He had almost succeded in putting revelry behind him when he heard sounds of pursuit and, on looking round, saw that Margs Gilchrist had torn free of her partner, a certain ginger colonel going as a baby in pale blue rompers.
‘I can’t arrive home,’ she panted, ‘without being able to boast that I danced with the famous Eddie Twyborn.’ ‘Infamous’ might have been the implication, as her nervous, though steely hand dragged him back into the maelstrom of a foxtrot, in which her abandoned ginger baby had continued whirling as solo jetsam.
‘Won’t you admit there’s fun in life?’ she hissed at him as they pumphandled through their steps.
‘Oh, it’s fun all right!’ Too hilariously awful funny.
‘We all know you’ve been through hell. But now it’s over.’
When it was beginning again, if indeed it had ever stopped.
Margs was determined to prove a point. She had thrust a campaigning vulva as deep as possible into his crotch; her rather flat little breasts were bumping and grinding against his chest; the heat of her wiry body smelled agreeably natural emerging from its mist of talc. He would have liked to feel more than kindly disposed, to have given her the opportunity to think she was making her contribution to post-war therapeutics.
She was grinning up. ‘Darling, you may be brave, but a girl’s feet aren’t the enemy. What about finding something else we could do together?’
He was saved by the ginger baby.
Brandishing its rattle at the end of a hairy arm, it screamed, ‘You’re hogging the lieutenant, Mummy! Poor Baby, must have a turn.’
The colonel’s crotch was almost as possessive as Margie Gilchrist’s, and certainly more developed than her breasts.
‘Eddie,’ the sultana called across the deck, ‘save me the waltz. A waltz is what I’m dying for.’ To illustrate, she swooned so elaborately that she brought her swaggie partner down.
At that moment the music stopped and Eddie Twyborn escaped from the muscular embrace of ginger arms.
While they were all laughing, stamping, shouting, clapping, he scuttled down the companionway into the smelly-clean bowels of a ship and the asylum of his cabin. When he had bolted his door, taken off his clothes, and shot La Rochefoucauld into a corner, he lay down — expecting what?
All night, it seemed, giggles and explosions, a traffic of clumsy, spongy feet filled the corridor. At intervals a handle was rattled, at others almost wrenched off.
Margie Gilchrist’s exploratory vulva, or alternately the colonel’s opulent crotch, was forced against his sleep.
Fremantle, 4 mars 1920
Said there would never be another diary, and here it is (like masturbation) in that old cahier I found amongst Angelos’s belongings — the stationer’s imprint A. Diamantis, 26 rue du Commerce, Smyrne (the French touch hovering over every Greek of a certain age and any pretensions).
But Fremantle, the first glimpse, the first whiff of a fate which can never be renounced, is enough to drive the pretensions out of any expatriate Australian.
A party organised for sight-seeing in Perth this morning. It ended up as Angie Parsons, Margs Gilchrist, Colonel ‘the Baby’ Wilbraham-Edwards, and a widow hurtling back into circulation, Mrs Merv ‘call me Dawn’ Pilbeam. I gave belly-wobbles as my excuse for not joining; might be a drag on their sport. The party accepted my reasons, while not wholly convinced. They tottered down the gangway on the first stage of their fun-finding, the ladies precarious on their heels, the colonel waving back. All soon quenched. No heat, or is it the glare? more quenching than that of Fremantle.
After letting the party make its getaway, I went down into the town. Rusted railway-lines are strips of red, solidified heat. Wharfies sweating round their hairy navels. I am the stranger of all time, for all such hairy bellies an object of contempt — a Pom, or worse, a suspected wonk. If only one had the courage to stick a finger in the outraged navel and await reactions. Nothing minces so daintily as an awakened male.
Dream streets: the tiny houses in maroon or shit-colour brick. Paint-blisters on brown woodwork. Festoons of iron doilies which suggest melting caramel. Blank, suetty faces of women framed in grubby lace or muslin curtains, as they peer out in search of something to whet their interest. A little pomeranian dog, white coat with patches of pink eczema. An ageing blonde stands holding the dog to her bosom, fat dissolving on her vast arms. A gold armlet eating into a fatty biceps, the neatly folded, obsessively laundered hankie held in place by this dented gold circlet.
Oh, God, but I feel for them, because I know exactly—they are what I am, and I am they — interchangeable.
Perhaps I should have gone with the Hoorah Party, fun-finding in Perth. Fremantle is something to be passed over because so painfully personal. No doubt that’s why I chose it — the expatriate masochist and crypto-queen.
Drank a schooner in a tiled bar. The acid smell, not quite urine, of draught beer. The ‘head’ forming as a red hand pulls on the joystick. The barmaid’s rattling cough accompanied by a blast of morning gin.
One old professional blue-nosed soak, a finger crooked above the slops in his glass, tries to engage the interloper.
O.S.: Owdyer findut, eh? in Fremantle.
ME: All right, I suppose. Yes, all right. [Hopeful laughter]
O.S.: Not all the Poms do. An’ I can’t see why. [His turtle’s neck at work as he swallows the last of the slops.]
ME: I’m not a Pom.
O.S.: Go on! You’re not? [He stands looking in need of a reassurance he does not expect to get.] What are yer, then?
ME: [because it’s useless to explain.] I’m a kind of mistake trying to correct itself.
Too much for Fremantle. The silence hits me in the small of the back, like the sheet of frosted glass with BAR engraved on a lyre of ferns.
I am in the street. I am the Resurrection and the Dead, or more simply, the eternal deserter in search of asylum. I did not leave Angelos, but might have done so. I did not desert from the army because it would have been too difficult. In such situations you’re sucked in deeper, while remaining a deserter at heart.
At a draper’s I buy for five shillings a cardigan in grey string. Stagger out again into the glare not knowing why I’ve made my purchase, except that it might encourage a humility I’ve never been able to achieve. And there, oh God, is the Greek shop I’ve been expecting while dreading.
SNACKS DINNERS SODAS SUNDAES
ALL HOURS
PROP: CON ASPERGIS
Will Con the Prop recognise the con?
At the Greek’s there is a soft, sticky gloom, the Greek concession to Fremantle’s version of Australian brown: an atmosphere made up of frying fat (oil, dripping, or a mixture of both) synthetic ‘flavours’ mingled with freezing gusts, light filtered through stained glass on to bas reliefs of dusty, brown-gold nymphs. The usual assortment of clotted sauce bottles, cruets and fly-specked ‘mee-news’.
I sit and wait at a stained table. For a moment I am tempted to smear my throat and wrists with tomato sauce, snuffle it up through my nostrils, and fall across the table, some kind of Greek sacrifice crossed with an Australian fate — lie there for poor Con to find and misinterpret.
He comes out through the bead curtain, a thickset, short-arsed man, thin on top, but with wisps of damp black hair sprouting from various parts of his body. Thick arms hanging alongside the stained apron. The inevitable wedding ring conspicuously gold on a finger swollen by kitchen rites. For the customer, Con is wearing a golden smile, while Greek eyes wonder whether the Turk has arrived.