Homesickness (10 page)

‘Something like eight hundred and twenty umbrellas,' the attendant was saying, blowing his nose.

Both Gwen and Leon Kaddok touched his elbow.

‘We've filled out the forms.'

‘Just a minute.'

He scratched his elbow.

‘I've lost track of what I was saying.'

He turned to North: man approaching his own age. At least he appeared to be taking genuine interest.

‘This is nothing unusual,' scratching his elbow. ‘I'm told asbestos miners suffer from some variety of lung disease. Imagine here every day surrounded by lost property and trying to sort it out! Of course it must affect a man. I find now I'm continually losing things: telephone numbers, a pocketknife, my wallet. I lose track of time and memory. The place acts like a drain. I keep losing staff. I couldn't even tell you, if you asked me now, my wife's birthday.'

To help out North ventured, ‘We're not getting any younger.' But he looked troubled. He had just lost a wife; the loss had spread and remained like a white stain.

Standing on one foot Kaddok hovered anxiously for his light meter, and although he couldn't see them could hear Sasha and Violet whispering and laughing.

‘Whyte, the man before me,' the attendant recalled, ‘in the end used to “lose” things on trains to see if they'd come back as found objects. This is his raincoat, poor fellow. Excuse me, what were we saying?'

North had stopped listening.

Was time composed of broken fragments, some lost, some occasionally coming close, before drifting into dots? Perhaps with age the fragments become widely spaced: arms and feet plunge through and grab trying to hold onto things.

Softer giggling behind the canary cages and tangle of walking sticks. It was Sasha: ‘I lost mine six years ago in St Kilda, you know when—that New Year's Eve. I remember I could hear a clock striking. I must have had too much to drink. God, he was a creep.'

Her best friend gave a harsh laugh.

‘Look around, baby, you might find it here.'

‘They can have it!'

‘Good riddance, eh Sasha?'

They both laughed.

North had pursed his lips but couldn't help smiling. They said something else.

‘You can talk!'

But the Kaddoks raised their voices, pointing.

The attendant had their forms at arm's length.

‘First, let me show these people the rest. Do you have a photograph of this light meter of yours? Well, then—'

‘But this is ridiculous.'

‘I know exactly what it looks like,' Kaddok said.

‘Leon, let me handle this.'

The attendant had turned and pushed open a metal door. He winked at North, ‘Have a dekko here.' And as they walked through Sasha whispered, ‘Have you seen the parrots? Just back there?'

North shook his head.

Taking up the rear Kaddok kept mumbling.

Here a girdered annexe housed an entire English railway station, presumably one of those lost in the savage rationalisations back in the sixties. Each component, each heavy piece of equipment, had been placed more or less but not quite in its original operating position—ticket box, platform, bench-seats, the Roman clock, refreshment room—and so the proportions and angles were subtly wrong, peculiarly cramped, and everything of course was unstable, not bolted down, making them hesitate and step back. And it all had a fine covering of dust.

The attendant shook Kaddok's pincer-grip from his elbow.

‘Your collector-friend,' said Violet, ‘what would he think of this?'

‘Very interesting,' North nodded. ‘I'll have to tell him.'

The rusting tilted mass had lodged in North's mind. Similarly, yet miles away, Kaddok decided to take a photograph: an image to pass around would prove they had been there.

‘We don't shout it about; no one has yet claimed it. I don't show this to every Tom, Dick and Harry.' The attendant jangled his keys. ‘Foreign tourists are all right.'

‘Whew, I found that very spooky,' Sasha whispered, ‘didn't you?'

North bent down to inspect the parrots: North African wax-bills, grey parrots (
Psittacus enthacias
), a stuffed racket-tailed among them, eclectus, and a galah from western New South Wales. The cage was clean and they had plenty of water.

Almost back at the entrance the Kaddoks stopped. First Gwen, then Leon, pointed to a shelf of photographic equipment. The attendant swung around.

‘Go on then, take the whole lot. You walk in; you're never satisfied. Go on! I hope you're satisfied. Now you can get out, all of you.'

Cars, lights, buses, electric messages, pedestrians crossed and abruptly flashed or thundered before them: overlapping montage. Otherwise, the street outside was dark.

‘Are you all right?' they peered at the Kaddoks.

‘I got frightened!' Sasha laughed.

‘It's after eight!'

At their table in the hotel they found only the Cathcarts left, having a second cup.

‘Howdy,' said Doug.

Sitting heavily down and perspiring Kaddok related their experience. The man had no right to do that; Kaddok quoted verbatim the relevant sections from the Public Service Act.

‘This is right,' Doug nodded, nasal. ‘The old poms, you know, can get a bit uppity. We found this.'

North sat quietly reading his palms.

As Cathcart spoke he shook out a tablet from a bottle beside him. ‘D'you have any H
₂
O?' he asked the waitress going past. Along with Enterovioform he took the small quinine tablet before and after each meal to counteract the condition of London's underground pipes. It was pretty obvious. Work it out: ‘Some of the pipes here'd be hundreds of years old. The insides must be half flaking. You can't tell me the place is clean.'

‘Their toilets aren't exactly,' Mrs Cathcart had said, filing her nails. ‘We take our own soap.'

If there was something she—they—hated it was untidiness. And that was the trouble, the further away from home. Some of these countries could do with a good scrub. And the dreadful smells. Take Africa! It said a lot about a place, its progress and hope.

Ah, according to a recent survey by the Department of the Environment, London has fewer flies than any other region in England. The newspapers had written it up. Frinstance: average London household in summer can muster up only 0.9 of a fly per day. In East Anglia that figure is 5.7. That's the largest in the country. Compare that to East Africa! (What about Alice Springs?) Method of counting is simple enough: clarity of vision, concentration, patience. All over the country men sat in rooms with a pencil, a paper, and ticked off the flies as they saw them. Many flies, the report admitted, look alike. Nevertheless, industry would put the results to good use, especially the aerosol syndicates.

Other news (in brief): 20 INJURED IN EXPLOSION IN SODA SIPHON FACTORY. ‘More than twenty people were taken to hospital suffering from shock and burns… Windows were shattered some distance from the explosion.' The newspapers published aerial shots of the devastated plant and the squinting foreman, L. Wyndham, 42, with a band-aided nose. BABY THROWN IN SEA MUM HELD. Blankets were rushed to the scene. Groucho, the London Zoo's much-loved hippo, shown as a proud father (photograph caption:
Cigar, Groucho?
). JOBLESS RISE. Same as home: no difference; only remoteness in the nouns. This English news didn't much matter. It was distant and fragmented. Australia? The word was not to be found, not even in the bloody shares pages, Garry Atlas pointed out. It might well not have existed. Only at Australia House and among themselves did it have a shape, grown naturally into the faces and voices, and in the familiar pages of their own newspapers. But here?
‘DEAD' UNDERGRADUATE SPEAKS
. Interesting, esoteric. The billiard table, essential in understanding the resilience and stability of the Empire, is making a comeback. Unknown, irrelevant laws being passed by parliament. A cold snap is expected.

‘Smile?' Sasha suddenly got it into her head.

Bending down she had to whisper it before North looked up, thousands of miles away.

‘That's better,' Sasha beamed, hitching her strap. ‘Remember you're with us.'

With the curtains drawn and the bottle-shaped lamp switched on but occasionally flickering, Sheila remained enclosed in her room. It had become warm, a personal humidity, immediately noticeable to those who had popped in to see if she was all right. She appeared jerkier than usual, a shade, and to Mrs Cathcart who called, her eyes slid off her face more, off the architrave and light switch.

But that could have been due to Mrs Cathcart's sturdy presence, legs apart, in the centre of the room.

‘I'm doing some catching up,' Sheila mumbled: postcards fanned out there by the phone. And she immediately looked concerned. ‘That serves to remind me,' said Mrs Cathcart. Postcards and the sky-blue airletters; she and Doug had gallivanted around so much she'd hardly written to anybody, and she should.

Sheila remained suspended, in a sense, by the angles of the room, a cube filled with rubbish. And then it was as if she was being sieved, for she was activated first by the stuttering lamp, then without warning the throat-clearing radiator pipes and—at distant regular intervals of a railway schedule—a slight volcanic tremor beginning from the floor through the soles of her feet, as if one of the underground lines ran directly below her room (quite possible). Taken separately the vibrations were pleasant; a combination of all three was rare and even then not unpleasant. They blurred the emptiness of the room. Sheila had placed her belongings to her liking, not windswept like the two across the hall. She'd seen them before returning from somewhere. The young full-breasted one, Sasha, was always horsing around but not badly—casually—and Sheila had to smile. Facing each other the three understood. There were no men watching. Approaching her door, Sasha began wobbling her behind, and putting her tongue in her cheek, dangled her key below her throat, dropped it down.

Professing to be shocked, Violet elbowed her, laughing, ‘You're a tart.'

‘That a gun yah got there honey,' said Sasha, ‘or yah jest happy to see mah?'

They were still shoving and collapsing as they tried to unlock the door; they were having a good time. Sheila smiled.

The others all had tickets to Ascot and were in high spirits, even Gerald who had decided to go along for the ride, as he put it, and Phillip North who had never before been to a horse race. At breakfast Sheila enjoyed the table's anticipatory nerves, a form of contagious jokiness, but shook her head. Again she'd decided to stay in. Lucky for her. The Queen's dark horses came seventh, second, last. Garry was up seventy quid before it rained and the mudlarks came in. He lost his shirt. As he kept shaking his head, he'd been ‘taken to the cleaners'. Fair enough, it was the heavy track, but look at the stupid fucking way English jockeys ride high in the saddle. It even looked wrong: ‘Emotional cripples, afraid to be seen being intimate with a horse,' Borelli suggested. They laughed at the leisurely race-callers. One would hardly know there was a race on.

Comparisons were unavoidable and were made constantly. It became at least a definition, or one measurement of experience.

To Gerald, the side view of the straining horses was inseparable from those elongated bay geldings depicted in nineteenth-century English paintings. Craning his neck he found himself enjoying the spectacle far more than he'd expected. But Kaddok who disliked being out of things ploughed in: ‘Their legs in those paintings are wrong. That's the trouble with art.'

Gerald reddened. Normally he quickly began shouting in arguments.

‘I've taken photographs here'—Kaddok tapped the telephoto lens—‘that can prove to you, anyone else if you're interested, that a horse's legs are all in the air. I believe that's one of the troubles with art,' Kaddok concluded. ‘It misses the real truth.'

‘You mean,' said Gerald harshly, ‘you mean we suffer from a form of visual blindness.'

‘That's right.'

They were a weary yet still vocal group.

‘At least we've been to Ascot!' said Doug notching it up.

Only Ken Hofmann who'd won sat as usual with his arms folded, gazing at the ceiling moulding.

‘Tell you what,' said Garry suddenly; and because his mouth was full began clicking his fingers. ‘I saw our friend from Africa, what's-his-name. You know, from the hotel.'

‘I saw
PHAR LAP
and
THE MELBOURNE CUP
some larrikin had carved on the rails,' North put in.

‘You don't believe me?' he turned to Sasha. She was the one laughing most at him.

‘Frank Newman?' Doug pronounced.

‘I think it is Hammersly,' said Sheila simply. She reddened.

Leaning across refilling her glass Garry Atlas made Violet laugh about something. He then lit her cigarette with his Zippo, snapping it shut, and dropping it in his side pocket. He adjusted himself on his seat.