To the Highlands Page 2

  Looks a bit dry, I yelled at the back of Robinson’s head.

  Won’t be long, he yelled back. The wet season’ll get underway any minute.

  When Robinson turned his bike off in the new bank mess driveway, he stood beside his Honda Black Bomber and said: What do you reckon?

  Nice bike, I said.

  I love it and there’s one more thing I gotta have before I leave this bloody place.

  What’s that?

  A trip to the Islands of Love.

  What?

  You never heard of them?

  Nuh.

  They’re on the other side of the main island. I know blokes who’ve been there. They reckon you just walk up to sheilas, ask for a fuck and if they like the look of you, you’re in. Sex is just a game for them.

  You’re joking.

  Nuh. You interested?

  Of course I was, but I didn’t say it out loud. I wanted sex, I was clear about that, but I was still a virgin, and still a bit scared of the wrath of a God who was no longer with me, or didn’t exist. Then there was the wrath of a mother who believed that sex was created by the Heavenly Man so we could reproduce, and fucking for fun was a sin and deserving of retribution.

  The dining room was nothing like my old boarding school dining room. It was like a large restaurant with modern chairs, tables, no prefects at their heads, all very civilised. People lined up for food served by native men through a servery. The furniture and general decor was plain and functional but the view out the large windows and across the bay was spectacular.

  Come on, Jacky, let’s get food, said Robinson. After breakfast I’ll take you down to the bank and we’ll see if we can’t get the day off to ride you around town.

  As people passed us they said: Gidday, Robbo. And: What are you up to, Robbo? Then: You already corrupted the new bloke, Robbo? Finally: Jesus, Robbo, haven’t they sent you home yet?

  ***

  Right after breakfast, we walked into the main branch of the bank. It sat on the ground floor of the two-storey building, just below the old quarters where Robbo and I lived as the only occupants.

  You better come meet the branch accountant, said Robbo. He said he knows you. He’s a West Aussie too.

  There was no need to find his office, Richard Symons was already out of it and walking towards us. That must have been why I got the job, my big break in the banking world, because Symons had headed the two bank training schools back in Perth, the two schools where Jack Muir shone, rose above the pack. There you are, Jack, said Symons. Good to see you again. How was your flight?

  Great, Mr Symons, I said. It was a long flight but I managed to stay above ground.

  You still have your sense of humour, Jack. That’s good, you’ll need it here. And, by the way, we are not as formal in the islands, so, please, call me Richard.

  Thanks, Richard, I will.

  Ted here has asked that you two have the day off so he can show you around town. Are you happy with that arrangement?

  Sure, I’m just not so sure about his bike riding.

  No one is, said Symons. But look, let’s make it half a day off, because I want you to come back here to see what we have in store for you. Given your knowledge and intelligence, we have quite a challenge for you and I believe you are up to it.

  Gee, thanks, Richard. Okay.

  Robbo lifted his eyebrows at me as we walked out the main entrance, past two neatly dressed white girls. I almost missed them because I was going over Symons’ words.

  Deep inside me there was a small part making noises, maybe wanting to believe in me and hoping to show the disbelievers back home that I had something, could do something, if I wanted to, if I felt like it. The old headmaster. Dad. Mum. My brothers. It would be a new experience, to make good; I’d have to stay focussed, to concentrate, to dedicate, to strive for consistency. I felt nervous, anxious, but ready. I decided to buy some salt to keep in my room because salt would help me keep my cool. When I was a kid I was diagnosed with pinks disease, mercury poisoning, and the family doctor reckoned salt would help me stay calm. I wasn’t sure, I still experienced sudden rushes of anxiety, but I loved salt and most days ate a handful of the stuff. And when drinking I couldn’t keep my hands off the beer nuts and the potato chips.

  I laughed out loud.

  What? said Robbo.

  Symons, I said. Did you hear what he said about me?

  Yeah, he’s got the hots for you.

  Ha ha. You got any idea what he has in mind?

  Nuh, but I’d keep your pants on at night and maybe rig up a piece of string and some tin cans, so if he comes into your room you’ll hear him before he gets to your bed.

  Shut up you filthy bastard. Get on your bike. Let’s go see some naked ladies.

  The capital looked like a frontier town, a town struggling to find itself in a maze of buildings randomly erected. Robbo rode around it like he owned it, yelling over his head and occasionally whistling at attractive mixed race girls. It might have been 1968 but there was no sign of it here, no hippies and no bearded students marching against colonialism, capitalism, fascism or calling for free love. Not all the white people wore white but they were all neatly dressed and behaving in an orderly manner.

  Do you play footy? he yelled.

  Which one?

  Aerial ping-pong, you wanker. You sandgropers only know how to play one.

  It’s a better game than chimp footy.

  What?

  Chimp footy. You play an ape’s game.

  Robbo took both his hands off the handlebars and made like a chimp, just for a second, but long enough for my guts to hit my throat.

  There were no naked ladies in town that day, but Robinson took me up a hill to see the sights from high, then down the hill and across town to the place we would visit often at night in many futile attempts to find the perfect mix of feminine beauty: Melanesian, European and Asian. When I say futile, I don’t mean ladies approaching perfection did not visit, they did, but they were usually on the arm of some flash, rich, or important, prick.

  5

  Robinson turned into the back of the bank, stopped his Honda and said: What do you think so far?

  I told you, I said. It’s a great bike.

  No, you goose, about this place, the capital, the island.

  I reckon I’ll survive, I said. As long as work doesn’t interfere too much.

  Yeah, you’ll be fine, just don’t let them real bank johnnies get their hooks in you, or before you know it you’ll be just like them and your life might as well be over.

  We were still laughing as we walked in through the main doors. Robinson went off to his desk to do whatever it was he had to do. I had no idea and never found out. I went to Symons’ office. It was a big room in the middle of the building. The only windows looked out into the bank itself. Symons stood up and shook my hand again.

  It’s good to have you here, Jack, he said. I’ve been trying to lift the calibre of the personnel on staff.

  Thank you, Richard, I said. I only hope I’m up to it. You’re not going to give me too big a challenge, are you?

  What I have in mind is the second teller. It has a cash holding of around fifty thousand dollars, so it’s a big responsibility. Have you ever used a pistol?

  My mind was racing in a mad fluster of fear and pride and an energy I had not felt before.

  No, I haven’t, I said. Who do I have to kill?

  Symons looked like he was about to laugh, almost laughed, held back, then allowed a small shift in one corner of his mouth.

  Seriously, Jack, we’ll have to send you out to the firing range for a bit of practice. As you know it is a standard regulation that all tellers must have firearms training.

  I almost said, look, Symons, I grew up on a farm and my dad put a gun in my hands when I was eight and told me to shoot that bloody kookaburra because they don’t belong here and the sooner the Victorians take them back the better off we’ll all be but especially the native birds and lizards, s
o I know guns. But I didn’t say a word. One thing I was sure about was that if a bloke came into the bank and tried to get my fifty thousand dollars I would do my best to grab my gun and shoot the prick. There was a war on and I knew lots of people didn’t like it but they were communists and, like kookaburras, if we didn’t stop them where they were they would take over everything. And bank robbers were just the same.

  Symons took me around the building and introduced me to all the other bank johnnies, mostly expatriate Australians, but a sprinkling of local mixed race men and women and, of course, pure-blood locals who worked out the back in the storeroom and in the kitchen where they made the morning and afternoon teas and wandered around the bank with brooms and dust cloths. There were five tellers’ boxes and mine was the second, number two, second in command, only one box holding more cash, number one. I was on my way. Finally, someone had taken a good hard look at me and decided I was worth something, worth a risk. I could see the headlines back home after the communist bastard had bailed me up for the fifty grand: LOCAL BOY FOILS ROBBERY ATTEMPT. RETURNS HOMW A HERO.

  ***

  That night Robbo grabbed me naked from the shower and said: Come on, we’re going to the Bulimbi Bar.

  I insisted I put some non-white clothes on and when I got downstairs Robbo had his bike revved and ready. It was another mad and crazy ride out of town and along a narrow road to the bar. When he pulled up in the carpark I fell off to one side, laughing.

  When are you sandgropers going to get used to riding passenger? he said.

  When are you rock-crabs going to learn how to ride a bloody motorbike?

  Rock-crabs? Where did that come from?

  I don’t know. What do they call Queenslanders?

  Banana-benders? Didn’t you know?

  Forgot.

  New South Welsh are cockroaches. South Australians...

  Yeah, I know them, croweaters.

  Victorians are Mexicans. Tasmanians are two-headers. And Territorians? Who gives a shit.

  We heard the music pulsing out from the upstairs windows and it got louder as we ran up the stairs. Robbo pushed the bar door open as the band finished a number and stacked its instruments for a break. The lead singer looked up as we entered and I couldn’t believe the face I saw. It was Hugh bloody Bainbridge, an old, almost school chum from Grammar School, Perth’s finest and most expensive private school.

  He looked at me and said: Jesus Christ.

  I said: Thank you, Bainers. That’s the nicest thing you ever said to me.

  What the blazes are you doing here, Muir?

  I live here. I’m a bank johnny.

  A bank johnny? You? That’s a joke. If I remember correctly, numbers were not your forte.

  Or my fifte.

  Bainbridge was one of the A students, always in the A Class, up the top, far away from me, but he wasn’t a bad bloke and he once bought me a bottle of sherry, which I threw up out a car window in the centre of Perth.

  What are you doing here? I said.

  My father was a lawyer, then a magistrate. Last year he was appointed Chief Justice for the island territories and he moved the whole family up with him. I’m taking a year off uni and thought I might fill in time by joining a band.

  It was good news. Mum and Dad would be pleased to know I had made contact with Bainbridge, university student, son of the Chief Justice, solid citizen, member of the expatriate elite, solid Anglican and probably Rotarian. Mum’s dream for her boys was that they would all marry girls from Peppermint Grove, Dalkeith or Nedlands, girls who had gone to the right and proper schools. And there seemed to be a time when I almost belonged to Perth’s elite. Given I had gone to one of the city’s most prestigious schools it was not surprising that I was invited to many fine and expensive parties in fine and expensive homes.

  Yes, Mum, Fiona Eccleston-Blackburn has invited me to her coming-out party, I would say.

  Oh, dear, that’s wonderful, she would reply. Now, do behave and wear your best suit.

  No, Mum, I will not.

  But you must, darling. These people only wear the best. We don’t want you looking shoddy and unkempt.

  Mum, I’m hiring a dinner suit, with bow tie and cummerbund.

  Then she’d laugh and I’d love her. I didn’t always love her. Often her affectations, her pretensions, her anxiety about the small things confused and annoyed me. She was often nervous about Rotary gatherings of some sort, and often morose as if she was experiencing some kind of inner tragedy. When she was morose, I too became morose, agitated and diluted. Maybe we fed off each other, the blind taking the blind by the hand to his or her private place of misery.

  Before the week was over a letter arrived from Mum with all the local news, the comings and goings that were nice and polite and seemly to mention. When I was in school Dad had often added a note at the end of Mum’s, but not anymore. Maybe he had decided to leave me alone, to see how I would make my way in the world, or what the world would make of me. He did one thing I appreciated, he paid a two-year subscription to every Monday edition of The West Australian, Perth’s only daily newspaper. It arrived once a week, one week after publication. The editor was a revered and feared man in Perth and the father of a boy in my year at Grammar School. When it arrived I took it to my room, unrolled it on the floor, turned it over then rolled it in the opposite direction to make it flat. I read papers like my father. First I flicked through, taking in the headlines and on arriving at the final page I tossed it over to the front for a more thorough reading. Inside it was packed with news from across the globe: the Vietnam War raged on; there was trouble on the Israeli – Jordanian border; students rioting in the United States; John Lennon and George Harrison were in India with an Indian guru.

  In the sports pages I learnt that Lionel Rose had punched the wind out of Fighting Harada to become bantamweight champion of the world and Australia’s first Aboriginal boxing champion. I was surprised, given the numbers of Aboriginal boxers in boxing tents around Australia.

  Someone said it was printed on rice paper. I wondered if I could eat it.

  6

  My first day in teller’s box number two almost convinced me I had a career in banking. I felt like the new Australian prime minister, John Gorton, who had been elected PM even though he was a senator and thus a member of the wrong house of parliament. Here I was wrongly appointed well above my capabilities, to a teller’s box I didn’t belong in, with a float of fifty thousand dollars, more money than I’d ever seen. I shared the box with Tom Hallett, the bloke leaving, going home after his two-year tour of duty. That’s what we called it. National Service was in full force in Australia and to do your time in the islands you had to apply for a stay on your conscription papers. As soon as I headed home I’d have to let the defence department know and it would chuck my marble in the barrel and that could mean another tour of duty in another tropical climate fighting slimy Viet Cong communist bastards. Hallett was going in the barrel as soon as he got home to Melbourne. He was a tall, good-looking man and an Aussie Rules footballer. If his marble came out, he was sure to go to Vietnam.

  I play for one of the local teams, he said. You interested in a game?

  Yeah, maybe, I said. I wasn’t too bad in school and I played a few amateur games in Perth but I’m a bit off the boil.

  I’ll take you down to training one night and you can see how you go.

  Great.

  The day was a blur. As soon as the doors opened the customer tide rushed in and didn’t go out until the doors closed. All kinds trooped up to the counter: wealthy whites, drunk whites, whites in whites, whites in suits, handsome whites, very pretty whites, glorious looking blacks, blacks in whites, blacks in skirts with naked breasts, blacks with bones in their noses, blacks who stank and blacks who looked at me as though I was some kind of film star. All the while Hallett stood beside me and commented.

  You see that bloke, he’s worth a million. She’s been around. Phil’s played Rugby League down in Sydney. I s
aw her the other night, after the footy game, mate, she scrubs up well. Whatever you do, don’t lick your fingers when counting the notes, you never know where these maries have kept their money.

  What?

  Yeah, that’s what they call the women – maries, said Hallett. They’re all called Mary and they keep their notes up their fannies.

  You’re bloody joking.

  Nuh. You see that one down the end of the line? After you count her notes you better go and wash your hands.

  I started with fifty thousand dollars, I took in over forty thousand and I handed out over twenty-five thousand and, at the end of the day, I balanced. I couldn’t believe it. The old man couldn’t believe it. Okay, he wasn’t there, but I felt him breathing down the back of my neck, waiting for me to fuck up, to lose count, to mess the numbers up, but I didn’t and inside I said a quick, silent, fuck you, you prick.

  My little teller door opened. I turned and saw Symons. His hand was out, looking for mine.

  There you go, he said. I had plenty of confidence in your ability to master this position. I knew you’d handle it. Knew you wouldn’t let us down.

  Phew, I said. Good to know I’m no John McEwen.

  Symons looked at me.

  You know, forced to take charge because someone died, but the wrong man for the job.

  Would have been better to shove in Billy Big Ears McMahon, said Hallett. Billy might not be up for the top job either, but looking at his wife would make up for it.

  McMahon had not long married a delicious woman twenty-five years younger than him and the best looking politician’s wife ever. No one could explain how such a big-eared dill got to marry such a beauty, especially after so many thought he was a poofter. And no one could explain why I was still a virgin in a world gone mad with promiscuity. Not that anyone knew. It was my pathetic little secret. Along with all the others, like the lingering, occasional conversation I had with Jesus and the reason I ate so much salt.