Another fellow, half behind the other, half beside, gave a scornful laugh. ‘You could’a done worse,’ he said. He turned to Digger. ‘He don’t even know how to write.’
‘Yair? Well what’s that gotta do with it?’ the first boy shouted. ‘Eh? Eh?’ and he began to jab the heel of his hand into the other’s shoulder. ‘I traded that pen fer a fucken good pair a’ socks. A man oughten’a steal from ’is mates.’
Faced with this fiercely honourable proposition the other fellow shrugged and turned away.
‘Me name’s Harris,’ the boy told Digger, ‘Wally’ — as if he had seen that Digger was the one man in all this throng who might remember it for the rest of his life. He waited for Digger to respond but Digger drew away. He had nothing to do with these men. He had been late lining up, that’s all. He had his own mob. But the boy would not be put off.
‘I oughten’a be here by rights,’ he confided. ‘I’m on’y sixteen. I lied to ’em. Me mum didn’ mind.’
Standing with his dixie and spoon in hand and the hat far back on his curls, his expression was a mixture of cocky satisfaction at his own cleverness and dismay at where it had got him. He was trying to interest Digger. He was one of those fellows that no one notices and he was eager now to pick up with someone, anyone, having grasped by instinct that you could only survive here if you had mates.
‘I could’a done a good swap for that pen,’ he said, ‘it was a real goodun. Listen,’ he said, dropping his voice so that the other fellow could not hear, ‘waddaya reckon I oughta do? I don’t feel so good. I got the shits all the time, I’m crook. What can I do?’
But Digger was at the head of the line now. He took his rice and moved away. He saw the boy turn and look after him, but there were dozens of fellows like that, who once the ranks were open were helplessly adrift.
‘I don’t eat it,’ another man told him, another stranger, when he was once more in the line. ‘I don’t eat the shit.’ Digger wondered then why he was lining up for it. He was a big, heavy-shouldered fellow, blond, red-faced, pustular.
‘If they keep feedin’ us this muck, and we keep eatin’ it, our eyes’ll go slanty. Dja know that? This professor tol’ me. It’s what the bastards want! T’ make fucken coolies of us. They hate white men.’
Digger frowned. Was he crazy? He was dancing about behind Digger with his dixie all washed and ready in his hand. Half crazy with hunger, he looked.
‘On’y I don’t eat it, see? They can’t make yer, can they? They won’t get me! I’d rather bloody starve! All it does anyway is give yer the shits.’
But a moment later Digger saw him, big-eyed and wild-looking, shovelling the stuff into his mouth. Their eyes met and Digger looked quickly away.
More than ever now he clung to Mac and Doug. Only in those who were close to you was there any continuation of cleanness and sanity. But now they had Vic as well and were an uneasy foursome, unbalanced, as they never had been when they were three. Forever looking about to see what you might be thinking of him, Vic was all little burrs and catches, always uneasy with himself yet at the same time cocky, and anxious at every opportunity to put himself forward or to get the better of you. Digger couldn’t stand him.
‘Oh, Vic’s all right,’ Doug would say. ‘Take no notice of ’im.’ But the foursome began to split into unequal twos.
Digger missed Doug. He missed his lightness and good humour. He was civil enough to Vic but resented his butting in. He and Mac thought alike on this. They thought alike on lots of things.
He was an odd bloke, Mac. When he was in the mood for it he could talk the leg off an iron pot. Not like Doug, who loved an audience and to joke and pull people in, but in a quieter, more reflective way.
He was full of stories, odd anecdotes and theories he had picked up from meetings or lectures he had attended or fellows he had heard on Sundays in the Domain; or from books, or from conversations he had had up at the Cross.
For a time he had had a flat there and known all sorts of people: radicals, poets, fellows who wrote for the Herald and Smith’s Weekly. It was an education. ‘Sydney wouldn’t be Sydney without the Cross,’ he told Digger. ‘That’s where you oughta head for when you get outa this. The Cross. No place like it.’
It seemed to Digger he had seen nothing really, for all the places he had been. Not after what you heard from other men. Mac’s tales of life round the city and on the trams, the different depots, and the runs he went on out to Bondi, Bronte, Clovelly, Watson’s Bay, the best pubs and pie shops, and Sargents, where his sister-in-law worked, which made the best cakes — all this brought Sydney to life for Digger and fed his hunger for a world of ideas and talk and action that he thought he would never get enough of, not if he lived till he was a hundred and three. He took in every detail, and each one was sharper for his having to picture it in his own head.
The walk up the long gully at Cooper Park, for instance. Could any place be greener on a nice Sunday afternoon? Mac and Iris and the boys would go for picnics there, and after an hour or so, when their meal had gone down, Mac would coach the younger boy, Jack, in the high jump.
‘I dare say he’ll be out of the juniors,’ Mac would say a bit regretfully, ‘by the time we get back. Grows like a beanpole, that kid. No stopping ’im. He’ll be five three or four by now, I reckon. You should see ’im take off — the spring he’s got!’ Digger could see it: the boy’s legs scissoring as he went over the bar, Iris seated on the grass with a chequered cloth spread out in front of her, and the scraps from their tea, with maybe a bottle of pickles. In time, out of Mac’s bits and pieces of description, and stories and instances, the whole household came into view.
The house itself, in Bon Accord Avenue, Digger could see as if he had lived his whole life there.
Mac slept on the side verandah in a room he had closed in himself with the help of a mate, another trammie. It was floor to ceiling books and there were more books in stacks under the wire frame of the bed and along both sides of the hall. Mac had not read these books, or not all of them; they were for his retirement. But the majority of them he had at least dipped into. How could you resist? On the way home, last thing Friday nights, when he had just picked up a new lot, he would take a good long look and be content then to have the rest of it stored up and waiting for him.
Technical manuals on everything from book-binding to telegraphy, novels, journals, books of travel, psychology, history — that’s what he liked. He’d been reading since he was a kid, like Digger — anything he could lay his hands on: Shakespeare, Shaw, Dickens, Jack London, Victor Hugo. They swapped favourite characters, told over incidents, laughing, and Digger, a bit shyly at first, recited out of his head from Hamlet or Henry the Fifth. They were Mac’s favourites.
‘Amazing, that is,’ Mac would say. ‘Ruddy amazing. Honest, Digger, you oughta be in a sideshow. What I wouldn’ do with your gift!’
‘What?’ Digger wondered.
It had become clear to him, even before any of this happened, that his ‘gift’, as Mac called it, even if it turned out to be the one thing that was special to him, was not to be the source of any fame or fortune. It would never be useful in that way. It had some other significance, or so he thought, that was related to the image his mother had put into his head, that room where all the things were gathered that made up your life. He was a collector, as she was. He hung on to things. But his room was of another kind, and so were the things he stored there.