There was a wooden rack over the sink with plates in it, thick white ones. They leaned there, drying, and had been washed a thousand times with a block of Sunlight soap in a little wire cage-like contraption, and rinsed, lifted out of the water and left. Beautiful, they were. He could have sat at the table and just looked at them forever, over and over. Because it happened that way, over and over.
Regularly, three times a day, the plates were taken down, set on the cloth, used and washed again. That was the beauty of it. Order, repetition.
But how boring! The same thing, day in day out, over and over! For him that was just the beauty of it. The cloth shaken out in the yard and the sparrows flying down. Light on the lovely glazed and crazed smoothness of the plates in the rack. The calendar on the wall turned to the right month, and the days, black or red, coming up in their numbers, workdays, weekends, the next page already there, and the next and the next all the way to Christmas.
In the dark, while the house slept, he waited quietly in the kitchen, his spirit touched by the light off those plates, in his hands the dryness of a bit of stale bread. There was a whole bowl of it, set out for the morning, to feed the chooks. His spirit broke off a bit and swallowed it — the chooks won’t mind, he thought, though he could hear them shifting their claws on their perches in the dark.
Once, standing there, he heard a movement behind him and Iris came in in her nightgown. She didn’t see him, of course. She walked right past him to the sink, took a glass, filled it with water from the tap, and drank, very slowly, gazing out into the dark yard.
He watched her as if the ordinary act was miraculous.
It was miraculous. It slaked his thirst.
9
MEMORY WAS A gift, when they really set themselves to it.
Lists. You started one and it could be extended forever, back and back, and gone over endlessly, and what you called up became a magic formula for keeping yourself in the world or for wiping yourself, temporarily, out of it.
For some it was a numbers game. What they went back to was the number-plates of the various cars they had owned or had driven at times for the firms they worked for. These numbers were it. Got into the right order, like the combination of a safe, they were a key that would unlock the universe. Only you had to get the order right, and it wasn’t all that easy since the right order had nothing to do with the one in which these numbers had first come into your life. The right order was the right order, the one that would work. If you got it at last the engine would kick over, and powered by the six or eight cylinders of all those Buicks and Chevvies and de Sotos and Fords, it would take you out.
For others it was railway stations. The stations for instance out from Redfern on the Western Line. They went through them slowly, in morning heat sometimes but at others in the chill of smoky winter, on their way to work. The line ran high above the street. Below you could see barefoot men walking greyhounds alongside parks, kids on their way to school with little satchels on their backs, leggy girls, the older ones in checked gingham. Then, after a bit, you took the same journey back. Only at dusk this time and with the names in the reverse order. Factory sirens would be howling over the flat swamplands. You would have a slick of grease on your thumb. The faces along the platform blurring, and the train moving too fast now for you to catch the headlines on the news-boards as you plunged into sleep.
For others again it was the names of all the girls they had done it with. Even if you only got a finger in, it counted. The Muriels and Glorias and Pearls and Isobels going right back to when you were in sixth grade and first could.
The names first, then details. Where each one was: behind the baths, or on a bench under a school somewhere, or in the back of a parked truck. And when: in the Christmas holidays or on a Queen’s Birthday long weekend, getting hold of the weather if you could, what she had on — the shoes, if any, the bra and panties, the colour and pattern of her frock, and the sweat-smell, or the soap-smell of what it had been washed in. Or the feel of leather (smooth or with seams) where it stuck to your bare arse in the back of the Vaux, or the splintery floor under the canvas seats at the Elite, and the taste of vanilla malted or popcorn in her mouth, or Wrigley’s Spearmint, or the fried fat of chips. Ah, chips! Now that would be something.
On the menu at Matter’s Boarding House for Men, the same menu each week over the seven nights, beef stew, shepherd’s pie, etcetera. The gravies — lovely! And the picture over the sideboard, a Pears’ print of a little girl about two in a sun-bonnet, standing in the nuddy in a galvanised iron tub. .
Or the words of all the songs in the Boomerang Songbook for March 1941: ‘I was watching a man paint a fence’. Or the rhymes their sisters and other little girls skipped to in the evenings after school, on the hot concrete under the sleep-out, while they were doing their history homework (Oliver Cromwell and the Civil War), or setting the wing of a balsawood plane with a dob of glue on a matchstick, and might stop a minute to have a quick pull on the bed –
Over the garden wall
I let the baby fall
Me mother come out and give me a clout
That almost turned me inside out –
cleaning up quickly afterwards with a stiff hanky, the smell of it and of the glue.
Others the no-hoper horses they put good money on, that never came in, and all the winners of the Melbourne Cup back to 1861, Archer.
Others the cows in a dairy herd: Myrtle, Clover, the Gypsy Princess, Angel, Sugarpie, Queenie, Minnie the Moocher.
What Digger remembered, and after a certain time in an official capacity, was the name and number of every man in the unit; including those who had been killed or gone missing and been replaced, then the replacements; and where each man was sent after the surrender; to Sandakan in Borneo, to Blakang Mali Island, the greatest bashing and punching show in Malaya, so they said, or who drew paradise and stayed on in Changi, or who went to Thailand, and in which force and to which camp. Official. All stored that information, safely, permanently, in the last place the Nips would think of looking.
He was so unremarkable, Digger, looked so like all the rest of them, barefoot, filthy, in a lap-lap, all bones, that no one could have guessed what he carried along with the pick over his shoulder or the basket with its weight of rubble and stones.
Once committed to memory these names would be there forever. The whole unit could be called up and paraded in his head, the dead right there with the living, all clean and in good shape again, whether they had drawn a short straw or a long and wherever they were.
Digger remembered them, and their names and numbers. And they, each one, remembered whatever it was they needed to keep them halfway in the world or halfway out of it: number-plate numbers, girls, songs, stations, all the flavours of milkshakes and malteds they served at the Mermaid Café, all the shops up and down Elizabeth or Queen or George or Swanston Street, both sides, the names of horses or dairy herds. Put it all together and something, secretly, was being kept alive. What an army marches on when it is no longer marching.
But there were others, Vic was one, who had no time for memories, even sweet ones. What they clung to were the things they could touch, the few bits and pieces they had managed to hang on to, some of it from back before Changi, the rest picked up along the road, at this stopping place or that, and were keeping for the day when it might come in usefuclass="underline" Singer sewing-machine needles, nails, screws, bits of rope or twine, keys, batteries, cards out of a broken pack, folds of newspapers — objects that elsewhere would have been trash, hardly worth stopping for, but were precious relics up here, and useful too, since you could trade them one for another and have something new in hand.