Johnno Read online

  He knew what it was to be a winner. He had never lost a fight himself, except to a real champ, Archie Bradley, and had retired without a scar. What it was to be a loser was something else again …

  When the Fights were over Johnno would be waiting and we would set off on our tramp round the town.

  “Look after yourself, son” was all my father would offer in the way of advice. He had come up the hard way, learning to scrap in the “pushes” that terrorised the Southside before the Great War, and at the same time going to mass every morning and after work making deliveries with his horse and sulky for the St. Vincent de Paul. He was a mixture of knockabout worldliness and the most extraordinary innocence. I have no idea what he thought we were doing in that disreputable part of Brisbane so late at night, or if he thought anything at all. He never asked questions, he never gave the smallest hint that he was aware of what was going on about him. There was a hot-dog man at the door of the bleachers. “If you’ve been t’ the fight and yer going t’ fuck, y’ need a hot dog” he would bellow as the crowd streamed out and made its way towards the darkened streets between the Stadium and the Gardens. My father never raised an eyebrow.

  VII

  ✧✧✧

  I don’t know when Johnno discovered the Greek Club, or how, but that was where we were to be found most often on those Friday nights, and the long dimly lighted room, with its marble-topped bar and tables, its blacked out windows and sawdust floor, is irrevocably associated in my mind with his conspiratorial phase.

  The barman, a sleepy, bare-armed Cretan called Stavros, served us cognac with little sideplates of tomato and olives. From the next room came the pock of billiard balls, and an occasional cry from half a dozen throats as a spectacular win was made at one of the card tables, where dark, moustachioed figures sat close under the lamps in a fog of driftless smoke. Sometime towards midnight a boy would appear, sprinkle the sawdust from a watering can, and sweep it up, greyish and foul with butts. Stavros would sleep with his thick head on his arm, till he was called from the doorway for another round of drinks and sideplates of fetta and olives. Or he would walk to the doorway and stand with his hands on his hips in the smoky lightshaft, while some tense moment passed in the play, shaking his head and shrugging his shoulders at us as he passed — someone had just lost a small fortune in there! And Johnno, responsive to the atmosphere of the place, and to the effects of the raw cognac, would begin hinting at some new revelation that he was about to make, lowering his voice across the table to the merest whisper. Though there was no one but Stavros to hear us. And he knew no English.

  “It’s something I heard last year,” he would whisper, “when I was on mining practice at Rosebery. From this Pole. Well, he was a count actually, but of course he doesn’t use his title out here. We called him Mike.”

  He would take another sip of his cognac and lean closer.

  “Only you’ve got to swear you won’t tell, Dante. I’m not joking, you’ve really got to swear and mean it. A man’s life could be at stake.”

  I look sceptical. I’ve heard all this before.

  “Will you swear then? It’s for your own sake as much as anyone else’s. They’d be after you like a shot if they thought you knew.”

  “Who would?”

  Johnno leans back and smiles.

  “Ah — well that’s just the point, isn’t it? That’s what I’m going to tell you. Only you’ve got to swear.”

  I do so, with a reserve of irony that Johnno pretends not to notice, raising my right hand scout-fashion and repeating an oath. Johnno isn’t exactly pleased but it will do.

  “Well then,” he whispers, “it’s the Organisation, see? The big one, the one that’s behind everything, wars, revolutions, depressions, the lot. We think they just happen. Twenty-four causes of the French Revolution and all that bullshit. Trade barriers, currency restrictions, economics. Human nature! And all the time it’s them. They’re sitting round a table somewhere, or contacting one another by secret radio. Boom! There’s a palace revolution in Jordan, someone’s knocked off quietly in Colombia, the drachma collapses. A plane crash. A world war. It’s them every time.”

  Johnno sits back, sips at his drink, considers the effect upon me of this shattering revelation. I shrug my shoulders. He crouches towards me. “And who do you think they are,” he asks darkly. “Can you guess?”

  I have recently been developing a taste for irony.

  “World Jewry?” I hazard. “The Church?”

  The effect on Johnno quite alarms me. He jerks forward, shoots me a glance that is full of suspicion, recovers, watches me closely as he drains his glass.

  “As a matter of fact, Dante, you’re closer than you think.” His voice becomes almost inaudible. “World Jewry, the Church, the Masons — all three of them working together! Isn’t that something? Think of all those poor fools who think the Catholics and the Masons are sworn enemies. You know what it’s like around here. You’ve got to be one or the other or you get nowhere. And all the time they’re in league. And the joke is, even the top people in the Masons, the Grand Masters or whatever they’re called, even the Pope doesn’t know! The only ones who know are the Big Ones themselves — and a few people like my Pole. That’s why they’re after him. That’s why he had to get out of Poland. And Argentina! And why he isn’t safe even in Rosebery. And that’s why you mustn’t breathe a word about it to anyone, Dante, or they’d be after us as well.”

  All this must have made some impression on me because Johnno begins to enjoy himself. His air of conspiracy, of imminent danger, deepens.

  “But that’s not the whole thing, even yet. It gets better and better. Because the Big Ones, the ones who really matter, the ones who are pulling the strings and making it all happen — well, what’s so enormous is that they aren’t big people at all, or not the sort of people you’d know were big, with their names in history books or in the newspapers. They’re the most inconspicuous people in the world. People you wouldn’t tumble to in a million years. Like those old men at the Public Library, f’r instance. Who’d suspect one of them? Or Stavros there.” Johnno jerks his head towards him, sleeping, or pretending to sleep, with his arms folded on the bar. “It’s perfect, don’t you see? It’s —” he searches for the word, “it’s Copernican! Once you’ve been made to realise it everything suddenly makes sense.”

  “You believe it then?”

  I was thinking of one old man at the library, with half-glasses at the end of his rheumy nose and watery-blue eyes, blood-red at the rims.

  “Of course I do. Don’t you?”

  I shrug my shoulders.

  “But it’s the only thing that would explain it all,” Johnno insists. “The unfairness of things. The absurdity.” He gives a big guffaw, then covers his mouth quickly with his hand. Stavros stirs and sits up. Johnno’s voice becomes a steady hiss. “Can’t you see what a joke it is? Those old men must be pissing themselves, sitting there in the library, watching us swallow all the garbage in those books. History, psycho-analysis, looking at the newspaper headlines! It’s one huge, glorious joke.” Once again he has to stifle a burst of laughter. “It’s cosmic! I knew it was true the moment I heard it. It’s the only possible explanation. Only f’ God’s sake, Dante,” he lowers his voice till it is just a breath of air between us, “don’t ever, ever tell anyone. Anybody you spoke to might be one of them. Just anybody. And you’d be done for. Pffft! Kaput! It simply isn’t worth the risk.” He sits back. “All in all, Dante, I think it would be safer if we never mentioned it again. Even to one another.”

  ✧✧

  After the “revelation”, and a couple more fiery cognacs, Johnno would be ready for the brothels.

  Hidden away behind a ten foot corrugated-iron wall, in one-storeyed weatherboards that were virtually indistinguishable from the spare-parts yards and mechanics’ shops of the sleazy areas between the Gardens and Elizabeth Street, the brothels were known, by reputation at least, to every Brisbane schoolboy and exert
ed an unhealthy influence over the imagination of a good many of the city’s most respectable young ladies, who liked to be driven past on their way home from the pictures, to marvel at the crowd of men round the doorway, and to catch, if they were lucky, a glimpse of one of “them”, striding about on the footpath in an evening dress slit to the knee or kilted up boldly behind. Mostly, however, they remained invisible behind their wall, and you had to duck your head and go into the little front yard with its geraniums and its trellis of shrivelled vines to see anything more. And even then it might only be the Madam, large and over-dressed in a cane armchair — fanning herself if it was summer, while big moths blundered against a lamp, or warming her feet at a one-bar radiator in Brisbane’s brief but chilly winter. The girls kept to their rooms down the hall.

  Johnno, on our visits to the brothels, was charm itself — mild-mannered, deferential, gallant. Within minutes of our arrival he and the Madam would be on the best of terms, she chiding him a little when he went too far, he smiling sheepishly, till one of the girls made her appearance at the rails of the one-step verandah and the Madam gave him leave to be off. Without hurry Johnno would excuse himself and drift across.

  “Such a charming boy,” she would sigh as I shifted from one foot to the other on the stained concrete that was a brilliant green like grass. “And so are you, dear. Only you mustn’t be so shy. We’re not going to eat you, you know. There’s nothing to be afraid of here.”

  It wasn’t true. There was Johnno to be afraid of. And while the Madam settled back plumply to enjoy the scene, I watched Johnno for danger signals. Every now and then the Madam would reach down under her plaited-cane chair, take out a mosquito spray and pump vigorously till a little cloud of droplets hung on the air. “The mozzies are death to me,” she would explain delicately. “If there’s just one of them within a mile they’ll find me out. It’s the Gardens being so close.” Occasionally in the long silence the animals could be heard from the Gardens menagerie, a sudden screeching of parrots, then the monkeys would start up, shrilling and jabbering, and the hoarse-throated baboons and chimpanzees. If the wind was in the right direction you could even smell them, dark and fetid, unnervingly close. “Horrid, horrid!” the Madam would exclaim, wrinkling the powder of her fine nose. “It’s a public disgrace, those poor creatures being locked up like that. I can’t bear to think of them.”

  Meanwhile, Johnno would have gathered quite a group around him. The girls in their kimonos and pallid evening dresses giggled lightly. Madam dozed. I would grow more and more anxious.

  And sure enough the good humour would come to an end with a sudden burst of argument. One of the girls would begin to object mildly to something he had said or hinted; this would be followed by further insinuations, bickering, then a full-throated babble, and the Madam, starting awake, would call sweetly: “Now now, kiddies — be nice to one another.” The girl would huff and flounce off to her room down the hall. There would be more whispering and giggling, then another outburst, even louder, and the Madam would ease herself out of her chair and go across to see what it was about.

  “Now look here. What is all this?”

  Then protests, recriminations, counter-recriminations, squeals, a full-scale shouting match with slaps, yells, little heel kicks, savage four letter expletives, and Johnno would be whispering at my elbow: “Get ready to run. They’re going to call the police!” as with a last vicious stand at the door he would proclaim fiercely: “Get fucked, all youse!” and make off round the corner, with me breathlessly at his heels and the lights of Queen Street swimming dizzily ahead. “Faster!” Johnno would be hissing, “Faster! I can hear them!” Till we were both exhausted and had to pull up in the entrance to a shop.

  The police never did come, though Johnno swore he heard the car and would spring into a crouch every time there was a glare of headlamps in the street. And it dawned on me at last that the police, and the chase up Edward Street, like Johnno’s drawn-out conversation with the Madam and his carefully calculated scene with the girls, were part of a private and powerfully exciting fantasy that left him panting and streaming with sweat, and which I could not share. The brothels suddenly lost their glamour for me. I became more and more unwilling to go.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Johnno would demand savagely. “You used to like it.” He would sulk and wheedle, and when I did give in at last and agree to go I would throw him into paroxysms of rage by refusing to cooperate in the fantasy at the very moment when his own excitement could brook no qualification.

  “For God’s sake,” he’d yell as I dawdled behind, “for God’s sake, Dante, what are you doing? The police are coming. Do you want us to get caught?” I would force myself into a half-hearted trot. And when I slowed again to little more than a fast walk he would lose his head completely: “You bastard. You fucking shit! You want us to get caught. They’ll be here any minute, I tell you. I can hear the siren!”

  But I couldn’t make myself run any more. It was too silly. And the game was over anyway. The houses had got to know us and the moment we appeared at the little gate the alarm was raised: “It’s him!” and a girl would appear with a bucket of slops. “Come on,” she’d challenge, “just you come another step and you’ll get the lot, you little bastard.”

  Johnno was delighted. “You see,” he told me, triumphant. But he kept to the footpath and limited himself to a few desultory insults, urged on by a taxi-load of sailors.

  “Get the police,” the Madam called from inside, “if he doesn’t beat it. Call the dicks!”

  Johnno’s triumph was complete. “The police, see?” he said defiantly. With a whoop of joy he took to his heels, and on this occasion at least, had me pelting after him. The fantasy was fact at last. He had made it real.

  After that we let the brothels lapse. We took to staying at the Greek Club into the early hours of the morning, and after peering through the iron bars of the Gardens, where giant Moreton Bay figs, huge-girthed like elephants, would be emerging out of the bluish dark, and the first animals stirring in their fusty cages, we would part and walk home, or wait at our separate stops for the five o’clock tram.

  I liked the city in the early morning. The streets would be wet where one of the big, slow cleaning-machines had been through. In the alleyways between shops florists would be setting out pails of fresh-cut flowers, dahlias and sweet william, or unpacking boxes of gladioli. After Johnno’s sullen rage I felt light and free. It was so fresh, so sparkling, the early morning air before the traffic started up; and the sun when it appeared was immediately warm enough to make you sweat. Between the tall city office blocks Queen Street was empty, its tramlines aglow. Despite Johnno’s assertion that Brisbane was absolutely the ugliest place in the world, I had the feeling as I walked across deserted intersections, past empty parks with their tropical trees all spiked and sharp-edged in the early sunlight, that it might even be beautiful. But that, no doubt, was light-headedness from lack of sleep or a trick of the dawn.

  “What a place!” Johnno would snarl, exasperated by the dust and the packed heat of an afternoon when even the glossy black mynah birds, picking about between the roots of the Moreton Bay figs, were too dispirited to dart out of the way of his boot. “This must be the bloody arsehole of the universe!”

  And I had to admit then that it was difficult to see how anything could be made of Brisbane. It was so shabby and makeshift, with its wooden houses perched high on tar-black stilts, its corrugated-iron fences unpainted and rusting, its outdoor lavatories, chicken houses, blocks of uncleared land where the weeds in summer might be six feet tall, a tangle of lantana and morning glory and scraggy sunflowers. Even in the city itself there were still buildings with first-storey verandahs, and occasionally one of the new facades (all pastel-coloured metal slats) would reveal, if you caught it at the right angle, the weatherboard fabric behind. Nothing seemed permanent here. Brisbane was a huge shanty-town, set down in the middle of nowhere. I was reminded sometimes of ghost-towns in the n
orth that had once had a population of twenty thousand souls and were now completely deserted — the houses one morning simply lifted down from their stumps, loaded on to the back of a lorry, and carted away to create another town a hundred miles off. In my childhood I had often seen houses being carried through the streets, creaking and swaying on the back of a truck. It wouldn’t have surprised anyone, I think, to wake up one morning and find that Brisbane too had died overnight. Its corrugated iron would be sold off for scrap. The weatherboard houses would rot in the damp, be carted away, or fail victim to the voraciousness of white ants. Animals would nest in upturned water tanks.

  And who, Johnno asked, would know the difference? Brisbane was nothing: a city that blew neither hot nor cold, a place where nothing happened, and where nothing ever would happen, because it had no soul. People suffered here without significance. It was too mediocre even to be a province of hell. It would have defeated even Baudelaire! A place where poetry could never occur.

  Perhaps.