The difference to me, p.3
The Difference to Me, page 3
‘Oh well, something will work out,’ she said. ‘Thanks for the lift.’
On the way home his head was spinning with solutions.
At the end of the year the hot weather came again. The traffic was impossible, people were crazy or cranky. Then Christmas came and everyone fled from the city. A year had gone by and the young man was flooded with memories.
It was no good. He withdrew his savings, had his car serviced, packed a tent and plenty of paperbacks and cassettes, and drove around the coast to the other side of the continent. He had a few small adventures and he thought about things.
He got back on a hot, still day four weeks later. The city seemed empty. The house ticked softly, the rooms were dim, peaceful, shadowy. No-one was home. He prowled around the bedrooms of the girl and the couple. All their little things meant something to them—the soapstone snail on the mantelpiece, foreign stamps cut from an envelope, a furry glass with a smear of port in the bottom of it. He skimmed their letters but didn’t learn anything. The massage book was still under the bed in the front room, and the young man thought that it hadn’t been opened all year. The girl in the back room still draped bright, filmy scarves over her furniture. It was good to be back.
In the late afternoon he put on his running shoes. He was pleased with them: they were pleasantly scuffed, and ringed with salt stains from the rock pools on the beaches he had visited. On his way to the park he passed Greek women watering their cement gardens and he smelt sawdust hanging in the doorways of workshops. He saw small boys drop their tennis balls and gather to touch and wonder when an older brother drove up in his long, glinting car. The young man felt lifted by everything.
In this mood he crossed the footbridge into the park. The air there carried a thick smell of mown grass, making his eyes itchy, and he kicked at a worm of chopped grass left by the mowing machine. Instantly he stopped, helpless, attacked by a sneezing fit. He longed to dive into the river and wash it all away.
Feeling clogged and half-blind, he climbed out of the trapped air in the hollows to a higher part of the park. It was the best time of the day and he wanted to survey the world. His friend with the limp was standing, blurred by the sun setting behind him, on the top path. The young man gave a low, pleased shout and saw, as he got closer, a twist of happiness on the man’s face.
‘Holiday,’ said the man.
‘Yes, holiday. Four weeks.’
‘Beach.’
‘Yes, the beach.’
The man nodded. He looked puffy and ill; there was a grey sheen of pain and perspiration behind his smile. The young man turned away. The clean slopes of the park were like a swell in the ocean.
‘Where’s your dog?’
The man said, ‘He dead.’
‘Dead.’ The young man gave a wild look around him, as though expecting to see the body. ‘Oh. I’m sorry.’
The man lifted his arm and made a sweep in the air over the park. The effort tired him. ‘Snake bite him and he die.’
The young man could see it happening and could feel the empty days. ‘You’ll miss him,’ he said.
‘Since puppy,’ said the man. He pulled at his shirt. ‘Carry in pocket. Go everywhere. My life not the same,’ he said, appealing with his hands. ‘I sleep. No more he jump on my bed and lick my face, wake up! Time to walk! Every day, same time.’
The young man could only listen. ‘Blutty bitch,’ said the man suddenly. ‘She glad, I bet. Soon no more. Soon I think they must be giving me my flat.’
The others were home when the young man got back to the house. They disturbed the peace. He thought about telling them the story of the man and his dog, but changed his mind, and quickly he felt the old tensions start.
He woke in the night. He lay still, staring at the ceiling. In the morning he telephoned numbers that were listed in the yellow pages. It was good to be doing something.
It made more sense to drive his car down to a place near the park where he could see the man coming, than to go down on foot. That way he could read a book and control the puppy at the same time, rather than having to run after it in the park all the time. Then, when the man was well inside the park and feeling at home, he would walk in after him and deliver the puppy. Quiet, no fuss. A simple act out of nowhere.
The puppy was black, fat with fur and good care. It explored the floor of the young man’s car, walking between or under the seats from the front to the rear and back again, pleased to be alive. It was not interested in sleeping on the rags in the cardboard box on the seat. ‘Cut it out,’ said the young man, lifting his bare feet off the floor.
It was working out. The man limped past half an hour later. After five minutes he followed, catching up to the man standing on the bank of the river, watching children cast fishing lines into the water. The air under the trees was cool and smelt of pine needles.
‘He’s yours,’ said the young man, offering the puppy.
Automatically the man pulled his hands out of his pockets, put them back again, and finally reached forward and let the puppy be placed between his hands. He stood like that, holding the puppy at the end of his outstretched arms. He didn’t say anything and it was unbearable.
To help him understand what was happening, the young man explained that the puppy should be taken back to the animal hospital in three weeks’ time for a final injection, and that he would be happy to do that for him. ‘No problem,’ he said.
They could stand there like that for ages: it would be best if he eased away quietly. He raised his hand. The movement broke the spell, and life came back into the man’s face as he held the puppy helplessly and said: ‘But I think if they are giving me my flat I must not be having a pet.’
NOW WHEN IT RAINS
A kid on an early paper round had a go at breaking the windscreen of Miller’s Ford Customline with bricks, and woke Miller up. The pattern of cracks pulsed and Miller was reminded of those bullets coming through the perspex of the chopper that was bringing him back to Nui Dat. He thought: Hair of the dog. Miller’s two-tone home rocked on its springs as he felt beneath the seat. He had his eyes closed in case there were spiders in the windscreen web. A spring in the back seat pulled a thread on his trousers. A good car in its day, the Customline.
‘Bugger off,’ he said to the kid, who was chanting now that Miller had raised the bottle to drink.
Miller settled against the door like a man accustomed. Customline, custom-tailored, custom, unaccustomed as I am with white-wall tyres and automatic gears, customer, cussed, crust, rusk, Farex for Customline families, cusp, cusped, cuspidal shape. Miller made finger sculptures in the air, curving his fingers, his hands meeting at the fingertips.
He got out. The door shut like a dream, as rich and secret as a Rolls. Passing a Prefect, passing a Vanguard, spinning his bottle against the side of a Bedford truck, dew wetting his boots, Miller entered the lane. The rot must stop. I need a drop. I must mop up the lot.
In the park Miller put his hands in his pockets and stopped and spoke consideringly to a man with a pram collecting bottles. ‘I put them down,’ said Miller, ‘and you take them away. You need me, sport.’
The bottle-o tiddled by on his obsessed little legs, his pants flapping, the pram pitching and bouncing enough to hurt Miller badly in the guts at the sight of it. Miller turned, watching the man rush down paths to rubbish bins or across the grass to a tree. He had wet lips opening and closing without words, lips kissing bubbles in the air within the privacy of his shoulders hunched over to sort and stack and balance his load of bottles.
‘Take it easy,’ called Miller from the path. ‘You’ll get a gut’s ache.’ Give a man a gut’s ache like mine and he’s stuffed for good.
The bottle-o pouted and ducked his head away.
‘I put them down and you pick them up,’ said Miller.
Squinting wetly the man darted down a path. He met a woman in a brown coat with no socks or joy about her, and a matching pram.
‘Family business, eh cobber?’ said Miller, observing. ‘Got any that aren’t empty?’
The man and the woman wheeled around to make for the last rubbish bin. Miller leaned into the wind and came in on their leeward side.
‘Keeping fit?’
The woman sniffed and Miller saw the splits for her toes in her sandshoes. Miller told her: ‘If it wasn’t for me.’ He pushed down on her pram handle and squinted for tell-tale surges of liquid in the topmost bottles. ‘Springs like a Customline,’ he said, rocking the pram again.
‘Clear out a here,’ said the woman.
‘Bloody dero,’ said the man.
That’s a laugh. You dried up old turd. Load up your utility three times a week, right? I put them down and you pick them up, and most probably you roll your own three times a day, you haven’t caught up with tailor-mades yet, you old dickhead, give the wife here a kick in the cunt once in a while. Dry guts. Pure guts. ‘That’s a laugh,’ said Miller aloud, rocking the pram.
‘You’re not sober,’ said the woman.
Not sober. Miller, offended, sailed away, his head down. You think his head’s down because he’s a dero or ashamed or tired. No, his head’s down because he depends on the odd cigarette butt, coin or note, or woollen cap, or bottle not quite empty. Keeping warm. Booze keeps Miller warm, calms the pain in his stomach; he sleeps, he doesn’t need to eat. If you had a bed in a Customline, you’d sleep a lot. Not sober. Christ.
‘I put them down and you pick them up,’ yelled Miller at them from a distance. What we’ve got here is a precious balance going. A balance situation. A balance-type situation. A pacify-a-region situation. A terminate-with-extreme-prejudice situation. A pre-emptive, reactive strike situation. The doctor tells me I’ve got delayed stress reaction syndrome, a name for all the things that have gone wrong. You come back and you’re the arsehole of the world. It was the Americans who lost—we didn’t lose anything.
You’re on patrol in the jungle, right, keeping off the tracks, along comes a Yank patrol, guys in ten-gallon hats and T-shirts and aftershave, doped to the eyeballs, there’s this guy with a transistor to his friggin’ ear, singing ‘Sky Pilot’, they’re all coming down the track, you can smell them and hear them, but you keep quiet, keep clear of the bastards, that’s the first thing you learn, that the friggin’ Yanks attract a fire fight, they’re so stupid you can get fifty dollars off them for a boomerang. So, the Viet Cong fire one shot, right, the Yanks dive into the mulga, only there’s these panjee stakes point upright in the bushes, smeared with poison or shit or something, and soon there’s guys squealing like pigs. You bloody melt away, call up a chopper maybe, you don’t bloody go in and free the bastards.
‘We have a fine balance-type situation here,’ said Miller alone in the park. Would you prefer me to hoard my bottles or drink in the pub, eh? Eh? ‘I’m straight with you—don’t bloody bite the hand that feeds you,’ yelled Miller into the empty air. I’m straight with you, like a plumbline. A plop, that’s what I need. Ease my guts.
Miller dirtied a cubicle but washed his hands and splashed his face for the new day. His guts hurt him. He would scrub and scrub his hands but always they would film up again. He felt it every day, a hot, corrupting film of oil creeping across his skin, burning to get inside him and stuff up his guts and his head. There was this fixed-wing plane spraying the jungle; the doctors painted our sores with this pink paint and called it tropical ulcers. Not like any tropical ulcers I ever saw.
Miller considered the morning on a park bench. Somewhere there was a band playing, with whistles and a parade-ground cry now and then, people gathering. A fly complained around spots on his clothes, causing him to cross and uncross his arms and legs. ‘Oh, bugger off,’ he said.
The Edinburgh Castle would be open. Miller traversed the park; and, at a point half-way across, he began to jig and reel, on top of the world, calling out, ‘Missed one, you evil little shit,’ pointing one blithe foot and then the next, hands on hips everybody, gentlemen to lead, one two three: a bottle in a paper bag, empty on the ground for all to see, waiting for to be collected, and they bloody missed it. Wacko.
Miller stood and correctly looked left and right. Like pitfalls, like bars on a ladder, like entry wounds tapping one ahead of the other up the back of some coon, the zebra lines on the road linked Miller to the Edinburgh Castle on the other side. Delicately Miller gathered himself and stepped out, putting his heels on a white bar, perhaps, and his toes on the tar, stepping on lines: I couldn’t care less about what’s going to get me around the corner because I’m not going around any corner, I’m going straight inside.
But, ‘Be on your way,’ they said, or words to that effect. Miller swayed on the footpath. People were gathering, men in suits or jackets and ties who were conscious of their age and health. Miller watched them shake hands and say, ‘G’day, you’re looking well.’ Men were gathering and Miller was fascinated. Big men in expensive outdoor suits and shoes for walking went to the front row, and tired men with cardigans on underneath smoked with the burning tip pointing in to their palms, and here and there was an untidy fellow rocky on his feet, tolerated and passed from group to group. Miller warmed to these fellows but had his eye on the other kinds.
‘You wouldn’t have twenty cents for a cup of coffee?’
Some of the reactions he got Miller wanted to say: You must really hate yourself, dressed like that, those buttons and collars and ties pinching in your soul. But after ten minutes Miller learned his lesson. He could run a bludging school, the lessons he was learning these days. The impulse was right but the wording was wrong. Never give the bastards an escape route, right? Ask a question like you wouldn’t have twenty cents for a cup of coffee and they’ll say straight away no I wouldn’t, and think they’re bloody clever to boot.
So, one hand in his pocket, collar up, a cold hand pinching together his lapels, Miller stammered, a small man diminished in the chilly air: ‘I can’t get warm, mate. Could you let me have twenty cents for a cup of coffee.’ No question mark either. They wouldn’t like it but more than one would say: ‘You’ll need more than twenty cents I should think. Here, take a dollar.’ A nod or a short thanks will do. And don’t bleed your territory dry. Get out while you can and come back to new faces later. Miller got out with eleven dollars in his trousers, wanting to say to more than one man: you must hate yourself, dressed like that, binding yourself at the neck and wrists like that, cutting off life, cutting out light.
In the bottle shop Miller chose thoughtfully, going for cheapness and impact. He warmed to the woman serving him. All the fractures of the day were mending. It was like a three-day leave, when he wore his Hawaiian shirt and some hippie beads in the hair at his throat, and went to wipe himself out in some bar, some place smelling of come and dope. It wasn’t home, I told myself, but it was a way out. So, some bar chick switches your money when you’re having a bloody shower after, or their fathers or brothers or pimps roll you in the bloody lane out the back, well, you bloody don’t let it happen again. Next time, you hide your money in her clothes while she’s having a shower. It kept the adrenalin going. And then if you’re really after some action the White Mice have closed off the street to do a sweep for deserters or VC infiltrators or guys in the black market. Blow you away, you look sideways at those White Mice bastards.
‘Been a bit of a bad boy, I hear,’ said a voice.
Oh, Christ, what now. Miller, his poor bony behind on a cold flagstone in a doorway near the Edinburgh Castle, looked up at the policeman. According to Miller’s gestures the bottle in a paper bag on the step next to him might well belong to someone else, might well have been left there from the night before, missed by the bottle-os this morning. And, for all the policeman knew, judging by the way Miller now eased his limbs up and fussily brushed away the dust, Miller might well live behind this door.
‘I’ve had reports you’ve been botting money off people,’ said the policeman. ‘That’s an offence.’
‘Don’t know what you mean,’ said Miller.
‘You just knock it off, all right pal? Stay away from here or some bloke’s going to put the boot in and I can’t say I’ll be able to get to the scene on time to prevent a serious injury, if you get my drift.’
Miller and the policeman moved along. Back at the Customline it would be warm and soft; a bloke could lead his life in peace and quiet in its back seat. ‘All I want is peace and quiet,’ said Miller on the footpath. His guts were acting up, there was no peace and quiet until he had another snort. All around him blokes were getting into lines and other blokes held banners, and then the marching tunes on bagpipes set them off and away, group by group down the road.
Miller was consumed. Like a sergeant-major, he goose-stepped alongside them, beaming, matching some old duffer pace for pace, doing a little hop and skip with him to help him get back into step. Miller hooked his finger under one bloke’s medals. ‘Twinkle, twinkle,’ said Miller, ‘little star.’ Off into the crowd on the footpath sometimes, beaming at some old dear shocked with him. Miller stood at rocky attention, eyes wild, chin in, beaming at the crowd.
‘Out of the way, mate.’ Channel 2 was covering the event. Poor old diggers marching, they couldn’t stop or look away, straight into the gobbling camera and out at mum sitting home in the lounge room, Miller got in on the act, but they pushed and shoved and he spun round and then he heard positive, definite, affirmative clapping, not the other kind, getting closer too. People craned to see, then nodded yes, clapped hard and proud and stern, hands clapping high at chest level, a way of telling the boys that, while the rest of the country raised a clamour back then, they had been behind them all the way. Personally, Miller clapped for the orange arm bands. Poor buggers, they aren’t sure what they’re doing here.
