Ten Pound Pom (14 page)

Tony comes back. We talk about spending a day and a night in Kalgoorlie but then decide to press on to Perth. Let’s get it done. Perth’s 590 km away. So we drive on, again, through Coolgardie, which is as I remember Kalgoorlie as being, thirty years ago, empty and windswept and deserted and surrounded by red desert and ragged scrubby patchy bush. Beyond it, the desert continues. Even the trees are now red. This is a landscape evolved to repel the human, it seems – all
jagged and arid and spiked and comfortless. Except humans lived in it, quite happily, for 40,000 years.

And still it goes on, the journey. Straight roads to the horizon, then another straight road to the horizon. This
landscape
pummels you, batters you. It is without mercy or respite. Outside Southern Cross, a sign directs us to the ‘SONS OF GWALIA GOLDEN LEAD MINE’, but we don’t go. Just want to get to Perth.

It’s become a kind of dream, a dream of perpetual forward motion and the monotone sound of the car’s engine a
never-stopping
drone in which the boy has started to discern rhythms and voices, a peculiar music. This car is his home. In his fuzzy trance he has noticed that the passing landscape has changed and there are now houses and civic structures and green-ness and tarmac roads, other traffic around. Indeed, the car close in front hits a wallaby; the animal springs from the bush on the left, the car clips it, it rolls over a few times and ejects a long straight squirt of silver piss into the air then leaps up onto its hind legs and disappears into the bush again, on the right. The boy knows that the sight of that will be burned into his mind for ever; the helpless animal, the fountain of pee, the sudden shock. The expression on the wallaby’s face.

The father turns round in his seat. –You okay?

The children nod. Ask questions about the wallaby; will it die, where’s it gone, is it hurt. The father reassures them and continues to drive and night starts to fall and they enter Perth at 6 p.m.

A large part of the culture, it seems, is concerned with visual warnings; mangled cars raised on plinths at roadsides, sometimes in elevated cages, to remind drivers that ‘SPEED KILLS’; pictures of diseased gums and fat-clogged arteries to remind the smoker that ‘NICOTINE KILLS’, not just on packets of cigarettes and tobacco but on billboards too, huge memento mori for the addict. No, note, images of cirrhotic livers or glassed-open faces to illustrate the dangers of alcohol; no drowned blue lips to warn against surfing; no compound fractures to dissuade you from rock-climbing. (The human animal will always seek danger. If it harms no-one else, then let it happen. Just let it happen.) These images are of a piece with the surface, depthless beauty of much of Australia. And anyway, the cause of death is birth; might as well have a billboard image of a pregnant woman squatting over an open grave and be done with it. ‘BIRTH KILLS’. Yes it does.

We pass the Merredin Pioneer Village and I remember, at one such place, feeding a wild bearded dragon with Opal Fruits. I’d been taken there on a school trip and snuck away from the group into the bushes and made friends with the big lizard. Was it this one here, at Merredin? Can’t recall, but the look of it doesn’t set any bells ringing. And this is Sunday, so it’s closed. But I do recall, clearly and in detail, the little dinosaur, his scales and teeth and eyes. How his wild proximity thrilled me to my heart.

The land gets drier and harder as we approach Perth. Baked dead. It must’ve been a long and harsh summer, and in fact the roadsides are flanked by signs exhorting us to ‘SAVE EVERY DROP’. At a garage we buy Chico Rolls and the taste of
them whooshes me back thirty years in time and I buy a Cornjack too and put it up on the dash while I go to put some garbage in the bin. As I’m out of the van, Tony takes a bite out of the Cornjack and puts it back in its wrapper, upside-down. Laughs his head off when I get to the bottom. He’s regressing back to his thirteen-year-old self. Turning back into the wicky get he once was.

A dream this has become. A kind of dream. This country is vast and I move at the same constant speed through a landscape that never changes so it’s like I’m not moving at all yet time and distance pass. It’s like floating. Like being a figment of someone else’s dream. The noise of the engine and the slipstream of air begin to seem like they’re hiding voices, and all of this is motion back towards the younger me. The years are slipping away yet at the same time I’m feeling every one of the thirty years between the then-me and the now-me. Feel every broken and healed bone, the ripped beginnings of every scar, the deleterious effects of every cigarette I’ve ever smoked and every drug I’ve ever drunk or snorted or injected. Every sleepless night. Every panic attack. Every moment of sadness. Every time my heart has been stabbed in rejection or bereavement. Every dead pet. All of this, I know, will soon transmute itself into joyous surprise at survival, and the happy appreciation of the accretion of experience. Just got to wait for that to happen. I know it will, though.

The village of Meckering promotes itself as Australia’s ‘Earthquake Centre’. Better not stop there, then.

The ground greens, swells into hills. This must’ve been promising to my parents, after so many days on the baked and treeless plain. I seem to remember it; the tree-lined road on the gradual decline. This long gentle slope into Perth, this is what I
remember. This is where the car in front of us hit the wallaby. The silver urine. Dark clouds gather above and that’s a good sign; in WA, rain is welcomed, has been prayed for. The approach road has been widened and re-surfaced and generally improved, probably several times over, since I was here last, but the feel and camber of it are unchanged. I’m remembering it, quite clearly. Rain falls, now. In a suburb, we pass a Chinese take-away called The Ming. Better not stop there either.

The damp greenness is a shock after so much flat aridity, and soon, in the dusk, we see the distant city, from high up on the road. Oz cities, from a distance, look impressive, futuristic; tall and sparkling. Like Brisbane, Perth looks much, much bigger than I remember it as being, but I don’t, at the moment, feel that intrepid excitement that I usually feel when I approach unfamiliar cities, perhaps because, even if it
is
at thirty years’ remove, I’m re-discovering this one. I’ve been here before. It was home for two years. A sense of returning home isn’t entirely absent, now, but what I
don’t
feel, oddly, is a wave of relief at arriving, at the journey being over, at the end of the plain’s battering monotony. Thought I’d be whooping in rapturous relief and glee but I’m not. I’m just tired.

But the writer-brain, or the survivor-brain (which might be the same thing), kicks in, and through the fog of exhaustion and boredom I start to wonder how I’ll describe the Nullarbor crossing, in written words. How to make that hellish trek readable? Is it possible to write such a journey in an exciting and interesting and compelling way? No, my inner voice says, slow and droney, like a 78 r.p.m. record played at 33 and a third: I’ll go for literal transcription. I’ll go for mimesis, and make it as dull and frustrating to read as it was to actually do. Sod the reader’s comfort and fun: Share the misery. Make it a
chore, a task, onerous, to read. Drag the reader into the gaseous and stifling cabin of the van, on the endless red desert. Make them suffer, as you did. Share the misery.

Now
there’s relief.
Now
there’s a lifting of tension and tautness from the shoulder muscles and neck and the gut. I feel some peculiarity of shape on my face and realise that it might just be a smile. Ho ho. Here we go. Welcome to Oz.

We pass a sign for Welshpool and traverse Griffiths Street. The globe shrinks. It’s 5:10 p.m. when we enter Perth proper, for the second time in our lives, on June 24th, 2007.

PERTH

They stay in the Swan View Motel, not far from the River Swan, hence the name, and sleep deeply. The boy, when he wakes, has become physically accustomed to the world being still again – he’s not reeling when he stands – but when he looks out of the window he expects to see it whooshing past and is momentarily surprised that it isn’t. The next day, the family visits the Migrant Services Unit in Perth city centre. They see Mr Myatt, who makes some enquiries about a Migrant Transit flat, and a man called Bruce Aldersley who advises the boy’s parents to ‘remember that you’ve got no money’. He gives a small wink as he says this to the boy’s father who, outside, calls him ‘a Good Man’. The boy can hear the capital letters in his dad’s tone. It’s like being an immigrant again, except he’s travelled overland this time, not through the air. And departed from the same country.

They are quickly allocated a flat, in Robertson Court, in the 
district of Yokine. The children make friends very quickly, the boy with, amongst others, a Northern Irish boy whose father had fled to Oz to escape the IRA who were seeking to punish him for some transgression. One day the Irish boy cuts his hand open and bleeds heavily and talks about the time his dad pushed the IRA man through a window and opened an artery in the man’s leg. He tells this tale in a very low voice. This particular friendship doesn’t last long; the two boys fall out and fight. The boy plays spin-the-bottle with a Scottish girl his age called Jackie Thompson and he kisses her and he’ll never forget the glorious and squirming shock of her tongue in his mouth. He trespasses onto a garden to look at the fish in the pond there and the house owners see him and call the police who take him home and have a word with his parents and the boy is very upset, largely at the revelation of how pettily proprietorial some people can be. He just wanted to look at the fish. This might, too, be the moment when the sight and smell of uniforms sets up in him an automatic recoil reaction which will never leave him. The boy enjoys gazing into the inverted cones of ant-lions’ nests, watching for the tumbling ant and the small eruption and the snapping jaws. Such miniature horrors there are here. As everywhere. The boy befriends a group of Yorkshire children, one of whom, Graham, likes to eat paper; when his elder sister tells him to stop doing this, he replies: ‘Sumtahms ah eats it and sumtahms ah dorn’t’, which tickles the boy. He laughs.

I remember this – I remember the parks by the river, and walking through them, sitting on their grass, watching the
parakeets, eating icecream. The city itself seems immeasurably more massive, but I recall little bits of it. Tony asks me what I’m remembering and I tell him about the parks and he tells me that he remembers punching me in the nose in one of them.

–I don’t remember that.

–I sat on your chest and punched you full in the face. You ran away screaming and covered in blood.

–I must’ve blocked that out. What a horrible fucking thing to do!

I’m outraged, all over again.

–I was a little bastard.

–So was I, but I was never a bleedin’ bully!

–What else are little brothers for, other than to punch in the face when you’re kids?

Which is a point, I suppose.

We’ve travelled 6,508 km. We look for the Swan View Motel but it’s not there, and there seems to be a much posher establishment in its place. We go in, ask at reception if anyone remembers the Swan View. Young feller asks the older members of staff but they shake their heads.

–Long gone, mate.

–Thought it might be.

I ask him for the tariff of his hotel and he quotes a huge sum. Bollox to that. Anywhere cheaper?

–In Perth? Nah. Yer best bet’s Free-o.

–Free-o?

–Fremantle. Few miles to the south, ey?

Free-o it is, then. We get back in the van and drive again, only ten minutes or so to Fremantle. I’m exhausted. The town is very busy. All parking spaces are on meters so I mind the van while Tony runs into the nearby Irish pub to ask if they have
any spare rooms. Shower, I’m thinking; bed. Proper bed. Scour the desert dust away and sleep like I haven’t slept in months.

I’m leaning against the van smoking when a young feller approaches, early twenties, mixed race aborigine by the looks. Smartly dressed, but goes into a spiel about needing money, so I give him a handful of change and then Tony’s there, squaring up to him, asking him what’s going on.

–Bit broke, mate, he says. –Need a few cents.

–No you don’t, Tony says. –Fuck off and take your mate with you from round the back of the van.

I watch, shocked and disappointed, as the feller skulks away, joined by his mate who’d been lurking behind the van, waiting to pounce. Gave that bastard about four bucks as well.

–Did you not see him? Tony asks.

–I didn’t, no. Just gave his mate a handful of change. Pair of fuckers.

–Best watch ourselves around here.

Big brothers – they
can
be useful. Especially ones that have been in the marines and know how to spot an ambush. Yet each mugging I’ve narrowly averted, and there have been several, makes me angry; did those pricks think I look easily muggable? Do I look like I’ll just surrender and give them my cash and wallet without a fight? I’m insulted. Feel like running after that pair of wankers, daring them to try and roll me. If I wasn’t so tired I’d do exactly that. In this state, tho, they’d have my pockets empty in a blink.

The Irish pub has a couple of rooms, so we park the van and I feed the meter a week’s wages, and we take our rucksacks up to reception, check in, get to our rooms, unpack. A tiny room, just a bed and a wardrobe and a wall-mounted small TV. Good enough. All I need. Two shared showers, one of 
which is free, so I dive in it and wash slabs of accrued muck off my body and feel like I’m being re-born and go back to my room and lie on the bed and turn the TV on. I can hear pub hubbub below, music and laughter, smell the rising fumes of beer. Quickly decide not to go down there, tonight. The great plain’s still in me. I just sleep.

Robertson Court is a brown building, arranged in a
block-capital
C, around a patch of green with a playground on it and some washing lines. Three storeys high. Stairwells and walkways. Each flat is high-ceilinged, with a sitting room and three bedrooms and a kitchen, all fairly large and basically furnished. It’s an immigrant hostel, much like Yungaba in Brisbane, but physically different; it’s less tropical here, cooler, less humid, more like a British suburb. There are small shady courtyards, perfect for playing football in and for examining the redbacks that make nests between the bricks. The children drop small pieces of debris in the webs to entice the spiders out; at the first glimpse of that bright red hourglass they run away screaming.

The family has very little money. On May 18th they go out looking for a second-hand TV but are unsuccessful; every seller, on hearing the family speak, seems to suddenly remember that they’ve promised their TV to a mate. Work is freely available, however, and the father shortly secures a job and a $100 sub from the boss. They buy a TV. Returning from the local shop one day, the dad gets talking to another occupant of the Court. The dad says that they left Brisbane because it’s a ‘hicktown’
and the man yells ‘so’s Perth!’; in his Lancastrian accent it comes out as ‘Puth!’. The boy is given the shopping to take upstairs to the flat and told to be careful because it contains eggs. ‘So don’t bounce ’em’, says the man.

They drive out into a suburb to visit friends, Gina and George, who have four children, all girls. The adults discuss house-buying business and schools and the children eat crisps and watch TV. The girl who is the same age as the boy, in her night-dress, lies on her tummy to watch TV, head propped up on her hands, and the boy discovers that, in a certain position, he can see her bare bum. So he stays in that position for so long that he gets cramp in the entire left-hand side of his body.

Don’t bounce ’em.
Odd, the trivialities that we remember. Why should that comment have remained in my head? I remember the bloke who made it, too, what he looked like; quite rosy face, greyish-sandy curly hair. I remember that he was wearing faded blue overalls.
Don’t bounce ’em.
Very strange, the details you retain.

Higgy’s flying into Perth to meet us in a day or so, to ferry us around, at which point we’ll be returning the van, so we scoot around Perth in it, do a wee bit of revisiting. Tuart Hill School is a low redbrick building, still there, not much different from how I remember it. It’s play-time (or ‘recess’, as they call it here), and hundreds of kids are running about in a playful panic, so I can’t take any photos. Can’t point a camera at kids who aren’t related to you, these days. Thirty years ago, I was one of these children. Running about and shouting. That was me. 

We drive out to Yokine. Robertson Court is now private accommodation, with a locked security gate, so we can’t enter the grounds. Discuss climbing over them but decide against it; images of Oz security guards Hitlerised by their uniforms. And relishing every last second. A sign outside reads: ‘WHY RENT? IF SIZE MATTERS, THEN THIS IS IT!’ How much did the copywriter get paid to come up with that meaningless twaddle? The flats
were
big, though, as I recall; voices echoed in the rooms. I had my first proper kiss here. On that balcony, there. With Jackie Thompson. Wonder what she’s doing now? We can see the window of the lounge of our old flat. The storm-drains are still there; whole worlds to intently and intrepidly explore, they were. The nearby row of shops used to have a chippy where we’d buy sausage and chips and take them home to watch
Dad’s Army,
behind that window, there, on the corner of the nearest building. Me. Three decades ago.
Dad’s Army.
Chips and sausages. Did Oz chippies have vinegar then?
Spin-the-bottle.
The ant lions. The redbacks. Can’t remember about the vinegar. Thirty years. Jackie Thompson’s tongue. A torrent, an avalanche.
Don’t bounce ’em.

The immigrant children amuse themselves by telling the Australian children fanciful stories about Britain. They tell them about scouse mines, porridge mines, open-cast cawl mines, about stalking haggis in the glens. The boy had done this in Brisbane, too, but here, he begins to entertain and entrance himself by creating fancies of another sort, on paper; in Perth he begins to write, he doesn’t know why, only that an
untouchable part of himself is demanding that he does so. He can contain the world, when he’s writing about it. The world seems less brutal and merciless, seems to make more sense, when he’s writing about it. Writing thrills him, makes him feel truly and madly alive, gives his presence on the planet a point. The world’s riches are available to him when he’s writing. In later life, he will achieve similar states of ecstasy in sex and drugs and snorkelling and standing atop mountains or travelling fast in cars or encountering wild animals, but it’ll stay with him always, this initial thrill, this first contact with one of the beauties of being alive. His reading consists largely of horror stories, and he is obsessed with films of rampaging animals –
Jaws
and
Grizzly
and the like – and his writing reflects that; one of his books is about a pack of mutant wolves devouring the world. He shares this passion with another boy, David, who also writes, and who, one evening on a Court balcony, insists on reading out the first few pages of his novel. He stands and solemnly declaims the first line: ‘The great snake stood lying there’. Our boy bursts out laughing. Not cruelly; he just can’t help himself. There’s another boy, too, a boaster and liar who has been everywhere, done everything. One evening he bores and annoys the boy by ticking off all the many swimming certificates he’s achieved, so the boy asks if he’s won his Swimso badge yet.
Ah yeh – got that one when I was eight.
Our boy laughs and dances and points.
No you didn’t! It doesn’t exist! I made it up!

The boy’s sister, with her friends, has a money-making idea: they’ll knock on doors and dance to Abba songs for money. On their first night, they make a few dollars, but it’s all American. Every last cent.

Work is so freely available that the father can effectively try
several sites before he chooses the one that suits him best. Most of his co-workers are surly, miserable, taciturn, but he does find one good workmate, an Italian, whose name – Antonio Indicalatto – fascinates the boy; he mutters it to himself, under his breath, relishing its rhythm, marvelling at its music.

On May 25th, at 10 a.m., they gather around the TV to watch the Ali fight. That afternoon they go into the city and the boy is bought some
Jaws
pumps; ankle-high boots with a jagged sole like spiky teeth and a picture of the shark on the side. He loves them and wears them until they’re falling apart on his feet. His mother has a friend, Marge, who she secretly calls ‘Marge the Moaner’. They often meet mid-morning for tea and a whinge.

Life, to the boy, is both exciting and worrying. He’s settling into, and is starting to cease fighting against, his nature; his idea of the world made up of equal parts wonder and disgust. He’s beginning to accept. He loves scrumping pomegranates, and scouring the undergrowth for insects and animals, and watching the strange and musical birds in the bushes and trees. He is terrified and sickened by the bullying he witnesses, and by the images of the war in Vietnam he still sees daily on the television. He’s growing. On the way home from school one day he walks past a driveway to a big house. The driveway is carpeted in bits of pretty green stone and he and his friends stuff handfuls of it into their pockets and bags and, the following weekend, take it to a jeweller’s in the city. The jeweller’s assistant, a young woman, examines a piece of the stone and says ‘you could be rich, y’know’. Outside, the boy does a little dance of joy. When they return later, the jeweller himself has had a look at the stone and he tells them: ‘It’s false jade. You got it off someone’s driveway, didn’t you? I’ll give you $2.48 for the lot.’