Patrick White - The Twyborn Affair

Oh, God, but I feel for them, because I know exactly— they are what I am, and I am they — interchangeable.

Perhaps I should have gone with the Hoorah Party, fun-finding in Perth. Fremantle is something to be passed over because so painfully personal. No doubt that’s why I chose it — the expatriate masochist and crypto-queen.

Drank a schooner in a tiled bar. The acid smell, not quite urine, of draught beer. The ‘head’ forming as a red hand pulls on the joystick. The barmaid’s rattling cough accompanied by a blast of morning gin.

One old professional blue-nosed soak, a finger crooked above the slops in his glass, tries to engage the interloper.

O.S.: Owdyer findut, eh? in Fremantle.

ME: All right, I suppose. Yes, all right. [Hopeful laughter]

O.S.: Not all the Poms do. An’ I can’t see why. [His turtle’s neck at work as he swallows the last of the slops.]

ME: I’m not a Pom.

O.S.: Go on! You’re not? [He stands looking in need of a reassurance he does not expect to get.] What are yer, then?

ME: [because it’s useless to explain.] I’m a kind of mistake trying to correct itself.

Too much for Fremantle. The silence hits me in the small of the back, like the sheet of frosted glass with BAR engraved on a lyre of ferns.

I am in the street. I am the Resurrection and the Dead, or more simply, the eternal deserter in search of asylum. I did not leave Angelos, but might have done so. I did not desert from the army because it would have been too difficult. In such situations you’re sucked in deeper, while remaining a deserter at heart.

At a draper’s I buy for five shillings a cardigan in grey string. Stagger out again into the glare not knowing why I’ve made my purchase, except that it might encourage a humility I’ve never been able to achieve. And there, oh God, is the Greek shop I’ve been expecting while dreading.

SNACKS DINNERS SODAS SUNDAES

ALL HOURS

PROP: CON ASPERGIS

Will Con the Prop recognise the con?

At the Greek’s there is a soft, sticky gloom, the Greek concession to Fremantle’s version of Australian brown: an atmosphere made up of frying fat (oil, dripping, or a mixture of both) synthetic ‘flavours’ mingled with freezing gusts, light filtered through stained glass on to bas reliefs of dusty, brown-gold nymphs. The usual assortment of clotted sauce bottles, cruets and fly-specked ‘mee-news’.

I sit and wait at a stained table. For a moment I am tempted to smear my throat and wrists with tomato sauce, snuffle it up through my nostrils, and fall across the table, some kind of Greek sacrifice crossed with an Australian fate — lie there for poor Con to find and misinterpret.

He comes out through the bead curtain, a thickset, short-arsed man, thin on top, but with wisps of damp black hair sprouting from various parts of his body. Thick arms hanging alongside the stained apron. The inevitable wedding ring conspicuously gold on a finger swollen by kitchen rites. For the customer, Con is wearing a golden smile, while Greek eyes wonder whether the Turk has arrived.

E.: What’uv we got for dinner, Con? [The Greek can’t know about this hearty self evolved solely for his benefit.]

CON.: Good fress fiss. Tsips. Stike ’n’ onions. Stike ’n’ eggs. All very spessul.

E.: Then echeis kephtehthes?

CON.: No kephtehthes . [Tongue held against the palate produces that clicking noise which is the sound of Greek negation.] You spick Grick, eh? [The Greek eyes again suspicious.]

E.: How I speak Greek!

CON.: You not Grick. Where you learn?

E.: In another life. In Byzantium.

[The Greek roars for this mad joke before steering into safer waters.]

CON.: What you teck for dinner?

E.: Knowing the Greek, whatever he decides I must teck.

CON.: [relieved by this lesser madness.] You teck fiss. Fiss is good. [He calls the order through the bead curtain.]

Two boys have come out, one of a superior teen age, and a small inquisitive roly-poly. If the youth is inquisitive too, he has learnt to disguise it. The father, muttering in the background, tells them he has on his hands some kind of foreign, Greek-speaking madman.

CON.: [returning to the foreground.] You titch my boys Grick, sir. Ross and Phil don’t wanter learn their own language. [The older boy prowls in an agony of disgust against the far wall of the café. He would like to dissociate himself from this communicative father.]

CON.: Ross make big progress at ’ighschool. ’E’ll study Law.

E.: Poor bugger!

CON.: Eh?

E.: Good on ’im!

[Ross can’t take any more. He stalks between the tables and out the shop door, a disdainful Greek imitation of the emu. The father is occupied professionally, but the roly-poly PHIL is fascinated by what is new.]

P.: [very softly, as he examines a heap of spilt salt on the surface of the table.] Where you from?

E.: From here.

[The roly-poly’s lip, his downcast eyes, are disbelieving.]

P.: You been away for long?

E.: Yes, ages — at the War.

P.: [acquisitively] Got any souvenirs on yer?

E.: Don’t go in for souvenirs. There’s reminders enough, if you want them, in your mind.

P.: No helmuts? Byernets? Didn’t you ever kill someone?

E.: I expect I did.

P.: Got any medals?

E.: I lost it.

[The questions are becoming intolerable, and only beginning. The customer gets up and is preparing to leave.]

P.: Hey, yer order, mister!

[For CON is at this moment returning with it, mummified in yellow batter, beside the mound of glistening chips.]

CON.: You no want yer good fiss dinner? [The incredulous wedding ring on the Greek’s stumpy, tufted finger; all the best men are ringed.]

E.: Oh, I want all right — yes! But somehow always miss the bus …

[Puts down some money and escapes into the outer glare, which blinds at least temporarily.]

‘But who will I say?’

‘You needn’t say anybody, need you? If she’s in the garden I’ll just go out.’

It was too much for the young parlourmaid. She had reddened all the way up her neck. The points of her cap were quivering for what she had been taught was an offence against accepted behaviour.

‘Mrs Twyborn won’t like that.’ The girl had begun to prickle with tears of anger.

‘She was never all that orthodox herself.’

The situation was something the maid’s starch was unable to protect her against, so she turned and blundered out in the direction of the servants’ quarters.

He was left with this house in which the owners had gone on living without his assistance. He wondered what part he had played in their lives during his absence, perhaps no more than they in his own unwilling memory: a series of painful, washed-out flickers. Unless those who lead what are considered real lives see the past as an achieved composite of fragments, like a jig-saw from which only some of the details are missing, or cannot be fitted.

Since encouraging his parents’ maid to surrender her responsibility here he was, surrounded by all the details of the classic jig-saw waiting for him to put them together, more alarmingly, to fit himself, the missing piece, into a semblance of real life. He could hear a tap dripping (there had always been a tap dripping in the cloakroom). Hanging from a peg there was the rag hat the Judge used to wear when he went fishing with his mates Judge Kirwan and Mr Mulcahy K.C. Opulence still showed through the texture of scuffed rugs; and on the Romanian mat, the place where Ruffles had pissed was only slightly darkened by time. He hesitated, dazed by the perspective of other rooms, opening through light and memory into a blur of acacia fronds and hibiscus trumpets.