Bicycles passed in droves, all honking. Children sat half-naked on the ground. Salesmen, squatting, had laid out on upturned butter-boxes, or low tables covered with a cloth, the few things, whatever it was, that they had to sell. Suddenly he stopped dead and stood stupidly staring.
What had caught his eye was a pyramid of six cotton-reels on a tray, one of them a sickly green, another royal blue, the rest white, but all dusty and soiled looking. The only other thing on the tray was a packet of needles.
The old woman squatting beside them glanced up under heavy pads of flesh, happy to have attracted his attention. She was preparing to call out to him. But the look he was wearing, or the threatening bulk of him, must have warned her of something. Her hand moved out to cover the single reel at the apex of the pyramid she had made. To save it. She sat staring up at him.
He was in a rage, a kind of madness, and close to tears.
In the left-hand pocket of his new shorts was the length of thread he had kept. His fingers went to it. He hadn’t thrown it away — you never know. Its value to him, anyway, was absolute. And here now, in this dirty bit of a place, this old crone of a Chinese woman had six reels of it on her mean little tray, six whole reels — and beyond that, on shelves somewhere in a storehouse, there would be cartons-full. They were common as dirt. He had a vision suddenly of how small it was, all that had happened to him.
The old woman’s hand, which was yellow and wrinkled like a duck’s foot, kept hold of the reel, expecting this crazy boy to use his boot now and kick the whole tray aside. They were like that, these blond ones. But instead he let out a cry of rage, flung something out of his pocket and ran off.
She watched him go, her hand still protecting her wares. Then she leaned forward over the edge of her tray a little to see what it was. A bit of dirty thread. Nothing.
Minutes later he was back. With his eye crazily upon her, he stooped, snatched up the bit of cotton as if she might be intending to rob him of it, and was gone.
IV
1
ON HOT NIGHTS late in Darlinghurst Road Digger found what he had always been in search of, a crowded place with the atmosphere of a fairground, but one that did not have to be knocked down and set up again night after night. It was simply there, another part of town.
It was a rowdy place, the Cross. It could be violent, sordid too at times, but it had put a spell on Digger just as Mac had told him it would.
Girls, some of them toothless and close to sixty, worked out of mean little rooms up staircases smelling of bacon-fat or sharp with disinfectant. The pubs were blood-buckets.
You would see a couple of fellows come hurtling through the door and in seconds a full-scale brawl would be going on, right there on the pavement, with passers-by ducking aside to get away from it or standing off on the sidelines to watch.
Often it was seamen; but mostly it was young blokes, louts, who had come in on motorbikes to roar about and see what was doing, keen to get a reputation and discover how tough they were.
They wore second-hand air-force jackets, duck-tailed Cornel Wilde haircuts and wanted blood.
They would roam about putting their shoulders into the crowd, waiting to be challenged, with a Friday night ferocity in them that had the pent-up frustration of a week’s work behind it, and would only be content at last when the man they were bludgeoning was in the gutter and they heard his ribs crack — ‘Ah, that’s it, that’s the sound’ — or when they had gone down themselves and were sitting with their head in their hands, hearing a whole lot of new sounds in there that might be permanent and with their palms wet with blood.
Occasionally it was a woman you saw, still clutching her handbag but with her mouth bloody, one arm like a broken wing, and the man who had done it shouting right into her face, spitting out obscenities but weeping too sometimes, justifying himself. This was peacetime again.
And in between these savage episodes the delivery boys would be out and old people, or women dragging a suitcase in one hand and a reluctant child in the other, would be going about their daily affairs. Well-dressed ladies walked pug dogs. Kids sucking sherbet sticks dawdled back and forth to school. Old fellows slept it off on benches or stood with their sleeve up to the elbow in bins.
There were coffee shops, continental, with mock-cream cakes in the window, and other, darker ones downstairs where it was rumoured that satanic cults were being practised. The paintings on the walls, which were pretty bold, gave you a hint of what they might be: a woman with her legs round a shaggy male figure with horns above his ears, another in which a girl was coupling with a gigantic cat.
Then there were the milk-bars, all fan-shaped mirrors and chrome, spaghetti places where men in business suits lined up for lunch, and barber shops, some with a dozen chairs; always with two or three fellows lathered up for shaving while the barber, razor in hand, harangued them while others, further down the room, would be snipping and chatting or showing a customer the back of his head in a glass, and in the doorway one of the idle assistants hung on a broom.
Barber shops, billiard saloons, dark corners in pubs — this was where the SP bookies followed their trade, using runners and a ‘nit’ to watch for the cops. But everyone up here had something to selclass="underline" petrol, stuff without coupons that had fallen off the back of a truck, nylons, second-hand cars, pre-war of course, and girls.
Towards five, with paperboys shouting the headlines and running out barefoot to cars, working men, still in their singlets, would be strolling home with the Mirror under their arm, taking it easy and eating a Have-a-Heart or a Grannie Smith apple; going back to a room in a boarding-house, or up three flights to where a girl was cooking sausages in a two-roomed maisonette, the only place they could get in the housing shortage.
This was the rush hour, the hour before closing. Sailors would be up in mobs from the ships you could see moored at Woolloomooloo, and along with them came fellows, newly demobbed, wearing suits you could pick a mile off (Digger had one) that they had been given to start them off in Civvy Street, but still with their old army haircut, and with the half-expectant, half-lost look of men who were waiting for life to declare a direction to them, now that they were free to go wherever they pleased.
Digger kept away from these fellows. They depressed him. He knew their story. It was his own. They were men who for one reason or another had never gone home — or had done so and come straight back again, one or two of them on the first day. They hung about feeling sorry for themselves and keeping close to one another, looking on at a show they were not part of, not yet, and wondering if they ever would be.
Digger felt that too, on occasions. He hadn’t been home either, but not because he was scared of what he might find there. He was putting it off, that’s all; enjoying himself, getting back into the stride of things. There was such a sense abroad of streets being swept for a new day, of ties off, sleeves rolled up, girls walking with a new bounce to their heels and their handbags swinging, full of what the world might offer them now and what they could do with it. ‘Me too,’ Digger thought. ‘The war is over and we won!’ — Except that it wasn’t quite like that.
‘We didn’t win our war because it wasn’t a war we went to. It was something else. It’s victories that are all the go now. This is a victory parade. No one wants to know about us.’
There were men who were bitter about that, and not just on their own behalf. Digger shared the feeling but would not give in to it.