Jack, page 8
I’m fine.
‘Not crook, just lonely,’ I say.
‘How about you tell me
some stories from your magazine?’
He opens a page at random
and starts his pidgin-reading
in a low voice.
This time it’s about how Theda Bara got her
first big break on the casting crouch.
‘Couch,’ I correct.
‘Couching crouch?’
His tongue twists around it.
He moves the page closer to his eyes
then further away a few times.
‘Casting couch.’ I sigh.
‘What a casting couch?’
I close my good eye, the other one
stares up at the overhead, regardless.
There’s a sudden niggling headache
at my temples.
‘Why don’t you read about
good old Australian movies?
The Wreck of the Dunbar, say,
or The Hero of the Dardanelles
with Guy Hastings?
Rose and I went to see that
at the pictures in Perth.’
I open my eye for his response.
e looks blank.
‘What about On Our Selection
with Dad and Dave?
Everybody knows that.’
His forehead pulls into a frown.
‘I don’t know any of those ones.’
‘Never mind,’ I say tiredly.
‘Georgie … why don’t you climb
in here behind me?’
He shakes his head.
‘Why not?
I’ll turn away from you,
and you can tell me the stories
and be warm at the same time.’
He’s ready to take off.
I play my trump card.
‘How would you like another one
of those silver coins?
You could buy a lot of movie posters.’
The change is miraculous.
He climbs in behind me,
and I feel the length of his skin
and beneath that
the tight muscle,
the tight scent of him,
trapped and warm,
absurdly young.
‘Move down just a little bit,
there’s a good boy.’
I feel his cock jumping like a puppy
up and down my back.
He shuffles and wriggles.
Finally he slips into the hollow
where it feels
most exactly right
like a stopper
in a lemonade bottle.
‘There.’ I squirm a bit more.
‘That’s comfy, isn’t it?
Just like Theda Bara
on the casting couch.’
My Left Hand Man
The wind’s up.
There’s a constant thumping noise
as if the lugger’s a rug
the ocean’s trying to beat
the dust from.
‘Georgie, fetch my coffee.’
The lazy little bugger’s
not doing anything,
just staring out to sea,
his curls
wriggling round his face,
but you’d think by the way
he stiffens
I’d just asked him
to dig his way to China.
He’s been turning a deaf ear to me
since last night
but Clive hears me well enough
and comes running.
‘I get Boss …
Clive, Right Han Man.’
He’s a split streak
heading for the fire
when my voice stops him cold.
‘No. I want Georgie to do it.’
Clive turns, shoulders hitching.
‘But Clive
Boss Right Han Man!’
I shrug and turn to Georgie.
He’s staring back at me now,
half a dozen different emotions
pulling the skin around his mouth
this way and that.
‘I’ve got two hands, Clive,’
I say,
still looking at Georgie.
‘One to eat my dinner,
one to scratch my itch.’
I withdraw my gaze
then inspect the dirt
under my fingernails.
‘Georgie.’
My tone is bored.
‘Do what you’re told.
Go and fetch my coffee.’
Devotion
The minute I sit down
he’s there
bobbing up and down
in front of me.
‘What you want, Boss?
cuppatea, coffee, pipe?’
Or if it’s night time,
‘Want blanket, Boss?
I get blanket belong Clive,
warm you up good, eh.’
If I don’t answer,
just scowl,
he bends his skinny
pockmarked legs in half
and sits in front of me
content to beam up
at his moody,
but no less sacred
oracle.
Now that I can’t stand
so I huff to my feet,
give him a clip across the ear
or kick him out of the way.
It’s for his own good.
If he hangs around too long,
I’ll vomit it back up
all over him,
that unworthiness
his hero-worship
keeps shoving
down my throat.
It’s old and sticky
putrid sweet
like sugar cane
gone bad in the sun.
It reminds me too much
of when I was a kid
and used to follow
Ted around.
He had to poke my eye out
before I’d go away.
Consider yourself lucky, Clive.
All you get
is a kick
up the bum.
William Bailey’s Amazing Adhesive Boots
Dad brought it back from Brisbane
when I was ten
and you were thirteen.
Remember, Ted?
That box
of conjuring apparatus,
ropes and shackles
à la Houdini,
and a book of a thousand
and one impenetrable tricks:
plastic thimbles, top hats
endless handkerchiefs,
disappearing flowers.
You had first pick,
and took
the only thing I wanted,
William Bailey’s Amazing
Adhesive Boots.
After that
you just kept taking
and taking,
Dad’s love,
the plantation,
and finally
the sticking point.
The one thing
I wouldn’t let you
walk away with
in your great big boots.
Miss Georgie
Georgie and Dickie are rolling across the deck,
stuck together like mating slugs.
Each one’s trying
to get a hand loose
and punch the other.
I put the boot in, not particular whose back
I’m connecting with.
‘I’m sick of you two ratbags.
What is it this time?’
They roll away from each other.
Georgie’s eyes are watering with outrage,
his chest heaving.
For a moment he stares up at the pale blue sky.
‘I said, what the fuck
are you fighting about?’
Georgie jumps to his feet
and lurches dramatically
towards the hold,
slamming the hatch open against the bulkhead
then disappearing down the steps
in a credible impersonation
of Mae West in a huff.
Dickie gingerly tongues the split on his bottom lip.
‘Answer me or I’ll thump you one.’
He looks at me, guilelessly.
‘I call him Miss Georgie
and he try to fight me.
I was only jokin but.’
Some Hobbies Are Not Worth Pursuing
It doesn’t help that I’m still not
a hundred percent.
Every time I breathe in, my lungs hurt.
The marrow of my bones
is made up of steel shavings.
It takes all my energy to keep
Matilda running.
The last thing I need
is Georgie’s
outraged
Victorian-virgin act.
I’m not above a bit
of complication,
but ask anyone
who’s tried to put together
a five-hundred piece jigsaw puzzle
of the Indian Ocean.
At some point
while you’re sorting
through all those pieces
that look the same,
you have to ask yourself
is it worth it
when the end result
will just be water
and more bloody water.
He’s clearing the deck of shell shards
with sullen sweeps of the broom.
For a moment,
despite myself,
I’m captured
by the way the muscles
on his upper arms swell
with the movement.
‘Georgie. I want to talk to you.’
The broom stops.
He holds it in front of him like a weapon.
‘You’ve got everybody stirred up.
You’ve done something you regret,
fair enough.
But let’s just get back to normal.’
‘Me!’
His voice cracks.
A slow flush starts up his neck.
‘But you… ’
‘I what?’
It’s curious how guilt has taken him.
Curious,
but not compelling.
Truth is I’m already bored
with the whole kerfuffle.
His bottom lip begins to twitch
then his shoulders
start up in sympathy.
I soften a little to his plight.
I know the crew is listening
so I take the opportunity
to turn away for a second
and show him my support.
‘You lot,’ I calL ‘Leave Georgie alone, you hear me!
Anyone can make a mistake.’
I turn back to him
and lower my voice,
though perhaps not low enough
the others can’t hear.
‘Seems to me you only
have one real problem, son.
And that’s your love
of money.’
He’s whipping his head from side to side,
pulling at his cheeks.
Anyone would think
I’m making matters worse,
not better.
I pick a fingernail-sized flake of paint
off the rail.
‘It’s the root of all evil, you know.
Cure yourself
of that weakness.
Then,
when you make it to Hollywood
those sugar daddies
with their bulging wads
of cash
won’t even get a look-in.’
The Captain’s Mermaid
Sometimes I need reassurance.
I need to know my eyes
aren’t playing tricks.
‘Tell me,
what do you see?’
‘Where, Boss?’
Dickie’s scanning the horizon,
anxious to please.
‘Out there.’
I wave my arm impatiently.
‘Out there.
Don’t mock me, now.’
His gaze is trying to snag
on something solid
in the space
where I’m staring.
If I could
I’d will her into his mind
as clear
as his own mother’s face
and he would say,
I see, but why
she smiling like that?
And I’d have to be honest
but delicate
because of his age.
She’s teasing me, boy,
I’d say,
she’s teasing me
with that closed~up tail.
I wait.
‘I don’t see nothin, Boss,’
he says
finally.
‘Nothin but that shoal of fish.
Best be we stay way
from that patch,
might be shark.’
I can’t help it.
I grab him,
one hand on each side
of his face,
just resisting
the urge
to
squeeze.
I whip his head round
to where
I want him to
for Chris sake
LOOK!
‘What about the scales, Dickie?’
Each word’s hanging
on a cliff edge
in my throat.
‘What about
the iridescent
fucking
scales!’
It’s Nice to Have Things
You Can Count On
The tide was running
half an hour ago.
I know
because the anchor chain
was humming.
Now it’s stopped.
It’s not
vibrating at all
and the water is clear
all the way to the bottom.
It’s time to send
Takemoto
down.
Houdini
‘You know, Clive,
they shackled
him with irons
then put him in a box,
then they locked the box
and tied ropes around it.
Then
they put weights on top of it,
lowered him over
the side of a boat,
and hung him underwater.’
He’s just handed me my lunchtime
damper.
As he listens
his face in the
cheek-warming sun
grows pale.
He backs up,
almost trips over
the rope coiled
behind him.
‘I didn do nothin, Boss, nothin.’
Looks like all those toes in the bum
had some effect, after all.
Potential punishments
gallop across his eyes.
‘Relax.’ I take a bite of my damper
and chew thoughtfully
‘I wouldn’t tie you up,
not for too long
anyway.’
I look away from him
and out to sea,
already thinking
of something else.
‘The point and issue is
he got free.’
I nod decisively,
retrieve a rogue lump of jam
off my chin,
with my tongue.
‘Despite all the things
those bastards sent
to try him,
Houdini
got free.’
Seagulls
To port,
a flock of them
swooping
on the shell meat
we toss overboard.
I hate them,
blatant opportunists,
scavenging
a gullet-full
of someone else’s
hard work.
And that high pitched squawk
drills a hole in my head.
I imagine the net
I cast out to catch them
and feel
the quick warm twists
one after the other
as I wring
their squabbling necks.
One of them
has Takemoto’s eyes.
Blister
My eyes widen.
I find it hard to breathe.
It’s perfect.
Sandy hands me the shell
like a sacrament.
The pearl’s the biggest
I’ve ever seen,
at least seventy
grains.
Carefully,
carefully,
pulse pounding in my temples,
I ease its slickness away
from the shell
with my knife point.
No surgeon could be so delicate.
Then the luscious weight
is in the palm of my hand.
I look down,
at the rosy depth and lustre
of my future.
A bloke I know in Broome
will skin it for me
with a special knife, the blade
thinner than the thinnest razor,
then it’ll emerge,
the payoff
for all my hard times.
I take a rag
from my back pocket
and carefully wipe
at that spot
on the back of the pearl,
the spot
that won’t come off.
‘Get me the sail needle, Sandy.’
There’s a tripwire
in my chest.
He gives it to me
with trembling hands.
I start to push in
through the small hole,
praying to a god
I don’t believe in
for some resistance.
But there’s nothing
to stop
the easy entry
all the way through
to the other side.
‘Fucking blister … it’s full of mud.’
My tongue’s eel-thick.
I hurl it as far as
I can into the ocean
then pound and pound
my fist on the mast.
It shakes and clinks,
scraps of skin
and blood go flying.
The boys
quite wisely
stay away.
Today
Injustice has a barb
worse than any starfish spine
under each of my fingernails.
Every time I move
I feel it squirt
more toxin in.
Ah May and Takemoto
Are At It Again
This time it’s about damper.
