David Malouf - The Complete Stories

“Shadily genteel" is how a famous visitor once described our city, and she was not referring, I think, to its quaint weatherboard houses with their verandahs of iron lace or to the hoop-pines and glossy native figs that make it so richly, even oppressively green.

Brisbane is a city of strict conventions and many churches, but subtropical, steamy. Shoes in a cupboard grow mould in the wet months, and on the quiet surface of things there are bubbles that explode in the heat and give off odours of corruption; everything softens and rots. There are billiard-saloons and pubs where illegal bets can be laid on all the local and southern races, and there were, not long ago, houses in Margaret and Albert Streets in the City, and at Nott Street South Brisbane, that were tolerated by the civil authorities and patronised by a good part of the male population but which remained for all ordinary purposes unmentionable — and given the corrugated-iron walls with which they were surrounded, very nearly invisible as well. Brisbane is full of shabby institutions that society turns its gaze from, and in a good many of them my Uncle Jake was known to have a hand. Always flush with money and nattily dressed, he rode to the races in a Black and White cab with his friend Hector Grierley and could be seen on Saturday nights at the Grand Central, blowing his winnings in the company of ladies who smoked in public, painted their toenails, and wore silk. Uncle Jake wore his Akubra at an unserious angle and had a taste for two-toned shoes. Loud is what people called him, but I knew him only in his quieter moments.

He liked to come around while my mother was ironing, and would stand for long hours telling her stories, trying to impress her (she was never impressed) and seeking her womanly advice.

She gave him the advice and he did not take it. It always ran clear against his nature, or interfered, just at the moment, with some scheme he had in hand. My mother made a face that “See, I knew it — why did you ask?”

She didn't dislike Uncle Jake. Quite the contrary. But she was afraid of his influence and she resented his idleness, his charm, his showy clothes, and the demands he made on my father. The youngest of my grandmother's children, he was also, for all the sorrow he had caused, her favourite, and it was the bad example, which even my father followed, of forgiving him every delinquency in the light of his plain good nature that my mother deplored. It seemed monstrous to her that on at least one occasion, when the police were involved, my steady, law-abiding father had had to go to a politician, and the politician to an inspector of police, to save Uncle Jake from his just deserts.

It hadn't always been so. As a very young man he had been an apprentice pastrycook. His paleness, the white cap and apron he wore, and the dusting of flour on his bare arms, had given him the look of a modest youth with a trade whose very domestic associations made him harmless or tame. He was cheeky, that's all; a good-natured fellow who liked a drink or two and was full of animal spirits, but in no way dangerous. He deceived several girls that way and some married women as well, and got the first of his reputations.

But people ignored it. He was so likeable, so full of fun, such a ready spender, and so ready as well to share his adventures in the stories he told, which were all old jokes remade and brought back into the realm of actuality. Then, at not much more than twenty, he fell in love. The girl was called Alice — she was two years older — and with rather a sheepish look before his mates (he was, after all, betraying the spirit of his own stories), he married her.

The girl's beauty made a great impression on everyone. She had the creamy blonde look that appealed to people in those days — big green eyes, a thinned-out arch of eyebrow, hair that hugged her head in a close cap then broke in tight little curls. Uncle Jake was crazy about her. He worked at the hot ovens all night and brought home from the bakery each morning a packet of fresh breakfast rolls that they ate in bed, and he made her cakes as well in the shape of frogs with open mouths, and piglets and hedgehogs. They were happy for a time, only they didn't know how to manage. The girl couldn't cook or sew and was reluctant to do housework, and Uncle Jake was ashamed to be found so often with his sleeves rolled up, washing dishes at the sink. He had always, himself, been such a clean fellow, such a neat and careful dresser. He couldn't bear dirt. They had house after house, moving on when the mess got too much for them.

They had a child as well, a little girl just like the mother, and Alice didn't know how to look after the baby either. She didn't change its nappies or keep it clean. It was always hungry, dirty, crawling about the unswept floor covered with flies. Uncle Jake was distracted. At last he stopped going to work — there were no more fresh little rolls, no more green iced frogs with open mouths. He stayed home to care for the child, while Alice, as lazy and beautiful as ever, just sat about reading Photoplay till he lost his temper and blacked her eye. Uncle Jake doted on the child but felt dismayed, un-manned. He fretted for his old life of careless independence.

Things went from bad to worse and when the little girl got whooping cough and died it was all over. Uncle Jake was so wild with grief that Alice had to be got out of the house, he might have killed her. She went to her mother's and never came back, and was, in my childhood, a big, blond woman, even-tempered and fattish, who drank too much.

As for Uncle Jake, he recovered his spirits at last, but he never went back to the bakery or to any settled life. He had had his taste of that. Nobody blamed Alice for what had happened to him. He had simply, people said, reverted to his original wildness, which the apprenticeship to flour and icing-sugar, and his diversion for a time into suburban marriage, had done nothing to change.

All this had happened long before I was born. By the time of my earliest childhood Uncle Jake was already a gambler. It was the period of his flash suits, his brushes with the law, and the little orange car.

This beautiful machine, quite the grandest present I ever received, was his gift for my fourth birthday. “There,” he exulted when we all trooped out to the verandah to look, "it's for the kid.” It sat on the front lawn in its cellophane wrappers like a miniature Trojan Horse.

My father was embarrassed: partly at being so ostentatiously out- done (my parents’ present had been a cricket bat and ball), but also because he was fond of my uncle, knew how generous he could be, and was certain that my mother would disapprove.

She did. She regarded the machine, all gleaming and flame-coloured, as an instrument of the devil. Whenever I rode in it, furiously working the pedals and making a hrummm hrumm hrummm sound as I hurtled round the yard, she would look pained and beg me after a time to spare her head. The little orange car brought out a recklessness in me, a passion for noise and speed, that appalled her. I had always been such a quiet little boy. Was this it? Was this the beginning of it? Just working my legs so fast to get the wheels going introduced me to realms of sweaty excitement I couldn't have imagined till now — to scope, to risk! I had discovered at last the power that was coiled in my own small body, the depth of my lungs, the extraordinary joys of speed and dirt and accidents — of actually spilling and grazing a knee. Uncle Jake was beside himself. He had thought of me till then as a bit of a sissy, but look at this! "He's a real little tiger,” he said admiringly. “Just look at him go!”

Uncle Jake was too attractive. My mother tried to keep him away but it wasn't possible. He was family. He was always there.