Quipu (18 page)

Through the hum of the fan, she distantly hears Wagner say, “That’s “kwee-poo,” singular and plural.”

She dries herself swiftly with a towel brought from home, leaving the hotel linen untouched. “Crap, Brian. “Kee-poo” singular, “kee-poos” plural. Check your dictionary.”

Unwashed Brian has his clothes on when she steps from the bathroom.

“Hike usage hasn’t made it into the dictionary yet, Marjory. “Kee” or “kwee,” it’s “poo” whatever the number. I’m making some tea. Want some?”

“You’ll find the teabags are rather repulsive.”

“Less so than the coffee sachets. Speak up, woman.”

Dressing, she nods. Her nerves are relaxing. She doesn’t even know very much about him, after all these years. He’s Ray’s friend really, they all are. Marjory pulls up the sheets, straightens the blankets, bashes the pillows into shape. It is Ray’s honorary position as assistant to the Chairman of the Convocation which is paying for this room. Brian Wagner, like many of the Melbourne brights, commutes each day and sleeps at home, or crashes on someone’s floor. In Brian’s case, she reflects, it could well be someone’s bed he crashes in. If he can find a willing partner. Until now, there’s been little enough spare to go around. At least the size and magnitude of this event has attracted interested and curious non-hikes, by the score. Healthy young librarians, teachers, Public Service clerks. Opportunities for them all, for hapless Mike Murphy with his self-destructive bouts of inappropriate fixation, for Joseph, for all of them. Maimed and half-formed, for all their authentically prodigious gifts. Calibans.

Because I’m lonely.

The tea is wonderfully hot. Marjory sits in a Fler chair and looks at her partner in infidelity.

“Brian, why don’t you find some woman and get married?”

“Shame on you, Marj. There are strict penalties for bigamy.”

She regards him in astonishment. They fill the pages of their quipu with endless nonsense and leave out all the important stuff.

“I didn’t know you were married.”

“Well.” He slurps at his tea, an attempt at comic distraction.

“Give. What’s her name? Anyone we know?”

“Hardly likely. Alice.”

“Where is she now, Brian?”

“I think they deported her.”

Marjory spills her own tea into the saucer. Should have brought some mugs. “They can’t do that, Brian. What, you don’t mean she—”

“Alice was Chinese, from Taiwan or Hong Kong or somewhere. She wasn’t very fluent.”

Despite herself, Marjory is laughing out loud. “Brian, you imbecile. What rubbish is this?”

“Happens all the time. Her parents wanted to marry her off for a tidy sum to a Taiwanese gent back home but Alice wanted to stay here. She had some cousins in Brisbane who ran a restaurant. It was all part of some half-crazed family Triad feud. I’ve never been good with these tonal languages. I was talking to some guys in a pub. I’m not even sure they really were her cousins.”

“Are you telling me you married a girl from a Chinese take-away and you couldn’t even pass the time of day with her?”

“She was a student, actually. The Department of Immigration planned to ship her back home when she finished.”

“But surely if she married you—”

“Yeah, that’s what we thought. What her cousins thought.”

“You did this out of the goodness of your heart?” That is harder to believe than the story itself.

“Are you nuts? They paid me a thousand dollars.”

“Good God, and you took it?”

“They were stinking rich—racehorses as well as restaurants. I was broke. This was well before Joe Williams got me his old job and I became a paid-up member of the Australian Journalists Association.” Wagner sits himself on the edge of the neat bed and sprawls back on it, pulling up both pillows behind his head.

“How bizarre. What happened?”

“We all fronted along to the local registry office and got married, at least Alice and I got married. Then, just for the form of the thing, we went off for the honeymoon to this bloody great luxury hotel on the Gold Coast. It pissed on this joint.” He waves expansively at Marjory’s borrowed accommodation. “Her cousins came with us, of course.”

“What? They disturbed the sanctity of the wedding chamber?”

“They did indeed. Most insistent. After all, they had to make sure we didn’t have it off with each other. That way it could all be legally annulled after a suitable delay, and she’d be available for re-marriage as unmarked goods.”

“You’re a sexist pig, Brian.”

He widens his eyes and tilts his head. “I merely describe the world, my dear. I didn’t invent it. The slant-eyes have lived this way for five thousand years, don’t take it out on me.”

“And a racist pig.” She does not smile. Brian sighs, lies back on the bed. After a time, Marjory rises and switches on the jug again. “You can’t stop now.”

Instantly bouncing back, Brian says, “All four of us sat around the bridal suite for three days. We played cards non-stop and drank. At least the cousins and I played cards, along with various friends of theirs who dropped in at all hours. Alice just rang up room service and asked for tea every half hour. The cousins were pretty sharp cardplayers, better than fans.”

“Oh, Brian. You lost your money.”

“The thousand dollars was gone by the end of the first day. So they lent me some to keep the ball in play, and I won a bit back. It was just like playing Monopoly. All these meaningless large-denomination notes kept changing hands. Sometimes I had a great stack of it, at other times I had nothing and had to borrow some more.”

Without benefit of room service, Marjory fills their cups with more tea, sugar, milk. She hands Brian one. Hikes are different than you and me, Ernest. They’re crazier.

“Thanks. Well, at close of play on the third day I had $500 in front of me. I think they must have arranged among themselves to let me keep that much. We all shook hands, and I went out and bought a new suit and an air ticket to Melbourne. The rest went in the bank. You could buy quite a bit for five hundred bucks in those days, before the ruinous inflation of the socialists had brought us all unstuck. It was strange, Marj. I could barely credit anyone being stupid enough to exchange these bits of paper for a packet of cigarettes, let alone a new woollen suit.”

“Did you ever see Alice again?”

“Never saw any of them again. Six months later two bloody great Commonwealth wallopers came to my front door and asked why I wasn’t living with my wife. I said we’d had a quarrel. They wanted to know if I’d read reports that Australians were being paid to marry Asians so they could stay in the country in breach of the immigration regulations. I told them I never read the gutter press. A couple of months later I saw a little news item on page 7 or 17, well back anyway, about Alice and a few other men and women being deported.”

For a moment Brian looks so doleful and distant that Marjory’s heart softens. She puts down her cup and saucer and sits beside him on the bed, taking his slack hand.

“Brian, that’s a sad and sordid tale.”

His mouth tightens, then relaxes to a sardonic grin. “You’re too innocent, Marj. It was all quite amicably arranged.” He gives her a swift, hard kiss and goes to the door. He stands at the boundary to the corridor. “The only sordid bit was that it had to happen at all.”

1970: marching

Cockroach Delighthouse

Rozelle

Sunday 10 May

My dear Joseph

Trauma and hysteria, hatred & tears. No, not me, baby—the musical Antony.

I found myself last night at a Peacock Point party—great music and dancing, I was in high spirits—and Antony & his entourage turned up. Time to remind him of some unanswered mail.

It was quite late when I confronted him. I was civil and cool (hadn’t had a drink all night). No, he wouldn’t talk to me, he was going home. Come off it. Oh, all right. We went outside and he became quite uncontrollable, so emotional, ranting and weeping, I hate you, hate Joseph, hate, hate—You destroyed me utterly, that letter, so horrible, so cruel it made me cry…

So it went. Excuses of his pitiful upbringing. I mentioned that this was not totally germane to the matter of his debts to me. How about some money? Screams and shouts again. Really bitter, fuck.

“You used me as an escape from Joseph, never loved me”—all this crap. I told him, “Yes, you hate me, you hate Joseph because you couldn’t destroy my love and admiration for him.”

“That’s right, I couldn’t & I hate him, I hate you, your insanity destroyed me, and then you abandoned me, just pissed off with Alan…” He really believes his lies, Joseph, I really think he’s convinced himself that he didn’t turn his back without a word, that I goaded him into coming to Sydney—it’s all so incredible.

Of course Iris and Francine rushed to the rescue. Leave him alone! Antony in tears (admittedly he was a bit drunk) kept justifying himself, appealing to Iris: “You know how upset I’ve been, I can’t sing when I’m like this.” Crap crap crap.

I let him go. He staggered off, a broken man, into the night—it was both a good act and pathetic, such a pathetic sight. I guess I don’t get my money back.

This torrent of hatred for you amused me. I’d humiliated him, and he knew you are not vulnerable to me in that way. He’d have killed me…enough of that. Sorry to bore you, but thought you might care to know how it all turned out.

Passed psych. More exams in 6 weeks or so. Have done no study.

Work is shitting me to death. So to speak.

The moratorium was a great success. Did you see our street theater on telly? Cheers and applause at Sydney Uni. Crippled frightened little Vietnamese. Five people as the War Machine in stark white face, black clothes, dead black stocking Balaclavas—we looked vile, quite horrifying. Then we led the march! Thousands of students with linked arms behind us—Americans, Australians, Vietnamese, screaming and whipping, kicking and abusing, genuine tears from fatigue and emotion, pleading, the War Machine chanting and droning.

We went on stage again at the Town Hall but the police blocked off most of the view. The cops were bored, really crapped, because there was no violence. When a communist guy got up to speak he was drowned out by the crowd yelling “Peace Now!”—incredible, how can anyone suppose that the Moratorium was a “communist front”?

Because we were up on the platform we could see how many people were there. And the street march in Melbourne! 75,000 people…it must have been devastating. Saw a bit of it on telly. Tell me about it.

I’ve had an average of 4 hours sleep the last week. Now the Moratorium’s over I can recover.

Write and give me strength.

with the usual dreary spirit of love

Caroline

1971: political science

Day ebbs from the sky. Ray gets up, turns on the light. He refills the kettle and carries the pot to the sink. Frustrating as this conversation is, infuriating, it intrigues him.

Living as he does in an Annandale terrace with three other socialist atheists of comparatively like mind, involved the rest of the time with tutors and students, he is out of touch with the world at large. The Nourses must be close to the norm for a middle-class couple of their age-cohort. Shut Marj up and reason with them. She’s too close to them, too full of personal bile and bias. Christ, listen to the woman—she’s being just as absurd as they are. No, not just as absurd, that’d really be pushing it. But pretty intemperate.

“Look,” he breaks in, leaning on the back of Marjory’s chair, “just tell me one thing, Tom. Why do you have such a low opinion of activists?”

No hesitation. “Louts with no respect for their elders. Just because they’re lazing around at university they think they should be running the country. When I was their age I was working my guts out making a place for myself in the world. They expect it all to fall into their laps.”

“Must’ve been tough,” Ray says sympathetically. “Growing up in the Depression, war breaking out, low wages.”

“It was awful,” Doris Nourse says. “You young people have no idea.”

“But the economy’s more buoyant now. More options’re available. Isn’t that part of the freedom you fought for?”

“They ought to be studying for their exams, not wasting the taxpayer’s money disrupting the community.”

“Exams! Exams are a mystification,” Marjory announces, a proposition, Ray sees to his gloom, that is a prime exemplar of the evil it denounces. “As it happens, a survey by the Political Science department has shown that most of the radical activists do better than average in their exams.”

“Tom, it’s not that we have
too much
,” Ray says. “The point is that we have
enough
. We’re not all forced into the rat race quite so soon, or so urgently. And that’s an epithet
your
generation coined, ‘rat race’.”

“You need to get your nose out of all those books and into real life.”

“Oh God,” moans his daughter. Ray digs both thumbs into her back but she shrugs irritably. “You’re the one who’s so strong on reports and figures and statistics. I can show you a whole armload of U.N. reports giving the details of ecological destruction and world poverty and suburban neuroses and waste in our community and—”

Ray jabs her again. She subsides into sub-vocal muttering.

“Look, Tom,” he says, “every day in our academic work we’re faced with real facts about human misery and other real facts about how little our community’s doing to relieve it. And further real facts, if it comes to that, about how much of that misery we actually cause.”

He raises his voice as Nourse starts to speak. “I agree with you—academic abstractions are often remote from everyday reality, universities are often diversionary. I imagine we’d differ on the details of that criticism. But one by-product, Tom, one by-product of our training in the ivory tower is the capacity to gather data together, and frame solutions to general problems on the basis of that data.”

“What’s this got to do with the real world?”

“Well, let’s take an example. The real world contains four billion people. Each year millions of them literally starve to death. Another real fact: our own society is the richest, most technically advanced in history. We have the answers. But we won’t use them. It’s a matter of deliberate choice.”