Fishing in the Styx Read online

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Because her first priority is to defend anything her kids do. That’s the way they are here.’

  Still, after the kitten episode I was desperate. ‘I can’t stay here,’ I said. ‘I just can’t.’

  ‘There’s nowhere else to go. We’ve tried everywhere, you know that.’

  This was the truth. Every friend of D’Arcy’s high or low, was looking out for a flat or even a room ‘with conveniences’ - a gas ring. Nearly every night, quite late, D’Arcy rang friends of his in the proofreading departments on the Sydney Morning Herald and the Daily Telegraph, to see whether they had proofread advertisements for any vacant accommodation. He would turn up before dawn at the addresses provided, but always there was a queue which had probably been there from the night before. The person offering the highest key money won the flat or room, no matter how appalling it was - and many were. D’Arcy would stump home from the city in the brightening day, gnashing his teeth.

  ‘I feel like going out and bottle-fighting someone,’ he growled after one of these fruitless vigils. It was the shamelessness of the greed exhibited that so disturbed him.

  ‘And Australians, too!’ he said sadly. He was the most innocent of patriots and remained so all his life. He deplored my native canniness and cynicism, believing correctly these were regrettable Kiwi characteristics.

  ‘Music, man, music!’ cried Beres, chassée-ing into the kitchen, and obediently D’Arcy took out the mouth organ he always carried in his back pocket and played some kind of cross between a jig and a dirge.

  ‘Eeet ees opeless, opeless,’ complained Beres, leaving. In between jobs he was forever trying out for the chorus in the Tivoli shows, but somehow his feet were never up to the work.

  But these small distractions did not allay my frequent despair.

  ‘I’ll die,’ I said. ‘I can’t stand it.’

  But of course I could. I just did not want to stand it.

  ‘There are plenty of good decent people in Surro,’ said D’Arcy. ‘You’re a writer. Observe.’

  ‘In between chucking up, I suppose.’

  ‘At least there is a between,’ he replied. I could have killed him then and there, but he was right, and I knew it.

  And yet, you know, so strong is the literary vision, whether it lies in the conscious or that twilight region below it, I was already seeing beauty in this place I thought so odious. Each little ‘front’ - not a garden, just a space between the steps and the street - grew something. I had the impression that these shrubs had never been planted; they had burst spontaneously, in accordance with Divine law, from the exhausted, cement-like earth. Yet, look at them! Frangipanni – scented creamy flowers exploding from bare tumerous branches. Poinsettia, so spindly, so frail, climbed by cats, pissed on by kids and drunks, yet seasonally offering ragged blooms like handfuls of flames.

  Some householders, very few, did try to grow something. That old friend of Frankie Green’s, Salim Bux, the Afghan camelman with the face carved up like a cat’s dinner, he had a row of old boots on his window-sill, each growing a leek, and one on the end sprouting a sickly rose.

  The smell of those streets was compounded of leaking gas, decayed fruit, mouldy wood, a vegetative garbage odour and sometimes, only sometimes, a faint breath from the wondrous frangipanni. It was an old-fashioned smell, a Victorian smell.

  On the elder cottages, where the spinach-green paint had flaked away, I glimpsed the sandstock bricks of which they were made – rubbly, uneven in shape and size, hand-moulded. Apricot and cinnabar flecked their mealy brown. These bricks were the very stuff of a Sydney not lost but built-over and hidden. I thought that if I could find a loose brick and prise it out I might see the thumb print of the convict who made it.

  For I knew nothing about Sydney, though I had discovered the Public Library and was about to begin my long study of what was to be my own city. Like many overseas people, I thought early Sydney was populated by convicts alone; I didn’t know of the hordes of greedy younger sons, exploiters and carpetbaggers, as well as the shiploads of frightened, hopeful immigrants. But my Sydney, my heart’s Sydney, was to be older than that.

  My Sydney sparkled and flashed with streams and little rivers, uncountable splashes that winkled through the ferns and grasses and tumbled into the nameless creek that flowed in the deepest crack of the Vale. There Captain Phillip, first Governor, pitched the first tents. It was a place of palms and creepers, orchids, water birds, and the sweet essence of damp soil and wet stones.

  Captain Phillip knew his people, shackled or free, were not alone. In the thick and silent woods that grew as far as the eye could see, were black fays who appeared, stared and vanished, whispered around the tents at night. What they whispered was eventually understood.

  ‘Go away! Go away!’

  I was beginning consciously to observe. Each scalding summer day, about 4.30 p.m., the chimney pots above our ceiling made a sound like a child blowing on the lip of a bottle.

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘The southerly, of course,’ replied D’Arcy, not even ceasing pounding at the typewriter. ‘Would you use determinant or determinative as the noun? Both are correct.’

  ‘What’s the southerly?’

  ‘Determinant then, it sounds better. The southerly comes every afternoon, don’t you notice the room getting cooler? Oh, I don’t know, determinative may look better.’

  I was filled with wonder. A clockwork wind! Nowadays the southerly comes only rarely; they say the tall buildings deflect it. But it was one of Sydney’s most idiosyncratic blessings, for in ten minutes the temperature would go down, five, ten degrees, and people would stop being cranky and fevered and feel like human beings again.

  It was a swift something that rushed up the east coast, barging against the hills, sprinting across shoaly shores, no more than treetop high, agitating the forests into puffs of snatched leaves. Reaching civilisation, it split a thousand ways through the chimneys, gables and dormers of low, crouching outliers of the city, depositing on roofs and in streets twirls and whirligigs of burned leaves, a one-winged butterfly, a torn rag of teatowel. It scrubbed away the heat and tweaked up the sea, and in half an hour was gone.

  In Surry Hills itself I looked for other things, such as the golden glaze of the sunset on the polluted air. Only industrial areas like Surry Hills had pollution then. And if I got up before dawn on Sunday mornings I heard in the distance the clopping of hoofs, unhurried and majestic. Running down to the street door, past the pseudo-hanged body in the barber’s chair, I watched with joy the divine dignity of the brewery Clydesdales going off for their holiday, a green holiday in Centennial Park, each matched team with a couple of elderly stable lads.

  ‘G’day, love. Ain’t it a bottler of a day?’

  Then I would go upstairs and cram in beside my husband, maybe just lying there staring at him, as newly weds do, marvelling at this new person in my life, his feathery black hair, the white skin, the strong square hands. I liked to put my hand on his heart and feel the steady regular beat, so different from the nervous skitter of my own. It never occurred to me that one day that heart would come to a stop.

  The girls at my old newspaper in New Zealand wrote me letters for a year or so. Oh, you’re so lucky, they said, to be away from dreary old here, to live a fascinating life!

  ‘If you only knew,’ I thought, for in my first six months in the Hills the blissful moments were few indeed.

  Nevertheless the time would come when I could see under the dirt, the human detritus and the frequent wretchedness of Surry Hills the great kindness and loyalty and unornamented human durability of which I was largely ignorant when I was twenty-two.

  Once more I would be able to read that wonderful letter of William Morris’s to his stonyhearted lump of a wife: ‘I entreat you to think that life is not empty, not made for nothing, and that the parts of it fit one into another in some way; and that the world goes on, beautiful and strange and dreadful and worsh
ipful,’ and know he spoke the truth.

  But until that happened, many times I asked, or even shouted, ‘How and why did I get into this place?’

  D’Arcy Niland was not one to regard temperament in others in any way but impartially. He turned a tranquil blue gaze on me and said, ‘It was me, or I, if you insist. You longed and longed to be close to I.’

  ‘God!’

  ‘You must face the truth,’ he continued complacently. ‘I was a lover wailing for a demon woman, and you answered the call of Fate.’

  In fact, my reason for emigrating to Australia was primarily pragmatic. Though a well-qualified journalist with a small success as freelance in international newspaperdom, I had a fatal defect. I was a woman. In my native country I had ample evidence that I would never be allowed to hold a prestige position, or indeed be given a quality assignment. The most I could hope for was, at the age of fifty or so, an appointment as Lady Editor, when I would spend my time describing the dreadful ‘frocking’ at the Easter Racing Carnival.

  Also I was deeply, permanently insulted by being paid what was called two-thirds of the male rate - though it was more like half - solely because I had ovaries.

  ‘Bugger the lot of them,’ I said to myself. Working on newspapers teaches even the convent-bred girl to swear. Then out of the blue I was offered a job on the San Francisco Examiner. However, my plans to sail on December 10, 1941 were wrecked by the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbour, after which all civilian travel was officially cancelled.

  ‘Go to Australia,’ said my father Mera, ‘there’s little for you here. Go!’

  My law of life was an ancient Maori proverb: He who climbs a cliff may die on the cliff. So what? Still, I had enough Scots hard-headedness to obtain two firm offers of employment on Sydney newspapers before I departed with a capital of ten pounds for an unknown future. Many months passed before I secured official permission to travel between these two adjacent countries.

  After one glance at the newspapers which had offered me jobs - they were tabloids - I took up neither offer. Besides, after seeing D’Arcy Niland again after a long separation, it became plain to me that I wanted more than anything to be close to he.

  Let no one think that I was not clearly aware I was climbing a cliff.

  • 2 •

  How fortunate I was to have had six months of extensive Australian experience before the calamitous housing shortage blew me willynilly into the disordered world of Surry Hills. At least I had comparisons.

  The huge golden continent and I had not met tranquilly; as with all immigrants I had reeled before that abiding shock wrongly called cultural, but more intimately related to climate, mores, language and personality. There was in me the common resistance to difference, based more on old loyalties and old loves than reason. It did not help when D’Arcy remarked that I gave him a cultural shock as well, but that he was prepared to weather it out.

  Neither of us had experienced a consummated love affair; we had been too busy writing. We were stunned by all the fighting, yelling and laughing that went on.

  ‘This isn’t like me,’ he said, awed. ‘And as for you, I’ve never met anything like you. You’re like chain lightning in a billycan.’

  ‘That’s just what I feel like. I can’t understand it,’ I confessed. ‘I suppose all my hormones are standing on end.’

  In between tumultuous rages and blisses we spent much time curled up together like two possums, not saying a word.

  ‘What are we doing this for?’

  ‘Just to be close.’

  Yet I was still afraid of marriage; I had seen it swallow women like a tide of mud.

  ‘I need to be a writer, that’s what I need from life.’

  ‘I wouldn’t want you if you weren’t a writer, Tiger.’

  So, three weeks after I had landed in Sydney, we married, to stay that way for almost twenty-five years.

  My wedding gave me the pip. The ceremony was conducted in a workworn, dusky church by a priest with a face like a rock knocked into shape with another rock. At the other end of the building a curate struggled to turn a yapping infant into a Christian. In our little group there was not one person I knew. My dear brother-in-law-to-be, Beresford, was working late. D’Arcy’s family stood in a huddled mass, staring grimly. Only the youngest child, sunny-faced and golden-haired, peeped from behind his mother and waved shyly. I did not, of course, realise that they were totally discomposed by this foreigner who had flown into their lives; they scarcely knew what to make of the situation.

  I felt solitary, dismayed and homesick.

  Two old women, of the kind that haunt churches, sat in the front seat and criticised my hat.

  ‘Oh, Lord, I wish Beres would come!’ I hissed to my loved one.

  ‘Me, too, by crikey,’ he hissed back.

  My father-in-law, Frank Niland, turned up full to the gills, but behaved like any ordinary person during the ceremony. As I knew he was an alcoholic, I had often felt a certain subterranean unease about him, but found his personality engaging. I approved of his bold hand with the English language. A man who used words like addictified, fundamentacious and furiosity was worth any writer’s attention. He almost won my friendship with his term for pregnant - spermatised.

  Having seen his eldest son wedded, he did perhaps feel a need for attention, and kicked up a hullabaloo in the vestry. The old priest, who had preceded our nuptials with a funeral service, which he described as a long stand on short legs, roared, ‘G’wout of here, you pestiferous thing!’

  Frank made the sign of the Cross, as though against the evil eye, and stumbled out. All too clearly I saw that here was a family complication to which I had not given sufficient thought.

  My new husband caught my eye. ‘Ah, don’t be hard on him,’ he whispered. ‘He’s only a poor broken-down old tomtit.’

  As we could not afford a honeymoon, Beres arranged a treat. This was a visit to the Chinese opera, somewhere up a lane of cabbage-leaves and old potato sacks in the Haymarket. The performance went on for three days. The opera house must have been the top floor of a rickety warehouse, for even while the villain with the white-painted nose was howling and stamping, five or six hearty young Chinese carried some kegs of what smelled like salt fish to the very front of the auditorium and with satisfied smiles, sat on them.

  The manner in which we sole westerners sat in one chair and cuddled must have alerted our fellow opera-goers, for we had many approving smiles, and several old ladies, with kind diamond-shaped eyes and scant white hair drawn tightly into buns the size of nutmegs, patted us both on the head.

  In retrospect I tremble for those two cheerful young knuckleheads. For me the birdlike shouts of the actors are drowned by the murderous clamour of the pivotal Battle of the Coral Sea, fought that week.

  But do they feel insecure, in that time of phenomenal insecurity? Such a thought never enters their heads, for insecurity is for older people to worry about.

  ‘Nevertheless,’ I said, ‘You might be called up again.’

  ‘Sure I shall, if the Japs invade us. And you too, don’t forget. But in the meantime I’m an Army reject, one of Manpower Authority’s nameless slaves.’

  Early in the war he had been indignant and argumentative when an Army doctor excluded him from active service because of a cardiac malfunction.

  ‘I’m as strong as a bull, I said. He just shrugged and said it was congenital and probably would never bother me and tossed me out on my ear. I bet he made a mistake.’

  He was immediately drafted into essential industry, and had worked all over the country for nearly three years. Shortly after our marriage he was to be called up for another long period in the wool industry, but after that there was silence from Manpower. Perhaps his file had been mislaid.

  But those wandering days were to come.

  By a miracle we had managed to rent a minute flatlet in King’s Cross, the converted back verandah of one of the wonderful old mansions that once lined Darlinghurst Road. In t
hose days King’s Cross was not the sleazy dump it is today. Maybe it was slowly on the way down to gimcrackery and crime, but in fact it was sunny, picturesque, and liberal-minded. Still the actors’ and artists’ quarter, it was crowded with European refugees with long haircuts, no money, and romantic manners.

  ‘Oh, Mum,’ I wrote excitedly. ‘It’s just so glamorous. The streets are packed with people all night, laughing and singing, and there are open-air cafés. A waiter bowed to me, imagine! D’Arcy is still doing the night shift at the Railway, and Beres takes me to the Minerva, a live theatre not far away. You may have read that Sydney was shelled by the Japanese, but it wasn’t much, and of course nowhere near us.’

  This was untrue, as the shells had whistled over our heads and landed a few streets away. I had the naive idea that my parents wouldn’t have a map of Sydney. But it was true that we King’s Cross-ites hadn’t been alarmed. The streets were full of chattering laughing people, looking up into the sky (we thought it was an air raid), flashing torches and chiacking the hysterical wardens who ran amongst us, ordering us back inside and under tables.

  The sounds of shells bursting, fire brigades setting up a screech, and a distant hubbub down at Elizabeth Bay were followed by an enormous whoomp as the moored ferry Kuttabul (we learned later) was torpedoed and blown up, drowning twenty or so Navy ratings.

  ‘Get under cover, under cover!’ howled the wardens, and reluctantly we went.

  ‘Gee, I wanted to go to the Kardomah for a cup of coffee,’ complained Beres.

  From all over Sydney people came to frequent the dim and decadent little cafés at The Cross. Many were in cellars, others in attics or lofts, or courtyards once the kitchen gardens of fading Georgian mansions or urned and turreted Federation terraces. The flood of European refugees had brought not only cosmopolitan chic, but the correct method of making coffee. Hitherto I had tasted only that offence against the Lord, coffee essence. I went overboard with the new discovery.

  D’Arcy thought coffee indefinably non-Australian. His family, like many others, regarded the teapot as an icon.