Gatherers and Hunters Read online

  Yes, pity makes you vulnerable. You open up and you open out. You give, when you damn well know this is the Year of Take. You want to be generous, when the decorums of Meeja Greed know better than you what you need.

  The newspaper vendor is not bluffed. The newspaper vendor has the strength of an ikon. The newspaper vendor is as cynical as a journalist.

  It is only people like us, in the middle to lower ranks of the social pecking order (as Moira was always telling me, from her superior perch two rungs up the ladder) who are part of the furry koala give and take.

  Or who might be in danger of being.

  Perhaps those koalas were not really cadging for Rainforest Preservation, Endangered Animals, or what’s left of the Right Whale. Perhaps they were part of a campaign for a new line in Koala-skin Muffs or Emu Pies or the South Australian invasion of Kangaroo Chops?

  I know that I’m making this up now. I’m aware I’m being over-defensive. I can see how others side with them, the Big Koalas. Of course I can. I know I’m outnumbered and outvoted. And of course I realise that auditors themselves are a despised species. Oh, Moira was right when she told me ‘Move into financial management. That’s where the future is.’ As well she proved. And yet, I have to confess it, there is something about the work of an auditor that I enjoy. I feel truly at home sniffing for errors and snouting out the little tricks and deceits of the junior clerks. Big corporate frauds, of course, are beyond me, I refer them to Upstairs. But give me a day with stocktaking registers, or – as in the Hawthorn case – weighing up flour delivery quantities with production output of bread, cakes and confections, and a calculator can uncover wonderful discrepancies. I am in my element.

  What really infuriated me about those canvassing koalas at the station yesterday was I, too, almost weakened. My fingers almost went straight to the coin pocket. It was only that ridiculous policeman saved me, in the end. The moment I saw him fumble, and throw his $2 coin, I was filled with contempt. I felt for my green pen, instead, and repositioned it in my shirt pocket, next to my heart.

  Don’t get me wrong. I do keep receipts for Tax Deductible Gifts Over $2. I have supported charities. Look, I am a simple auditor. I do not have a plastic-coated identification card proclaiming me a Tax Inspector (though sometimes I have aspirations). I have learned to live with myself. And with the two girls on alternate weekends. I have taught them chess and Scrabble. I live a very ordinary life, not like Moira with her Opening Nights and her Musica Viva. I am a very contented person. Auditors know the satisfaction of a job well done. I’m not a member of the Mafia intent on elbowing into the act. I have no subscription to the Loggers Association or the Pulp Mill Manufacturers Monopoly. Look, I even like cuddly, furry koala bears.

  That, of course, is the trouble. Koala bears are not cuddly and furry, they have very sharp claws and if cornered they come out fighting like any one of us godless bastards. Koala bears are immune to pity. How could anyone believe they fall for sympathy? I would put it that they keep to themselves and are territorial. Have you ever seen a real koala bear traipsing round with a plastic bucket asking for handouts? I rest my case. The moment you give way to pity, you’re undone.

  But what really gets me is the way those skinheads and young thugs began talking to each other and even some of the old mums on the steps, right after. It was as if they thought they were onto something. Generosity, perhaps? A Good Cause?

  They wouldn’t even know what a rainforest is. On the corner of Flinders and Swanston streets there’s not a single eucalypt in sight.

  If I had not been forced to fumble for change at the ticket office I would have seen none of this. This aftershock. But, having seen, I carried it like a file of unexamined documents in a manilla folder, onto the platform, where I did have to wait all of ten minutes, and in all that time, when I could have been going through the Hawthorn file in preparation, or when I could even have re-examined Moira’s earlier documentation of the children’s costs just in case there was a mathematical error or some dubious inventory item that could have been classified as partly her own (I am ever the optimist), no. I found myself thinking, still, of those lumbering koalas. It was as if they roused some hidden response mechanism in me, as if they were making a claim deeper than that even of the children (who rejected teddy bears in favour of Barbie dolls years back). It was that hidden claim which was the real hurt, the potential exposure. Pity is the most dangerous of passions. Self-pity is unforgiveable. I found myself writhing on that station platform. And for no reason that I could clearly allocate.

  It was only as the train was pulling into the Hawthorn platform, with its 1890s fashionableness come full circle, that I realised where and why the koalas had inspired me with such instinctive love and anger. Yes, love. Fortunately, anger is more permanent.

  My brother, Bellamey, would have called my initial reaction pure cupidity. He was always defending his teddy bear from my clutches. That was his way of saying it. But I loved his teddy bear with pure ardour. It wasn’t avarice, not at all. It had purity. And when I did take the scissors that time and then carefully unstitched every seam (it is a moment I recall with great clarity and satisfaction) I think it was a sort of delight, as well as the dismay I so loudly voiced, that brought our mother running. There I was, tossing the stuffing all over Bellamey’s bed and his teddy bear was truly dissected. That was the incipient auditor in me, even then.

  It was because I had no teddy bear at all. Not one. I had been given a gollywog, despicable creature. Bellamey’s teddy bear was my first true love. Love, as we all know, does not bear analysis. After, I swore I would never be vulnerable again. But we are taken by surprise each time. When I told Moira the story of the giant koalas yesterday afternoon, in Laurents where we usually have our Progress Reports and Interim Settlements (by which time I had it already polished) I intended it as a sort of shield against further demands. But Bellamey’s bear slipped into the conversation. I was deeply surprised when she leaned over and gave me a peck on the cheek. It was the first time in two years. That was when I fully realised that pity is the most dangerous of passions. I felt as vulnerable as some junior clerk when the auditor’s arrival is announced. I could not afford to let Moira know this. When she settled down again I said to her, I hope lightly: ‘Well, what would you have done in my position?’

  ‘I would have saved up and bought my own teddy bear,’ she said instantly. ‘Oh, you mean about the Flinders Street money-bears? Arthur, I think I could have easily offered them a ten dollar note.’

  I was shocked.

  I didn’t say it, but I thought: ‘That’s my money!’ I had just given her the cheque for the children’s allowance. And yet, in my heart, I knew how we differed so utterly. She would have bought her own teddy bear. There was only one teddy bear in the world. And it was Bellamey’s.

  Sunshine Beach

  One

  You don’t have to take it lying down, he thought to himself. Where is that bit of canniness you prided yourself on, and your wife derided? Old moneybags, old stick-in-the-mud, old party-pooper. He had forgotten how reassuring and lively their backchat had been, how it kept him on his toes – of course he knew it did. Not that it made some of the gibes easier, but he had had his own defences. Or, as Miriam would have said, his own fences.

  He had always said to Miriam that it would be him, Charlie, who popped off first. Miriam, with her angina problems and the long business with the osteo, was nevertheless strong as an ox; she had her mother’s genes and old Hannah was still bridge champion at ninety-one. Miriam was the sort of person who walked into a room and was instantly at the centre. Charlie had become a sort of shadow, there to make sure or to divert the more obvious bores and the nuisances from his wife’s range.

  It was curious how the relationship, which began with him arranging trysts with Miriam in France or Greece or Honduras (amazing, the number of conferences and seminars they managed to be at, together, in those first years), ended with each one moving independently to fore
ign capitals and provinces, but never together. Well, perhaps not so curious. Perhaps it was all too predictable. Charlie remembered a movie he had seen in his early years, where an American JP who had married six couples and then, after performing the ceremonies, discovered her licence of authority was post-dated a week or something. The couples she had joined officially were contacted, a year, or several years, later. The comedy was how each relationship had altered. Charlie remembered only one of them: the twosome who buzzed with words, laughter, wit and repartee as they finalised their hasty marriage. When contacted later, they had hardly a word to say to each other.

  There had been rough patches but Miriam and Charlie had eventually found a sort of settlement, in the times when they were together and one of them not on some overseas commitment. They played chess (bridge was never mentioned) and concentrated on the moves and the game, but it was companionship, and they were fairly evenly matched. That made a difference.

  They had finally come to their balance, an equipoise that gave Miriam all her rights and her freedoms but which did not commit Charlie to a janitor status. In his own world he still had some standing, some credibility, and had begun to adjust to the easier pace, while taking on some contract work. There had been enough of that to reassure him. They had even talked of a joint trip to Spain, which their old friend Bob continually urged on them. ‘You both used to be at your best when you were haring around together, like naughty schoolkids,’ he kept saying.

  So that Miriam’s death halfway through her Amnesty International Congress in Thessaloniki sent everything flying. It came out of the blue, and it had such a sudden finality Charlie at first could not believe it. The onrush of decisions, arrangements and activity soon overtook his shock and had him busy as he had not been since his retirement, two years before.

  Now there would be no shared experiences, no mockery of the pictures in hotel rooms, or the inadequate towels, or the supposedly wonderful coffee.

  It was twelve months before all the incredible junk and mess had been cleared, allocated, disposed of, or salvaged. The house had been tidied and repainted. It realised a surprising amount at the auction, though Charlie had been unable to force himself to attend. There had been three moves before, three previous auctions, and each one came back to haunt him. The new one was to be distant, impersonal, and Charlie had resigned himself to whatever he could get. The reserve had been minimal, and that only at the agent’s insistence. The property leapt past the reserve at the first bid, he was told.

  Short term investment of the proceeds was something within Charlie’s old line of business. He was left with time on his hands. After settlement, he looked at the remaining furniture and sent off the lot to a secondhand dealer ‘in deceased estates’. It was one of those decisions he knew he would regret later – but he also knew he would regret even more having to live with the pieces they had purchased together, or had each brought over from previous lives, previous commitments. No. The lot. Cedar and mahogany had lost their tang, they had a way of reinventing past moments, quite precisely, quite ruthlessly.

  The glass fronted double bookcase: Charlie had initially bought that as his first real antique and it was laughable to think what he had paid for it, but even at the time he had rejoiced at the bargain and couldn’t have cared less about the little old widow who had put it up for sale because she was being moved to a retirement village. All these years later, her anguished face and her stoop, her stuffy living room and the immense clutter of painted plates, anti­macassars, balloon-back chairs and velvet drapes came back, vivid as yesterday. Also the way he beat her down, pointing out the bulk of it, its heavy presence in the room, and the wobbly overmantel, as well as the missing keys that made it useless to lock. ‘You’d be lucky to get a hundred pounds in Big White’s Furniture,’ he had said. It was now worth five thousand.

  Ghosts. No, out with them all. Everywhere he looked, even with so much of the household furniture already sent off to children, in line with Miriam’s will, and with all those ‘might come in handy’ bits and pieces (from long pieces of timber to what seemed like every piece of electric gadgetry ever invented) at last bequeathed to the Salvos, in each room of the house Charlie still found himself looking into a mirror, not a tunnel, of remembering. And what made it worse, each memory associated with each stick of furniture or property was as if each moment of the past were still now. Everything lived still in a perpetual present tense. He had not realised that furniture had this power.

  The afternoon the carrier came to remove the contents, Charlie at last knew this part of his life was ended. He had arranged one week’s accommodation in a rather comfortable old hotel in the city, it was the one where he had fairly regularly had a Friday afternoon G & T with some of the remaining work associates from the old days.

  He had cleared out the furniture, he had sent to the tip a remarkable volume of paperwork, he had even thrown out all those albums of photographs – though at the last moment he had torn out twenty or thirty pages, sufficient to allow himself some moments of sentimental reverie if the mood should overtake him, though he remained suspicious of himself for this indulgence. He had discarded nearly all his old clothing, suits and vests, some shoes not worn for a decade, those ridiculous T-shirts with their witty forgotten images and sad ­language, and a drawerful of socks, ties and underwear. It was summer, and winter things like woollens and overcoats were useless now. Charlie had thoughts of moving into a warmer part of the country. He already had made enquiries – with stimulating results – about the prices for home units on the Sunshine Coast of Queensland. His family had holidayed at Caloundra for five or six years in a row when he was in the first years of adolescence. Strange, how something like that, after all these years – fifty or so – came back, surfaced, and filled him with a sort of old anticipation. It was the old energy and the excitement that, curiously, tingled.

  He could remember his father’s old car and the crowd of them, all singing the radio commercials of the day and urging Dad to overtake, overtake. His father had been dead forty years.

  Perhaps it was the swirl of curious memories that had been stirred up by the shift and displacement of all the old furniture. Caloundra. Those had been glorious times, and the coastline there so impressive, so various: rock cliffs with pandanus palms scrambling among basalt rocks, the beige sandy beaches and all that repetitive and hypnotic surf, the Stillwater of the Passage, where Bribie Island had its northern tip within swimming distance from the mainland (except that the rip was always too dangerous, even when they had been swimming champions). The wildflower plains, always full of Christmas bells in December when they came up. The small village itself, solid and squat and settled, with its permanent residents – fishermen, farmers, retired weather­beaten teachers and clerks. They had called it a Graveyard Town, in those days. Well, here was Charlie at last, ready to be one of the retirees, and it was a strangely consoling thought. He was coming home.

  +++++

  Beatrice had been really his brother’s friend. She was family, in the way that so many people in their wide circle were ‘family’. Her parents had lived next door until Beatrice was seven or eight and then had moved to another suburb, but the parents had remained in touch and Beatrice, once or twice a year, came over. She was familiar company, taken for granted. So that the year Beatrice came up to Caloundra with them for the summer holiday was just an added one to the number. Her father had just died and it was decided that this was the ideal way ‘to take Beatrice out of herself’. They always rented the same large house, Pen Y Sarn, on the headland overlooking the Passage and it had lots of rooms and the big turn-around verandah-sleepout where the boys and their friends could batch down. Beatrice was to share the big inside room with Jane, Charlie’s elder sister. Inevitably there were three or four of the three boys’ friends included; Charlie’s mother wisely recognised that house guests were a great bonus – bickering and sibling rivalry tended to be deflected, chores like washing up and drying could be made grou
p activities, and they could all go off in a gang to the beach or the island or hire a dinghy for the day and go fishing. Even going to the one cinema with its canvas seats was done in a spirit of adventure and complaints were minimal.

  The year Beatrice joined them, and a couple of their other friends, Charlie was just fifteen. Jane welcomed another girl in the gang; until that year she had always refused to bring one of her own friends; ‘the boys are too rowdy, no thank you, I wouldn’t submit Katrina or Ellice to that!’ Jane always joined in everything, though, and didn’t put on airs. Beatrice, nearly two years younger than Jane, turned out to be as big a tomboy, except when the two of them got together in their room and talked seriously about fashions and film stars and hair styles. By half way through the summer holidays both Jane and Beatrice had wild salty hair and peeled noses.

  That was the year Charlie discovered that girls were special.

  +++++

  The upstairs pub turned out to be not a good idea. Charlie was bored, restless, and the sad impersonal room was worse than the least appetising pensione in Venice or Bologna. Charlie found himself down in the bar more often than he was used to, but even the bartenders were a different shift and of course none of his old mates appeared, except at 5.30 on Friday, as if they, too, had come straight from work.

  He drove out past the old house only once. This is nonsense, he thought. Be resolute.

  He amassed a number of glossy brochures, not only of units on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, but at Yamba, and Forster, and Gosford and even Sorrento – though the warmth had, metaphorically, seeped into his bones and windswept southern beaches held no attraction. In his mind’s eye his toes were making their old explorations through the warm, gritty sand of Caloundra with its inviting texture like decomposed shellgrit and its clean but auburn colour – not like the white bone nakedness of the Gold Coast but heavier and close under the feet, almost friable.