The Suburbs of Hell
JULIAN RANDOLPH ‘MICK’ STOW was born in Geraldton, Western Australia, in 1935. He attended local schools before boarding at Guildford Grammar in Perth, where the renowned author Kenneth Mackenzie had been a student.
While at university he sent his poems to a British publisher. The resulting collection,
Act One
, won the Australian Literature Society’s Gold Medal in 1957—as did the prolific young writer’s third novel,
To the Islands
, the following year.
To the Islands
also won the 1958 Miles Franklin Literary Award. Stow reworked the novel for a second edition almost twenty-five years later, but never allowed its two predecessors to be republished.
He worked briefly as an anthropologist’s assistant in New Guinea—an experience that subsequently informed
Visitants
, one of three masterful late novels—then fell seriously ill and returned to Australia. In the 1960s he lectured at universities in Australia and England, and lived in America on a Harkness fellowship. He published his second collection of verse,
Outrider
; the novel
Tourmaline
, on which critical opinion was divided; and his most popular fiction,
The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea
and
Midnite
.
For years afterwards Stow produced mainly poetry, libretti and reviews. In 1969 he settled permanently in England: first in Suffolk, then in Essex, where he moved in 1981. He received the 1979 Patrick White Award.
Randolph Stow died in 2010, aged seventy-four. A private man, a prodigiously gifted yet intermittently silent author, he has been hailed as ‘the least visible figure of that great twentieth-century triumvirate of Australian novelists whose other members are Patrick White and Christina Stead’.
MICHELLE DE KRETSER was born in Sri Lanka and lives in Australia. She is the author of four novels, the most recent of which is
Questions of Travel
.
ALSO BY RANDOLPH STOW
A Haunted Land
The Bystander
To the Islands
Tourmaline
The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea
Midnite: The Story of a Wild Colonial Boy
Visitants
The Girl Green as Elderflower
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Copyright © Randolph Stow 1984
Afterword copyright © Michelle de Kretser 2015
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.
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First published by Secker and Warburg, London, 1984
This edition published by The Text Publishing Company, 2015
Cover design by WH Chong
Page design by Text
Typeset by Midland Typesetters
Printed in Australia by Griffin Press, an Accredited ISO AS/NZS 14001:2004 Environmental Management System printer
Primary print ISBN: 9781925240313
Ebook ISBN: 9781922253125
Creator: Stow, Randolph, 1935–2010.
Title: The suburbs of hell / by Randolph Stow ; afterword by Michelle de Kretser.
Series: Text classics.
Dewey Number: A823.3
CONTENTS
Like a Thief in the Night
by Michelle de Kretser
The Suburbs of Hell
For WILLIAM GRONO
—twenty years after
‘The Nedlands Monster’
Gasparo | You have acted certain murders here in Rome Bloody, and full of horror. |
Lodovico | ’Las, they were flea-bitings. |
The White Devil
Security some men call the suburbs of hell,
Only a dead wall between.
Bosola in
The Duchess of Malfi
But the demon, a black shadow
of death, prowled long in ambush,
and plotted against young and old.
Beowulf
, tr. David Wright
In the Bible it says:
Behold, I come as a thief.
And:
The day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night.
That always seemed so strange to me, to find talk of thieves in such a place. And not in any condemning way, but dignified, almost understanding; which, when I first heard the words, struck a chord in me, being a thief.
In this little town where I find myself again, mist hangs unmoving in the few narrow streets. It is a winter day, at the very point when autumn is over at a stroke. Winter began this morning, with brittle light, air keen in the lungs. Across the estuary, which was calmer and had more blue in it than usually, woods and tawny stubble-fields had drawn close, showing details that at most times are blurred by haze. This special day of the year has a smell of its own as well: of chrysanthemum leaves in small hidden gardens, and of woodsmoke from the first open fires.
A thief is outside. He passes in the street, peers through windows without seeming to. He wants to be in, to handle things, to know. Lonely, one might think; wistful—but not so. A thief is a student of people, knows so many that his head is full of company. I have stood in a pub and seen a face, heard a voice, and slipped out and entered that man’s house, calm in my mastery of all his habits. But then—ah, the thrill then, after my many studies; to find his things, his self, lying opened before me, all his secrets at my fingers’ ends. For some thieves the excitement of that opening is a drunkenness. It is the intoxication of inside. Because a thief is, as he knows, an insider, a master of secrets. But the waiting may be long.
It is not envy or anything of hatred that brings me again to this little place in the mist which I have known so long and wished no harm to. I have no quarrel with the figures—uniformed in blue jeans and fisherman’s jerseys, for the most part—passing quickly and alone in the dim distance. Nothing that the housewives prize, in the houses crammed cheek-to-cheek along the mediæval streets, touches my desire. I wish them well, or well enough, and their offspring: the divers from the quay, expert in flags and fish and sailings, whose sleep throughout childhood is agreeably troubled by foghorns and exploding maroons and the haunting sea. No; it is never hostility or malice. Simply, it is correction, a chastising.
In the mist, in the failing light, I pause before a door. He is never here, at this blue hour. The two windows of his large bedroom are open. I think mist must be wreathing above that lonely bed.
He has looked at me, several times, with a shy curiosity. Once I thought he was going to speak.
He is in a fury of resentment, in a gambling mood. He is undone by hurt. He has written to his brother to come and live with him. He will buy a boat, which he cannot afford, they will sail it to warm seas.
In the Bible it says:
Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee.
THE MIDDLE YEARS OF HARRY
Harry Ufford woke in his armchair and removed from his lap his faithful cat, Rover. ‘Goo and sit on your own self,’ he complained.
An open bottle of whisky and a smeary tumbler were on the table beside him, and he poured himself a large drink and sipped it. The cuckoo-clock showed a quarter to nine. Drinking, he considered the room which he had now got exactly as he wanted it, the frame for his middle years.
It was a place full of ships and horses: of model ships in and out of bottles, china Suffolk Punches, and many horse-brasses. Over the fireplace, with its dying fire of coal and driftwood, hung a huge print of Constable’s
Leaping Horse
, faced on the other side of the narrow room by Turner’s
Fighting Temeraire.
Behind the glass of a bow-bellied cabinet were other knick-knacks, long in the gathering, also bearing on Suffolk or the sea.
It was a small room in a very small house, in a street which had preserved its mediæval outline and ran towards the place where the landward gate had once opened in the borough’s walls. But Harry Ufford did not feel the narrowness. He had lived in a caravan, on ships and fishing-boats, and for an early year or two in a Borstal. What he felt was warmth and freedom, the privacy of his own special place, the comforting profusion of all those things, so lovingly chosen, which he had carried home to mark his patch. Harry Ufford, at forty-seven, drinking whisky he could pay for and smoking a cigarette of Dutch tobacco, from his usual matey source of supply, was at home like a cockle in the mud.
But the cuckoo would soon be out; it was near nine on a Saturday night. He glanced at the television set, at the bucket of coals by the dying fire, and, as he set down his empty glass on it, at the vivid paperback about sensational true murders. He was a devotee of real-life murder. But the forms of his society called him out once a week; and dutifully he heaved his large frame from the chair, stood for a moment in thought before the fire, then reached out a tattooed arm to a doorknob, and so made his way upstairs.
In his brand-new bathroom, the pride of his heart, he washed and shaved. In a brand-new mirror he faced his face. Broad-boned, still lean, a little flushed. He bent nearer to inspect himself, and with a fingertip touched a spot on the side of his nose, made up of little veins. ‘Hot cobwebs, boy,’ he warned himself. He ran his fingers, tattooed L-O-V-E and H-A-T-E, through his black hair. It was thick and long, with no more than a spike or two of grey.
On his bed a cocoon of army-surplus blankets still kept the shape of him. He had no time for sheets, was not used to them. He changed his underclothes, and carefully fetched from the wardrobe some of his more formal gear. He put on blue Levis, a fisherman’s jersey, a short black leather jacket. Over seaman’s socks he pulled leather boots the colour of Ovaltine, with rather high heels. Then he paused to check on himself in a long mirror, while attaching his front-door key to a belt-loop.