals.
I had never felt so…so…sophisticated. Movies, TV and books and I were now related. The sins in their stories had become my own. ‘As long as my kids don’t find out.’ That was Caroline’s only worry. That’s the rule, that’s the small-town code.
Chapter 3
That’s how I got there, in short: London, 1985. In short, and yet it’s perfect—my life shrunk down to this written form. Here I am in my home on Main Street in Scintilla, Australia. It is 1993. I am sitting at my little wood desk, upstairs in a nook beside the bathroom. I may be in Scintilla but right this minute I am in London in my mind. I am about to fall in love all over again in sentences. Fall in love, fall in pity, fall in anger, hate, fear, pain. I bet Shakespeare that’s all writing is: you live life out a second time, make sense of it to clear your conscience, square your soul.
To start with, the thrilling part, the love part. I swoon just thinking about it.
London was a bitter place in October 1985. I don’t just mean the cold. Unemployment queues, a miners’ strike—there was no Empire any longer if you took notice of the news. Me, I had a job. I had initiative. I had thirty pounds a week, with a room and food included. If the English didn’t want to work I would do it. I would clean a youth hostel, and that is exactly what I did. I wasn’t so proud I couldn’t sweep corridors. Cow and horse stink prepared me well for toilets.
I was promoted to cutting the lunch ham. You had to hold it very softly to the mechanical slicer. If you squeezed it would slime away, you could lose a finger in the blade.
I had no idea Tilda existed. She was in New York, going to galleries like churches. She had pipedreams of her own, of being a Pollock or Rothko. The other matter, RADA—even now I squirm to think of it. I jump on one leg and hit ‘Get out!’ to my temples to be rid of those four letters trapped like swim-water in my head.
At the time I convinced myself my failure was a blessing. It was bitter fate doing me a favour: I should be happy it happened, the shorting-foot-nerve problem. Such a violent attack I almost fainted. It rattled my leg bones and sent my nerves into such a spasm all my words got tangled: I recited, ‘Put rats in thy purse.’ It was humiliating.
Even if I had been accepted I would have turned them down. Or so I said at the time to my vanity. What kind of building was called Royal Academy and yet was shabby as an old town hall, flaked plaster and peeling paint? Where was the spruced, grand glamour?
And as for the two who sat and judged my shake-tangle show. I had dressed in good shoes and white shirt. I wore a duffle coat for the outside chill, but only for the outside. I carried it serviette-style like a gentleman when in. They wore jeans rubbed out at the knees. Jumpers moth-holed and letting through elbows.
I had combed my hair down, parted it at the side for a dash of drawing room elegance. They had matted mops, and beards with patches of baldness showing, the way beards are when you’re young. They must have been under thirty and yet were magistrates of me. And no proper speaking either. They had cockney vowels. I was expecting Sir-someones with impeccable language. I was taller than they were but they looked down at me and smirked. I was thankful that at least they didn’t laugh in my face.
I could not get out of the place quick enough. My legs were awobble with nerve-water but I swayed down the hall and barged through the front doors onto the street before my legs gave way and I slipped on fish batter and rain spit.
It occurred to me to do myself in. Just a thought-sip of suicide, nothing more.
Chapter 4
My room was tiny; I nicknamed it The Box. Four strides by three with a camp bed in the corner. I had to sleep with one shoulder hanging over to fit the rest of me. The hostel clientele were Italians, Germans, Australians. A hundred of them a night stacked in rickety bunks. Girls in the north wing; boys the south. My shift began at 6.30 each morning, serving breakfast with Polish Lily and Dirk from Rotterdam. At 10 we did the cleaning. The main rule was, if we slept with guests they still had to pay the bunk fee.
I hadn’t slept with more than my passport under my pillow, but that was about to change: Tilda was coming. She was bringing my future with her. It had hatched in her hair, was growing down her limbs and about to make contact with me. She had arrived at Heathrow. Her purple haversack was hitting the carousel, Tilda Robson printed across it in gold texta. Flat 4, 14 Lyndon Street, St Kilda, Melbourne, Australia.