Gatherers and Hunters (7 page)

You would have thought I had sold the shirt off his own back, to hear him rant and rave. It was the first time I ever heard Tim show any interest in the land so it surprised me. No, it didn't but you know what I mean. Down deep we've all got a bit of the soil in the soul, don't you agree?

Still, it did take Tim's eyes to make me see what was happening and what had happened. He came in with the phone book one day, just before he left, and it was that little area directory, not the official one; the one that has all the phones and the businesses and the listings of all the little townships and villages over the valley. And there was Pristina: most of the names and businesses here are Albanian, he said. There's been an explosion.

Population explosion, certainly, I agreed. The Ibrahims set a trend, set an example for the lot of them, I've certainly noticed that, I said. They have fourteen kids – and a nicely behaved lot they are too, I said. But his brother-in-law – do you remember Belly Blaga? – Blaga has twenty one kids, what do you think of that? And the whole lot all living, the whole tribe of them. The youngest pair were born only last month, I said, and they're the third set of twins. Imagine that, three sets of twins in the one family. Belly Blaga, I tell you, must have the highest fertility rate in the valley. Though there are half a dozen others now bidding high to catch up with him. They really believe in large families. I used to think that was not only industrious, it was almost noble. Populate or perish, as we used to say. Now, well it's suddenly sort of overtaken us.

But their fourth girl, Melita, she used to help out when I tried the goat's milk cheese business that time your mother-in-law had all the allergies, thank goodness they cleared up though I don't know if the goat's milk did much help. Still, Blaga bought all the bits and pieces and the goats as well so I came out of it without much skin off my nose in the end. But you think of it, mate, twenty one kids. That'll make you glad you have only the two.

He didn't see the joke.

Before he left he made a point of going round to all the other families, even the Irish lot, though there's only a quarter of them left, if that.

Look, I said, if it's the mosque, or religion, or whatever, forget it. They keep to themselves, and there's even the Mormons at the other end of town, up on the hill.

When the Yanks came through with the McDonalds franchise and the Pizza Place, there were a few settled in this area, they were the ones to start the new fashion for toy farms and avocado or pecan nut plantations for their income tax. So check up on them Mormons, and the Christadelphians and the the Lutherans – lots of those further down the valley, I reminded him.

Tell the truth, I got a bit protective over our local lot. I still remembered Grandpa Weatherhead and his enormous pride in the way his workers scheme had paid off, and what he saw as their loyalty and gratitude.

Not much gratitude with the younger ones, Tim said to me. Damned sullen and surly, most of them. And of course I realised he must have felt himself treated as a stranger in his own home town. Expected to be recognised, even after all these years. Expected to be hailed and greeted and made much of. But we all nurture a little niggle in our hearts over those who flee the sinking ship. Those who are not prepared to stick it out. Nessie sided with him. And her mother, oh yes, Mary too.

And I've got to confess I am out of it all a bit myself, these days. I know my own crowd and having the shops keeps me up to date on some things.

But I was a bit taken aback when I heard the other week how the secondary school has just introduced a course on the Koran, and they even passed a majority resolution in the primary school against singing Christmas carols because it was cultural imperialism or something. That's going to extremes.

None of the ones I knew went as far as that. Though I do hear with the very young generation there is a growing fashion for the girls to keep their heads covered, even their faces and I did see a group of three schoolgirls, just last week, who looked more like an old Arabic photograph than anything I have ever seen right here in Pristina.

I think we have avoided some of the siller fashions, that is the good thing about a small country town. True, the boys in the garage down on the main road wore their hair long and ratty years after long hair went out of date, Tim tells me. And there was young Donnie Doolan who worked in the barbershop for a while, he startled us all with his Mohawk. But that soon grew out and he was, you know, a bit of a pansy anyway so it was trying to upgrade his image, to use the modern jargon, and besides, Donnie's old man threw him out as soon as he shaved his head. I let him sleep in the room above the barber's for a while but it was clear he was a lost cause and I think we were all relieved when he cleared off. Kings Cross I suppose, somewhere like that. If you don't stick out like a sore thumb, in this town you get on all right I'm saying.

I don't know what will happen with this oriental fashion, but it really did get me a bit unnerved. Especially as old Mrs Gleeson told me just this morning that at the secondary school ninety percent of the girls are all registered as Albanian Muslims – even though the lot of them were born right here, in this country. Well, Mrs Gleeson says the pressure is really on among the peer groups for them all to go what she calls Fundamentalist. And Mrs O'Dwyer is sending her next girl over to Saddleback, to the nuns. It hurts, you know, hearing about that.

Nobody tells me anything these days, you know that. Part of the price you pay for being old, don't think I don't know that. And I would never have believed that selling the rest of the Weatherhead inheritance would have made such a difference in the way people treated you. Or, for that matter, how much that land meant in asserting the status of certain other newcomers in the place. Not that they haven't worked for it. But there's no attention paid, these days, to the pioneers and the people who did all the hard yakka of settling the district, making it what it is, giving it its name and its character. That's all gone.

No, is that so? A Law and Order squad? And who's behind all this? Wouldn't you know, but the pub's a good centre, course it is. Bet they have suffered too at this upsurge of ­religious puritanism among our Albanian friends. They don't really believe in alcohol, in the Koran, isn't that the case? Ernie's a bit of a hothead, always was. And what does he think can be done about it? No, I hadn't heard that story, sounds more like a mob of Irish ruffians, you ask me; more like the days when those louts, all fresh back after the War and trained in aggression, you remember them scaring the living daylights out of Mrs O'Donnell down in the petrol pump store, rationing was still on, you remember, and they cleaned her out of all the fuel in the place when they hadn't a ration ticket among the lot of them, caused her no end of trouble later. But they settled down, all of them settled down after a bit, needed a few girls to get hold of them, put them in order.

Don't think this sounds like a case of a few sensible women saying a few commonsense things, not with the way things are, or the way things are going. I don't like the sound of it. To confrontational by half.

Well, that's true of course, but in a sense we're all newcomers here, in the end. My grandfather might have called this place Pristina and said it was pristine, but that's only the half of it.

I bet you don't even know the old sacred burial ground, down in our far paddock, the original one, way up by the big cliff where the river cuts in, yes the Magic Mountain, that's the one. We always knew it was secret, an Aboriginal burial place. They would have been here centuries, thousands of years perhaps. So if we are going to talk of ownership and who was here first and all that, we'd better get things into perspective if you know what I mean.

You go on, then. Leave me out. I was going to say that of course I've seen it all developing and running away from everybody, everybody that counts, that is. But I'm too old anyway. This town isn't the town I grew up in, or the village I knew as a kid. Of course I'd be sad to lose it all, but I will, you know, soon enough.

Just a minute. You've got to get this straight, it's the key to the matter.

All of those properties are paid for. Going price, hard cash most of them, not even on credit. Well yes, the prices were a bit low some of them, and I'm as much to blame for that – but you don't really think them being there devalued the land for others, surely you don't believe that, that's only pub talk, sour grapes. No, no no.

The Weatherhead land, yes I did sell that, and I did sell it to the Albanian Collective as I think it was called, I told you all that before. But it was the bank foreclosing, not the buyers that time, it was the bank. I had to sell for a quick realisation and anyone knows a man in that bind has to settle for the best that's on offer. A bargain then, well if you have to call it that. But I am not going to accept the blame for all that other talk about lowering values all through the district.

I'll give you that yes: population explosion. Who could have foreseen where that would lead? Do you think you could? They've always been polite to me and that's my last word on the matter.

No. No? Where was that? And who did you say was responsible? Gangs of them, that's a bit too much surely. Thirty seven, and Sergeant Miller confirms this? I'd put it down to the younger generation and not just the kids of one ethnic minority. Majority, then.

No, they've always spoken English to me. All of them. I think you're a bit paranoid, once you forbid a thing like teaching their own kids their own language, well you only make the forbidden more desirable. Young Ibrahim never spoke his language at home, never, he made a point of teaching his mother and she was the hard one but in the end she was trying to speak in her new language.

They do it to keep others out, to exclude them, you say? Like a code? Look, they sit for their exams in English, they read the bus timetables in English, Gawd's sake, all the ­television is English, what do you mean?

Very well, I'll come over to the pub with you, right this minute. What do you mean, take the car? It's no distance, the walk will be good for you. Stared at? Ganged up on? Look, the pub might be the only building on the main street left with a local owner, as you call it (I still have reservations on the Irish) but isn't this a bit of a siege mentality? After all, they're neighbours, not enemies.

The Singer

Kester

You ask me about Juliet Klein? The town – our home town – was so proud of her, I was about to say the world was so proud of her, but you might just accuse me of exaggeration.

Still, Juliet Klein had a voice that almost defined its own era, just as, a bit later on, Joan Baez and Odetta defined the late 1960s or thereabouts.

Juliet would hate such a comparison. Hers was a voice for the 1950s, the decade that took to the long-playing record and stereo sound. There was a time when her ‘Skye Boat Song' followed you everywhere, it was perhaps the first time music became ubiquitous, you couldn't escape it and you couldn't escape Juliet's almost painfully pure soprano. It was a voice that is now so embarrassingly dated. You probably know all that.

People said things about Juliet, but I loved her. I can say that now.

No, I don't know what happened to her, have you heard? You hear all those stories but none of them are true. Our involvement with each other was not in those very early days, out here, though of course we had known each other since childhood, how can you help it living in the same town?

No, I stood on the sidelines like everybody else, including her mum and dad and even her brothers Victor and Nelson. We all did, though, when Juliet made that extraordinary leap into international fame. I'd put it at three years? After that, well. Oh yes, there was the
Dead City
LP.
Die Tote Stadt
; it was a mistake, let us at least be charitable. Though the title song itself was haunting. It still haunts me in a way, in fact I would say I'm glad it did not take off like ‘The Skye Boat Song', which I cannot bear to listen to now.

Not after all these years.

What seemed engagingly sweet and vulnerable then now appears quite phony, the singing teacher over her shoulder, that stagey little gulp after the first phrase, the one moment of vibrato near the end. No, it's funny how for years – four or five years at the least – that one song worked a sort of magic. And then, overnight, there was a change in the balance of the world and it was as distant and puzzling as Melba or Caruso on wax cylinders.

When Juliet and I had that extraordinary and tense relation­ship – it was extraordinary – she had been virtually forgotten as a singer for a decade at least. It was in 1972. London. Even that is probably before your time.

Of course you want to know the details, but let me put it into its proper perspective. 1972 was not the end. Not by a long shot. There was 1974 as well. Well, yes, 1974. The high and the low. The most and the least. I had never believed I would see myself grovel. I had never believed Juliet Klein would see me grovel.

Again, that's not true. ‘See me grovel' – it's a phrase, I don't mean it literally. It's almost as if I end up saying the opposite of the truth each time. Gwen was brought into this – into this Thing with Juliet – perhaps if I were honest I would also say Gwen, or the absence of Gwen, while I was in London two years earlier was the very real trigger.

After all, it was because Gwen wanted me to contact Juliet in London – she had her address – that I made that fatal phone call. They were cousins you know, Gwen and Juliet. You haven't met Gwen yet, you say? In their early years Gwen and Juliet did have a sort of family resemblance – they were both very fine boned, fragile to look at but somehow columnar steel underneath. Gwen was a fine contralto herself, when she was young: in the Oratorio style, which is now so very outmoded. Her speaking voice had a similar tone to Juliet's, a slightly husky vibrato. It's interesting that Juliet had that soubrette sound when speaking but the instant she burst into song – she fluted into song, I should say – the voice always produced that quite pure timbre. I used to tease Juliet when she was humble enough to be teased. I called it her choirboy tone.

Look, let's forget the fifties. And the sixties for that matter. Gwen and I married, Juliet was in the States, I think, much of that time, I'm usually charitable and call it all the Revival Campfire decade as far as Juliet was concerned, anyway she made no more records, at least not commercially and I've only heard rumours of a cassette pirated from a live performance in one of those rusty church halls; Jacksonville was it?

Let me get to the point. My then wife Gwen was so loyal that when I got that International Travel Grant and it became clear that after three months in California I would be a month in London, it was Gwen who gave me Juliet's address and, more important, her phone number.

I had not even realised Juliet had been living somewhere in London. Telephonist for a taxi company, it turned out, not singing, of course, not singing.

I was in London nearly three weeks before I dredged up her address and phone number. You're right, simply to report back home at the end of the month, when Gwen and I reconnected.

How can I explain this with any effectiveness?

It was the voice, the timbre. It tore down fifteen years just like that. Juliet on the phone, that very first time.

It's the voice I'm talking about, not the body. The body had its own games in a way but that first phone call was voice, only the voice. Afterwards, when I walked away from that public phone in the pub on Bayswater Road and ordered a half pint, there was still that tingle, I could not concentrate. And I could not believe someone could take me over, quite against my will I can tell you. After all those years. Bloody Juliet. Bloody. Bloody.

Of course we had arranged to meet. That evening. You've unlocked me now, you've got to take the consequences. Juliet has moved in, as always, she has taken over.

Even here, even now, she has taken over. Don't grin like that, it only shows you cannot understand the meaning of it, the intensity of it. You think all things intense are only momentary?

Perhaps you are lucky. Perhaps you are not alive yet to the way things are, the way things might be. Some things continue, even underground, even unacknowledged, they ­continue. Like a curse. Like a sort of twisted blessing don't ask me to decide which, and does it matter? Like the vibrations of angels' wings. Juliet mattered.

I'll tell you that first meeting. That first re-meeting. Fifteen years ago? No, last week, last night.

I know everyone changes. And, remember, Juliet in those fifteen years had gone from being the soprano lead in the amateur stage musicals, into being an international star, an international voice rather. And then the voice blew itself out, the term these days is burn-out, but Juliet's voice was ice, not fire.

I know you don't remember, you're only a researcher you say, it's okay, people look blank these days when I say Harold Blair, or even Marjorie Lawrence. My growing up is full of voices that seemed everywhere, that seemed eternal, and which never bothered to have properly engineered recording sessions. You could say the same about Juliet Klein, except that last LP was all recording engineer sound, like a bathroom or like the early Elvis Presley echo chamber.
The Dead City
.

Juliet came up behind me on the concourse at Victoria station before I noticed her. She had been absolutely precise in her description of where we must meet and of course I respected that, it was a jolt back to old times in fact, a part of old times I had forgotten. Juliet and her precision. Juliet and her instructions. Juliet and her requirements that we all had to follow. In a sense we all went along with Juliet in that way. We all allowed her that sense of command, it was our connivance if you like, but it was genuine. We were all always so very well intentioned.

I was waiting, exactly as she had specified, with the light full on my face, looking outwards, near the main noticeboard.

Even so, I was quite startled when she recognised me. ‘And so, Kester,' she said, that voice almost at my ear, and her hand just brushing my shoulders as if to reassure herself I was still the same height. I was. ‘And so, Kester, here you are, after all this time.'

You could say I gave a start. You could say I had completely forgotten her uncanny instinct for recognising people. In truth, though, I melted. My knees melted, even if I did not slump. I was instantly vulnerable. I did not turn round, Juliet was already fronting me, in her fawn gabardine, and we were embracing. Old friends. Very old friends. Old strangers.

It's silly. I thought of those old choir days, the rehearsals. The funny way we embraced, not to seem too passionate. Not to seem unpassionate. She was still the kid sister of my friend Victor.

Well, there was that time, the first weekend rehearsal for
The Merry Widow
, when we were all lolling around, lying on the floor, listening to our conductor's new LP of
South Pacific
, fifteen or twenty of us, a tangle of grubs on the carpet.

Juliet seemed to choose to lay her head with its long fair hair at an angle onto my tummy. Within ten minutes it was closer to my groin where her warm head was weighing against me. Then she did things with those blonde tresses. She knew what she was locating, though all the time she was making lazy comments to some of the other girls on the high points and the low points of the music.

Yes, a tease.

She had not changed.

We didn't even have to talk much. No asking about what happened when, who and where and the consequences. No talk of marriage – I still don't know if Juliet had ever married, though she soon enough had the whole case history on Gwen, but that's family, and when I married Gwen it was perhaps a subconscious marriage into Juliet's family as well, a step closer.

She could still have been sixteen years old.

Can you believe that? Sixteen years old going on thirty-something? I suppose it was the clarity of the skin. Juliet always had – so did Gwen – that golden-brown skin. Victor had it too. The gods, or the goddesses, know their aim when they fire. Juliet had her hair longer than I remembered, but we are speaking about 1972, mind, and 1957 was long before girls let their hair grow long and lissome and alluring.

All right, that's my generation, but it was the glory of those years, the freedom of long hair, girls swishing it around, flicking it off their face, letting it fall over their breasts, down their curve of spine as if pointing towards the firm curve of buttocks. Oh, all right, I'm only human, you've got to forgive me.

Juliet's first act, after that embrace, was to toss her hair back over her shoulder.

You're the generation that would probably say she was like Emma Kirkby, but I keep reminding you Juliet broke with the concert tradition. I tried to get her to perform, in some dim smoky pub that night, it was somewhere near the British Museum. Of course I gave up after a bit, though I can remember being tetchy, despite Juliet's long, still gaze that seemed to be directed back at me, and the way her hands had begun moving in that old, compulsive, blind person's ­fingering.

+++++

Juliet was quite happy to speak about her present employment. ‘For the visually handicapped, it's a gift,' she said. Visually handicapped. That was her new term for it, in 1972. In her school days she wore those bottle-glass spectacles.

It was when she ceased wearing spectacles that I became aware of her translucent beauty. And she was always so damned independent. I admired her for that. Gwen always tried to smother Juliet, whenever she came up from Brisbane in those days, before we really became serious, Gwen and I. It was Gwen's nature, I'm not accusing her. That was in the days before Juliet had that little white cane. In London in 1972 the white cane was a compact, retractable model, high tech we would say now. Juliet used it surprisingly little.

When I took her back to Victoria and she instructed me to the right platform, I let her go through the tickets and onto the waiting train all by herself. I knew that.

‘How do you know the train is in? Can you still see occasional glimpses?' I asked.

‘It's the weight of it. There. I don't actually see it, I feel it. You see, Kester, it's not a matter of visualising, but of taking account of. Of weighting, if you like.'

Then she laughed lightly, and stroked my face, and left me.

Of course I waited. I watched, from the sidelines.

‘Bitta orright, that wun,' said the ticket collector. ‘I see her regular. Does shift work she says, keeps her outa peak hours. Got 'er 'ead screwed on real sharp, thet leddy.'

He gave me a wink. ‘Carnt see a thing, y'know, mitey, carnt see a thing, just a sorta blurr she tells me, a sorta wash a light is what she tells me.'

We both looked at the train, now pulling out. ‘I know,' I said. ‘We've known each other since childhood.'

‘Hey, I c'n pick thet accent, you're an Orstrylyun,' the ticket collector said.

‘Too right,' I said, laying it on.

‘But she's not an Ozzie, not her. Thet's not her accent.'

‘Ah well, she was a celebrity performer. In her time. A singer. And singers, you know, have their voice trained, so it's different. But it's true, fair dinkum cobber.'

Was I going too far? I felt cocky and ebullient. It was Juliet doing it.

‘I guess she was orlweys a stunner,' mused the ticket man, with that touch of regret in his voice. He was young, sturdy, rosy-cheeked himself.

‘She was that, all right,' I said. I could not conceal the smugness, even as I continued with my put-on broad accent. ‘The great thing is, she is still a stunner.'

That was the only time we really looked at each other, and he began to nod slowly.

‘We all have our burdens, but some get them heavier than others', I said.

I knew it sounded pompous.

Silly, cheeky, confident, confiding, pompous: how could one person bring all these chameleon aspects of me out in such a harlequin muddle? I went back to my cheap hired lodgings.

There was an appointment the next morning but I cancelled it. First thing I phoned Juliet again and insisted on seeing her.

This time Juliet suggested I come over to her flat, she had two days off, and there was a little park nearby I might care to explore with her, it was her ‘retreat'.