Charlie Mundine

A CHAPTER FROM A NOVEL.   IS IT BAD LUCK TO PUBLISH A FRAGMENT FROM AN UNFINISHED WORK?
IT'S INSPIRED BY SOMETHING I WITNESSED AS A BOY, 35 YEARS BEFORE NICHOLAS EVANS WROTE THE HORSE WHISPERER.

A light cloud of yellow-grey dust rose from behind the willow trees marking the line of a creek.  It was a couple of hundred metres away, and Sully and Pat could hear no sound other than the ticking of the old Toyota’s engine as it cooled.

The house before them was very small; just an old weatherboard farm worker’s cottage, probably only two or three rooms, and it appeared cool and comfortable in the shade of a huge Moreton Bay Fig.  Between the house and the creek was a low shed, with walls of unpainted grey concrete and a shiny new corrugated steel roof.  No dogs were visible, no scraggly garden, no farm bikes, no rusting machinery or abandoned rolls of old fence wire, no chooks and no sagging gates.  It was not a typical small Australian farm. 

Sully and Pat exchanged a look of admiration for the favourable first impression, and got out of the ute.  Sully pointed toward the willow trees and the drifting dust cloud, and raised an enquiring eyebrow.  Pat nodded.

As they reached the willows they discovered the source of the dust.  On a flat area just across the creek was a circular enclosure, about twenty metres in diameter, fenced with stout log posts connected by rough-cut wooden rails.  The surface inside the enclosure was of smooth yellow-grey dirt.  At the exact centre of the enclosure stood a broad post, about a metre high, and seated on it, his arms casually folded, was a man.  He was facing directly towards Sully and Pat, but showed no sign of being aware of their presence.  The actual cause of the dust cloud was a young chestnut horse, wildly snorting and stamping in a tight circle of nervous frenzy, just a few paces behind the man.  Its flanks and chest were streaked dark with perspiration, and its eyes wide with alarm. 

The horse abruptly approached the man’s back, its head jerking and twitching in agitation, and its hooves skittering and slipping in the loose dirt.  It came so close to him that Sully and Pat could see the flecks of foam from its lips and nostrils spray onto the man’s shoulders as it snorted.  Then it suddenly flinched, lurched wildly sideways and quickly retreated again, before resuming its frenetic, dusty dance.  The man sat perfectly still, ignoring both the horse and his visitors, who had now paused under a willow tree.

Pat moved to step across the small creek, but Sully placed a hand on his shoulder and they stood quietly in place together, waiting to see what would happen.

Nothing happened, or at least nothing different.  The man remained motionless on the post, and the horse continued to paw and snort, tossing its head in confusion, and circling uncertainly in the dust. 

        

Sully examined the man.  He wore dark trousers, a white shirt buttoned up at the collar, and a black waistcoat with a shiny satin back.  Where Sully had expected to see riding boots, he noted instead conventional black leather lace-up shoes, well polished beneath their fine surface coating of dust.  His hat was an Akubra, but not of the usual broad-brimmed stockman’s style; it was of the type more popular in the 1930’s or 40’s.  Sully was reminded of Humphrey Bogart.

        

At about that time, they realised that the horse was gradually quieting.  Its frenzied stamping and pacing had slowed and finally stopped, and now it simply stood a few paces behind the man, breathing hard, warily shifting its weight and swaying its lowered head from side to side.  Its expression, in as much as a horse can have an expression, now suggested confusion tempered with curiosity. 

        

The horse approached a step closer.  The man was unmoved.  Another step: now it was less than a metre behind him.  Again there was no response from the man, so the horse cautiously closed the remaining distance between them and softly touched its foam-speckled muzzle against the man’s right shoulder.  The bunched ropes of muscles in its chest twitched involuntarily.

        

‘Well fuck me!’ Pat whispered, his eyes never leaving the remarkable scene.  Sully silently agreed.

        

The horse, its head now resting on the man’s shoulder, rolled its nearside eye towards him, seeking a reaction.  When there was none, it gently bumped its nose against the side of the man’s head.  Then again.  And a third time.

        

At last the man moved.  He unhurriedly reached up with his left hand and laid his fingers lightly on the horse’s muzzle.  The tips of his fingers were resting directly across its nostrils, and the horse trembled at the touch and smell of him.  But it did not retreat, and quickly the trembling passed.  The man then eased his right hand across under the horse’s jaw and up the other side of its cheek, until he was apparently embracing its head.  He spoke a few very quiet words, and the horse lowered its head slightly, allowing the man’s arm to slide even further around it and his fingers to slip beneath the hanging strands of sweat-soaked mane.  The man spoke again, gently, and turned his own head slightly towards the horse.  Their heads touched.  For a long moment both man and horse were perfectly still together.

        

Then the man released the horse and stood.  He walked across to the rails, toward Sully and Pat.  The horse followed freely and easily, walking close behind him.  They both stopped at the rail fence, and the man at last made eye contact with Sully.  ‘G’day,’ he said.

                 

‘G’day, mate,’ Sully replied.  Pat, still dazzled by what they had witnessed, was unable to manage even that; he nodded awkwardly and remained silent.

        

Sully gestured.  ‘This is Pat,’ he said, ‘and I’m Sully.’

        

The man’s face broke into a broad smile, exposing perfect white teeth.  ‘I’m Charlie Mundine,’ he said.  His voice was deep and velvet-smooth, and as dark as his skin.  An ebony voice.  ‘I reckon you blokes have come to see a man about a bunyip?’

        

The long concrete shed turned out to be the stables.  Charlie had slipped a rope halter onto the young horse’s head and led it across the creek to the shed, although Sully suspected that the horse would now have followed him without the halter.  The shed had only three solid walls: the back and the two sides.  The open front was enclosed by a neat post and rail fence with five wooden gates, all standing open.  Behind each of the gates was a large, clean stall with water and feed troughs made from wooden wine barrels cut in half.  The floors of the stalls were of dry, coarse river sand. 

        

‘This used to be the fertiliser shed, back when this place was part of the big station,’ Charlie explained.  ‘These stalls were the bays where they stored the different fertilisers in bulk.  Of course, they built it facing away from the prevailing wind and rain direction to protect the fertiliser, so all I had to do was add a roof and build the fence across the front and I had the perfect stables.’

        

Charlie released the young horse, after a few murmured words in its ear.  The horse tossed its head and walked quietly into its stall.  Charlie closed the gate.  ‘OK,’ he said, turning away from the horse, which watched him intently.  ‘How about a cuppa tea while we talk bunyips?’  He didn’t wait for an answer, but instead strode off towards the house.

African Arts

Othello & Desdemona

Vigilantees

Street Dancers

La Muerte

Jive Queen

Nixie

Fokkoff!

A short play in one act.  Scene: a city street. 

 

A young man is walking in the street.  He sees a second man – a man in shabby clothing ­­– sitting slumped against a wall, his eyes closed and with a disposable coffee cup placed on the pavement in front of him.

The first man starts to move across to drop some change into the cup, then sees a third man – an older man wearing a suit, and texting on his cell phone – approaching from the opposite direction. 

The man with the cell phone notices the man with the cup at the last  moment and steps around him with a glance of annoyance. 

The first man suddenly has an irresistible impulse.  He steps in front of the man with the cell phone.

First Man:   Excuse me; would you do me a favor?

Cell Phone Man:  What?

First Man:  Would you give this dollar to that man?           

Cell Phone Man:  Why?

First Man:  Because he needs it.

Cell Phone Man:  Why can't you give it to him yourself?

First Man:  I wondered if you'd like to do it.

Cell Phone Man:  What?  No!  Look, I don't have time for this.

First Man:  Your time is too valuable?

Cell Phone Man:  Yes. Of course.

First Man:  How valuable?

Cell Phone Man:  More than you can afford.

First Man:  I'll give you two dollars then.  Give one to him and keep the other.

Cell Phone Man:  I’m sorry, I really don't have the time for this nonsense.

First Man:  But it'll take only five seconds, and you get a dollar.  That's … over seven hundred dollars an hour. How much an hour do you make?

Cell Phone Man:  What?  How much do I ...?  This is ridiculous.

First Man:  I'll give you five dollars.  You keep four for your time.  Give this man one.

Cell Phone Man:  No.

First Man:  Ten?

Cell Phone Man:  No!

First Man:  Come on, man!  That's near Bill Gates’ income, for five seconds' work.

Cell Phone Man:  Will you please just fokkoff?  What are you on about?

First Man:  I just want to see people helping other people in distress.

Cell Phone Man:  Well I'm sorry, but I don't give money to beggars.

First Man:  But it's my money you'll be giving him.

Cell Phone Man:  That's not the point. It only encourages them.

First Man:  What if it helps him?

Cell Phone Man:  What if it doesn't? Most of them only use it to buy booze and drugs.

First Man:  What if he's not one of them?

Cell Phone Man:  One of who? Whom?

First Man:  One of the ones who spend it on booze and drugs.

Cell Phone Man:  I've had enough of this. You’re an idiot.  Now fokkoff! (and off he fokks)

The first man shrugs.  He looks again at the second man sitting on the pavement.  After a pause, he takes out a further dollar.  He quickly steps across, and drops both dollars into the disposable coffee cup.  Coffee splashes out onto the second man's sleeve.  The second man wakes with a start, and looks down at his sleeve, then at the coffee cup.

Man With Cup (glaring up at the first man):  Hey!  What the hell are you doing, man?  Fokkoff!

First Man:  Oh… Oh! Sorry! (he hurries away)

Man With Cup (shouting after the first man):  And you owe me a cup of coffee!

                                                                    

I Run

photograph by les roberts

Scarecrows and storm clouds crowd about me,
I feel the electric twitch and coil in long lines of force
that drive me to my home
and drive me away.

The lines buzz and mutter to each other
of threats and taunts and torments,
and all the while the scarecrows flap and squawk
and conspire together to denounce me.

I run because I can,
I run because I must,
I run before these hounds of Hell
can turn me into dust.

Street Pictures

intersection

fife and drum

transgression

soliloquy

i see my shadow fly

cold comfort

the night comes down

The Entrance

photograph by les roberts

Now that I am grown old and live my life in a sort of wispy solitude, I am drawn to the pool. 

            I wake each morning at thirty minutes before sunrise.  I don’t know how that works, because of course as the seasons unfurl themselves the sunrise slowly creeps forward in time and then reverses and subsides backward again.  I suppose it’s only the stirring light whispering a wakeup to me, but if it does I retain no memory of it.  Each morning at that same moment relative to the approaching sun, without even a moment of transitional alarm or confusion, I am simply and suddenly awake.

            I lie in perfect stillness and watch the blue-grey predawn light slowly accumulating in my bedroom, soaking in through the shutters of my window and diluting the end of the darkness.  A pale blotter gently mopping up the night’s dregs.  I like the process: I like just watching it happen.  It’s like being born every day.

            When it becomes possible for me to read the maker’s name on the face of the old alarm clock on my dresser, I know it is time for me to go.  I don’t bother to look at the actual hands of the clock because they are stopped at twelve minutes past something and have been so for at least ten years now.  I don’t need the hands anyway.  My days are not measured by time but by light.  I rise.

            In the bathroom I stand and piss easily, and grunt in soft satisfaction that I can still impress myself daily with this simple act that now eludes and tortures my few remaining contemporaries.  A splash of water to the face, a brief stare of dismay at the visage of my long-dead father’s ghost in the mirror, and my pre-dawn ablutions are done.  

            Dressing is a matter of seconds.  Dark blue Speedo ‘budgie smugglers’, then a pair of loose khaki shorts and an even looser old flannel shirt.  Leather sandals worn comfortably down to cradle their shallow casts of my feet.  A faded and thin towel around my neck like a scarf.  And finally, outside the kitchen door, a bicycle.  It has the ladies’ frame with a dropped top rail, because I care less for the regular jibes I suffer about ‘forgetting to wear my skirt’ than I would for the occasional ball-bruising mishap if I tried to use my unreliable hip to throw my leg up and over a more macho model.  And thus clad, shod and mounted, I take the field for another lone tilt at the world.  It’s a brief encounter: in just under four minutes of easy pedalling I am at the pool.

The pool is more formally known as The Entrance Ocean Baths, and is actually a series of three connected pools of different depths and lengths, all of which are directly fed and constantly refreshed by the adjacent Pacific Ocean … sometimes refreshed unexpectedly and even violently, when rough weather causes the waves to break against the concrete wall and smash over the top to dump foam and confusion onto bathers doing their laps in the pool’s ocean-side lanes. 

            But I don’t use the big pool where the swimmers plough their endless lonely furrows.  I am one of a group of old friends who meet in the smaller walking pool at sunrise every day.  And ‘old friends’ is an accurate term in more ways than one, because each of us is aged closer to ninety than to eighty.

            We walk in water that varies from hip deep at one end to about nipple deep at the other.  Fragile bones, shrunken sinews and untrustworthy tendons are thus cushioned from even the moderate strain of carrying our own gradually diminishing bodyweight.  And so we are able to not only walk freely, but can even cavort a bit, rejoicing in the liberation of unearthly buoyancy just as the Apollo astronauts did when they capered in childish joy in the low gravity of the moon, in spite of their cumbersome space suits.

            It’s twenty-five paces from one end of the walking pool to the other.  Easy enough at the shallow end, but each step becomes harder, slower and shorter with increasing depth.  We walk together in our regular pairs for a while, pairs that no one can recall the genesis of but that nevertheless are inviolable now.  Then one or the other of a pair will stop for a ‘spell’, and when he does so his mate continues on solo.   And even when the spelled bather takes up the trudge again, it’s alone.  You always stay in your pair until one bloke takes a break, and then you’re both on your own until tomorrow morning.  That’s just how it’s done.

There are six of us, and we have known each other for sixty-five years.  We all met on the same day in December 1944, when we were allocated a tent together in a dusty army camp in Queensland.   Bill and Clarrie were city boys, but the rest of us were from the bush.  Athol was a drover.  Little Pat had been a shearer and more recently a miner.  Big Pat was a grazier’s son, and had defied his father to enlist before it was all over.  And me.  Walter.  Wally.  Whippet.  I did a bit of everything back then: fencing, scrub clearing, boundary riding ... anything without a roof over it suited me best.   I even rode a motorbike.

            And there was one other, because there were originally seven of us baking in that tent in the summer of 1944.  But young Stainless went away a few months later when we landed in Borneo for one of the last land campaigns of the war.   He wasn’t really named Stainless of course, but his mother had christened him Stephen Stuart Steele so we had no option.  And he didn’t really go away either.  Well most of him didn’t.   We carried most of him back to company headquarters wrapped in a rubber groundsheet and loaded him onto the back of a Blitz truck with a pile of empty ration boxes.  We stood silent and looked at the sad, slippery, sagging green bundle that used to be one of us.  It started leaking.  For a bloke called Stainless he made a bloody awful mess on the bed of that truck.  And then the truck started up and he was gone, and that was sixty-five years ago in July and Stainless was just twenty.

We don’t talk all that much, as we trudge up and down the pool.  Even when we’re still in our pairs we usually each keep to our own thoughts.  I walk with Athol, and he seems content to just walk in a sort of companionable silence.   We’ve already said pretty much all we’d ever needed to say to each other I suppose: anything more now would be pointless repetition.  So most days I just say g’day and occasionally make a comment about the weather.  Looks like rain, gonna be a hot bastard later, that kind of thing.  Athol sniffs and looks up at the sky.  He has this look on him that says yes he agrees and no he doesn’t think so, both at the same time.  Consequently Athol’s rarely wrong about the weather, which is a damned admirable ability to have.

            I do say a brief word most mornings to the other four blokes, as Athol and I pass by them in the pool.  Generally it’s some smart-arse remark about how they are slowing down, and maybe they should be doing their morning exercise over in the kids’ splash pool instead.  But I am realising lately that it’s only me who is showing the wear and tear of the passing years.  My body is thin and bony, my hair is gone, and my skin is blotched and mottled.  Clarrie looks ten years younger than me, and Little Pat looks exactly the same as he did way back when he turned sixty-five.  Athol has the same full head of thick wavy brown hair he’s always had, still cut short back and sides and parted square in the middle.  Big Pat remains a solid big bastard, his back marked out in great hard plates and ropes of muscle, while mine is all shoulder blades and spinal knobbles. 

            Only Bill seems to be in the same decade as me, but when I mentioned the other blokes’ remarkable physical condition to him one morning as we shuffled up the ramp out of the pool, Bill looked confused and didn’t reply.  He seemed to have no idea of what I was talking about.  I’m starting to wonder if Bill might be having a bit of trouble with his memory.  I bloody hope not.  That sort of thing can deteriorate pretty fast, and Clarrie would be totally lost without his morning walking pool partner.

This morning I stayed on a little longer in the pool than the others.  Athol looked at me and raised his eyebrows, but I just said that I felt like doing a few more laps to work off last night’s big baked dinner.  The fact is that last night I had just a few spoons of pea and ham soup, and all I really wanted now was to catch my breath before I had to climb those cement steps up to the showers. 

            I walked slowly back down the pool towards the deep end, trying to slow my breathing and letting the water support me.  And for the first time I realised that there was someone else standing in the pool’s deep end right against the end wall, sunk well down into the water with just his head visible.  Not one of our group; they were all up in the showers already.  He looked like a young bloke, but the morning sun had risen enough by now to be streaming in from behind him and in the glare I couldn’t see enough to recognise him.  Still, he looked sort of familiar and so as I got a bit closer I said g’day.  He sank deeper for a moment and his head slipped beneath the surface, and then he came up again, the sparkling water falling like diamonds from his face.  For a moment I saw him clearly and then the sun seemed to expand and my vision was flooded with its yellow light.  And just for that single heartbeat I thought once again about how my days are measured by light and not by time.

The young lifeguard helped the ambulance blokes carry the stretcher up the difficult stairs and then he stood by watching as they rolled it inside and closed the doors.  They nodded to him before they drove away and there was no siren.

            ‘Who was he?’ asked a barefoot woman wearing a floral sarong and a huge floppy hat.

            ‘Just an old bloke who swam here every day,’ the lifeguard replied.

            ‘Every day?’

            ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I’ve been here for nearly two years and he’s never missed a morning.  Set your watch by him, you could.  Sunrise every day he’d be in that pool walking up and down all alone.  Talked to himself a bit sometimes, but still a harmless old bugger.  Then today I saw him just floating there, face down.  What a way to go, eh?’

            The woman looked down at the empty walking pool and shuddered. 

            ‘Awful,’ she agreed.  ‘Was he already gone when you got him out?’

            ‘No,’ the lifeguard said, ‘He was still conscious for a few seconds.  He even spoke to me.’

            ‘Oh?  What’d he say?’

            The lifeguard shook his head in sorrow. 

            ‘It was nothing,’ he said.  ‘Or nothing that made any sense.  He just said, “G’day Stainless, how are you mate?”  And then he smiled and closed his eyes.’

Dedicated to my father, Al (1923 - 1998)

The Day of the Week

photograph by les roberts

He would come home, if he came home, on a laundry day.  She knew that he would want to first see her from a distance before he'd come closer, so she wore her best skirt and shoes to hang out the shirts and underwear and linen.  Every week, every season, every year. 

And it really was years by now.  Almost five years since that night when she had heard the cars, and then the shouting, and then the soft groan of the iron gate on its home made pipe-hinges.  And then he’d been there in the doorway, wearing a long dark coat she had never seen before.  It was unbuttoned down the front and she saw something dark on his lovely white shirt, the shirt in which he had just a few months earlier walked to the front at the old school house and received his certificate.  The National Senior Certificate.  It was an almost unbelievable accomplishment about which she was at once both proud and a little  bewildered.  Where had he ever found his way to that?  How had he managed all the work required, here alone on all the nights she’d had to work?  How had he held true to his course, when boys she didn’t trust, and even girls she didn’t trust, came calling for him?

Now the shirt moved into a patch of light as he stepped toward her.  It was some black and glistening mess on the front his good shirt, and she reached out to touch it.  Wet.  And sticky.  She looked down and her hand wasn’t black; it was red.  She began to lift her fingers to her face but he quickly knelt before her, his own fingers gripping her wrist and drawing her soiled, defiled hand back down into the darkness between them.

She looked at him in confusion, seeking some explanation of this vile thing, and she saw that his dark eyes were filled with tears.  She could not speak.  Not even move.  So even his tears fell free and untended, her fresh white handkerchief remaining untouched in the pocket of her apron. 

Another shout, answered from somewhere across the road, and nearby.  He stood, shrugged out of the strange long overcoat and quickly undid the shirt buttons and stripped it off, twisting it into itself, wrapping the awful stuff on it well inside before thrusting the tight bundle into her hands.  Then he reached for the long coat again and stepped back to put it on.  She saw his body, his chest and stomach, in the light from the street lamp (the only street lamp for a hundred yards in either direction, her guide home sometimes after long days and nights at work … many times she’d have sleepwalked into a ditch without that light).  His clean young torso was unmarked, undamaged: this lifeblood was not his.  She was relieved for a full two seconds before the obvious truth hit her; it was someone else’s blood.  He’d held someone to his chest as they … bled.  Died?  Yes, she knew it: he had held a dying head to his chest.  Somewhere nearby, tonight, just minutes ago.

He reached for her hand, hanging limp and useless at her side, lifted it and took it and gently opened the calloused fingers.  He touched her palm and she felt herself almost pull away, and he felt it too, and his grip insisted, surprised her with its demand.  His fingers touched her palm again, and then something else, and he wrapped her fingers tight around it.  She knew at once,  A thick wad of banknotes, tightly rolled and held with rubber bands.  She felt as if it may begin dripping yet more blood from between her trembling fingers, though it did not.  It was death, this thing.  She would bury it, dig it deep and forget where.  He nodded, bowed his head to her one time, eyes down and not lifting back to meet hers.

Then he was gone, into his old room and, she knew, straight out of the hinged window into the tiny space between their shack and the next; an alley narrower than the shoulders of the man he had become.  And the window softly swung shut and his room was an empty room.  Five years ago.

And so she knew that when he came home, if he came home, it would be by way of that secret alley.  She was out here not to meet him, but to show him, from wherever he would watch her first, that it was safe.  And on every laundry day, every season, every year, she dressed in her best to show him she was still proud of his National Senior Certificate.  And every time, every laundry day, the very last thing that she pegged onto the line was his white shirt, now forever perfectly white and pure again, as it ever was in her mind.

My Bag

 

photograph by les roberts

My life passes through my bag.

A past in scraps of places been,
receipts for prices paid.
A future in pictures and promises
torn from magazines,
folded and refolded into my dreams.

When I sit and let the world turn
I can feel the threads twisting,
braiding all that has been
with all that must yet be done,
and I know the trap is sprung.

My bag passes through my life.