Johnno

  I spent long hours at night along the piers at Hamilton, talking to the fishermen and picking up, as I talked, a little of their patience as they waited hopelessly, in those oily waters, for cat-fish to bite. At weekends I took my bike to the Coast. Nothing extraordinary ever deigned to reveal itself to me. Several times I thought I was in love — once, not so briefly, with a boy from Sarina and we spent a good deal of our time riding suicidally into the darkness off country roads, seeking some sort of romantic dissolution, and skidded often enough for me to be left with half a dozen minor burns. But what remains with me most strongly are impressions I can barely have noticed at the time. They were just part of the background to whatever else I was feeling: the low bridge at Tallabudgera as I rode into a mist so dense in the early morning sunlight that it was like riding upward into cloud — then a flash as it lifted, and the broad creek rippled to the sea. Or a stunned hammerhead one afternoon between two sandbanks off Point Danger, its belly pearl-like as it turned and turned in the shallow water while a fisherman plugged at it with a .303. Two years drifted by, in which I learned nothing, it seemed, and certainly achieved nothing. I had five jobs, two serious near-misses on the motorbike, and was twenty-three.

  When I think back to that period now I wonder how I can have endured so long the disappointment of my own expectations. All my prospects had simply shrivelled into nothing like burning cellophane. All those inner resources I had been cultivating turned into a vacuum inside me. I watched boys I had known at school get Rhodes Scholarships to Oxford or play their way into the state cricket selections, and found myself entirely without envy of them — entirely unpricked by my mother’s pointed enquiry, as she regarded their photograph in The Courier-Mail, whether that wasn’t So-and-So who was at Grammar with me, wasn’t he doing well! People I had known forever paired off and got married. I bought them watersets or electric jugs and failed to turn up at the reception. Someone a year younger that I was (hopeless I had always thought him when we were at school) found uranium on his father’s cattle station and was a millionaire twice over before he was twenty-two. What astonished me, I think, was to discover that I was entirely without ambition. I found no need in myself to succeed on these terms. I wasn’t suffering — though I couldn’t have been called happy. I was in good health. My life was easy, undemanding. I didn’t even have the comfort of being a victim. I was simply immobilised from within.

  XI

  ✧✧✧

  Johnno had been in Paris for over a year, teaching English to private pupils (mostly Bulgarians as far as I could gather) and giving conversation lessons two afternoons a week at the Lycée Henri Quatre. He had a mistress — after all, this was Paris — and it was to her address in the Rue Fossé St. Bernard that I sent my letters and the telegram announcing my arrival.

  I rode up in the train from Naples through the lovely Italian countryside. It was spring already and the terraces between the farmhouses with their faded green shutters were foamy with peach and almond blossom; sharp verticals of cypress pointed to a clear blue sky. I felt vaguely disturbed that Europe might after all be about to do what Brisbane had refused to do, break the spell that had been over me. We crossed the Alps in a series of thunderous tunnels between sun-struck peaks, and when we emerged again it was into the depths of winter — row upon row of poplars that looked, against the dirty clouds, like witches’ broomsticks upended and stuck savagely into the earth. Paris in the late afternoon was low, grey, smog-ridden. What impressed me most, I think, was the cats cradle of television aerials and the greasiness of the cobbles as we flashed past cafes already lighted, at four in the afternoon, behind smoky glass. When I got off at last at the Gare de Lyon and Johnno wasn’t there to meet me I was already colder and more miserable than I had ever felt in my life before. O Brisbane! O Baudelaire!

  For an hour or so I simply wandered about in the station, unable to think what I should do or where I should go. I was hungry, but too self-conscious to enter one of the station restaurants, and unwilling as yet to face the city outside. I found a street map and located the Fossé St. Bernard. It was about a mile off, as far as I could tell by spanning my hand across the city and allowing for kilometres, on the far side of the Seine. I planned an indirect but unmistakable route towards it along the main boulevards and set off in my inadequate clothes through the late afternoon drizzle.

  The concierge at the Fossé St. Bernard was suspicious and not inclined to follow my French.

  She knew of no Australian gentleman. She had never heard of a Monsieur Johnson. And Madame Bousson, who was away in Corsica, did not have a club foot! I cursed Johnno’s preference for the sentimentally bizarre. (I should have recognised his picture of Madame Bousson from a minor tale of Maupassant.) Still, there was a Madame Bousson, and when I showed one of Johnno’s postcards the concierge shrugged her shoulders, disappeared into her hutch under the stairs and came back peering over her spectacles at a scrap of grey note-paper. I recognised Johnno’s hand immediately. He would be waiting for me, sometime round eight, at the Café Bonaparte.

  But the monsieur who had left the note for me was not, the concierge insisted, called Johnson and he was not an Australian. He was a Scot!

  I hurried back, still keeping to the boulevards but already feeling cheered. In all the cafes now the tables were crowded with girls in suede jackets and long blond hair à la Bardot and young men with beards cut square under the cheek bones and bare upper lips. Older men, with plump shaven cheeks, any one of whom might have been Jean Paul Sartre, talked animatedly behind the glass with little soundless ploppings of the mouth, like carp, and there was a good deal of steam and intensity. The intellectual life of la Belle France was going on all around me. An armoured car swung into the street, nearly catching me as I stepped off the pavement on the wrong side, and one or two passers-by catcalled, then sprinted off into the dark. On the walls, on the footpath, everywhere, there were slogans in white paint: ACTION FRANÇAISE, or a hammer and sickle, or the General’s two-barred Cross of Lorraine. Under the iron street-lamps, with their circles of delicate filigree round the base, tramps began to gather, great crowds of men with beards and floppy boots, who lay down on the pavement where the hot air comes up in a blast from the Metro, side by side in their rags, looking oddly, as the steam began to rise off them, as if they were being immolated on communal pyres. In the big shop windows round the Madeleine plaster figures glowed in a world of racehorses and light red bicycles. There were leafy branches overhead, as they gestured from wrought-iron benches and garden chairs, in parks that were already bursting into spring. In front of one such window, its shelves brightly lit with rows of fashion shoes in every conceivable colour — scarlet, beige, emerald, yellow, mauve — an old woman stood with her hand out, begging, shifting from one bare horny foot to the other in the cold.

  I found Johnno walking up and down the cobbled square, a monk-like figure with the cowl of his duffle-coat drawn forward against the rain.

  “Dante!” he exclaimed in a rather pinched voice that I would never have recognised, and which turned out later to be Johnno’s version of Scots. (No one, it seemed, would employ an Australian to teach them English. It was the accent. Effroyable!) He clasped me formally, in the French manner, and drew me to one of the tables under the awning. “You went to the Fossé, then.”

  I didn’t want to complain: “Yes I did. I thought you lived there. The concierge —”

  Johnno lifted his shoulders slightly and his lids drooped. A gesture expressing a great deal that he did not bother to explain. He had a fine gold moustache growing downwards towards the jaw, and this, with his hollow cheeks and large eyes, bluer even than I had remembered, made him look fragile, aesthetic, in a way I found difficult to reconcile with the big, raw-boned Johnno, all angles and impatience, of four years ago. Europe, it seemed, had deeply transformed him. He sat back now, looking entirely at home, and studied me while he sipped his grog.

  “You’ve come with loads of cash, I suppose,” was what
he said as a result of his scrutiny.

  I must have looked surprised. “Not really,” I said. “I’ve got about eighty pounds.”

  He stared at me, open-mouthed, then groaned, clenched his fist, and beat four or five times on the metal tabletop. “Jesus!” he hissed, and the vowels were ten thousand miles away from good Scots. He ground his jaw. “And I was banking on you to get me out of all this.” He jerked his head, indicating Paris: the Boulevard, the black tower of St. Germain des Près, the cafe tables with their marvellous conversations. “Eighty pounds! How could you do it, Dante? It won’t last a fortnight.”

  “It’s all I’ve got,” I told him tightly. “When I get to London I’ll get a job.” I felt hot and angry. After all, I hadn’t come all this way to save Johnno from whatever scrapes he had got himself into. What about his six thousand pounds? I had saved my money from the tutoring — which I’d slogged away at for six months at ten and sixpence an hour.

  He swung sideways on the elegant metal chair, and sat with his chin on his fist, looking huge and miserable. So this was Paris! Suddenly, turning back he reached across and took my arm. “I’m sorry, Dante. I didn’t want to spoil your first night. I was just hoping you’d come with some money, that’s all.” He tightened his jaw. “This fucking town is a nightmare! If I don’t get out soon — I tell you — I’ll go right out of my head!”

  So instead of carrying him off to London for a long spree on my easy Australian money, I moved into Johnno’s shabby little hotel in the Rue Monsieur le Prince.

  Walking towards it, along the Boulevard, he warned me against being too easily impressed. Those people in the cafes, for example, the blond Bardot girls and their bearded young men. They weren’t French at all. They were Germans, the place was full of them. After two world wars, three violent forcings, the mystic marriage between Europe’s masculine and feminine principles was still unconsummated. And these blond shits were trying to do it with TALK! “I don’t know what you’ll want to look at,” Johnno said. “The Musée de l’Homme, the Guimet perhaps — Christian Dior, Père Lachaise. I hope you won’t want to see Sainte Chapelle!”

  In rather more than a month I saw almost nothing of Paris except what Johnno chose to show me, though I did slip out once or twice, while he was giving his afternoon lesson, to the Jeu de Paumes and on another occasion to the Louvre, where an American in white shorts and sneakers was sprinting up and down the stairs, and in and out of the enormous galleries, to challenge a record.

  Johnno preferred to stay in bed till early afternoon reading Chester Himes. Then he wandered round the damp, untidy little room for another hour in his underpants while we decided where to have lunch. Sometimes, when he had no lessons to give, we strolled up to Montmartre and bought sheep’s cheese and dates, which we ate in the nearby cemetery, a small classical city with rows and rows of pedimented sentry-boxes — an excellent place, Johnno assured me, for fucking, if you didn’t have a room; and the flowers too (he indicated huge pink and white bouquets under rain-dabbled cellophane) were nearly always fresh here, if you got them early in the day. Once we went walking in the woods of Meudon on a silvery afternoon when the birches were just springing into leaf; there were tramps everywhere, with their bundle-shaped women and savage terriers, and we went on to Sèvres and St. Cloud, where we had coffee on the ruined terrace under the limes; then back to Paris through the Bois. Each night, after dinner at La Source or the student restaurant in the Beaux Arts, we would make our way slowly through the labyrinth of dark alleys behind the Tour St. Jacques (“Mystical” Johnno would proclaim, regarding its proportions in the moonlight), where the tarts stood at regular intervals of two feet or so in the dusky lamplight, heavily made-up à la Bardot and calling to us in their heavily formalised patter. Somewhere in the steamy little cafes behind them were the leather-jacketed toughs who were their pimps, and I think it was the pimp, or at least the knowledge of his presence close by that was the real source of excitement for Johnno. Very often, before deciding to go with a girl, he would ask about her pimp, and we would stand on the pavement with our noses pressed to the grimy glass while she pointed out a cap or a black leather shoulder at one of the tables inside. Johnno would nod approvingly or suddenly call the whole deal off, whispering to me as he slouched away, “No style. Just a jumped-up factory worker.” He sang the praises of the pimps with a passionate lyricism that would have done credit to Genet: the elegance of their pointed shoes! and the cars they drove! the way they stood with one hand lightly cupping the crotch, and shifted themselves! the flick-knives hidden away somewhere in the top of a boot! the mean slits of eyes! the way they rolled the spit on their tongue and jetted it in a clean fast gobbet between their teeth!

  “It’s the mystery of it all,” Johnno would whisper, watching one of them entranced, as he moved towards an assignation. “Sperm being transmuted into gold — the apotheosis of capitalism. It’s the only place left now where there’s any style or anything like a genuine ritual. The mass has become completely debased, did you know that?” He had recently become a Catholic. “They might as well serve it in the supermarket. But this is the real thing. Mystery! Mystery!”

  “Au bord de l’eau,” he would intone, producing each of the foreign vowels as if he were discovering it for the first time. It was an old phrase for the streets along the river that had been engaged in this busy traffic since the days of St. Geneviève. For Johnno it was a magic incantation.

  AU BORD DE L’EAU …

  One of the girls we met in the Boulevard de Sebastapol became Johnno’s mistress — a tiny Algerian called Marfya, who wore black stockings, a grey tweed skirt, and a glossy black motorbike jacket that she shared with her pimp. Johnno went sometimes and hid in her wardrobe when she came back with a client. (“I jerk off” he told me, with a broad, innocent grin.) And once a week or so she came in the early hours of the morning to sleep at Monsieur le Prince and we would have a late breakfast together at the Café Danton.

  The Rue Monsieur le Prince was a narrow street running diagonally between the boulevards. There was a Vietnamese restaurant that played sad, gong-like music in the evening, a record shop, four or five cheap hotels, and the long wall of the Ecole de Médécine. Although it was less than a hundred yards from the Boulevard with its incessant traffic, it was generally deserted, and unless the police were making one of their periodical raids (which they did every time there was a bomb blast or a murder under the trains at Châtelet), it was as quiet and suburban as the Parc Monceau.

  I got used to the raids. Like everyone else I would tumble out of bed at the first sound of the armoured car swinging in over the cobbles, and by the time the first hammering came on the door downstairs would be out on the landing with my passport, while Johnno shouted from the landing below: “Twice in a week, this is! It’s driving me crazy. You can see now why I wanted to get out.” But when the uniformed officers arrived with their tommy-guns at the ready he was desperately eager not to give trouble. His student permit had expired several months ago, and if they had wanted to the police might have arrested him on the spot. But they were after terrorists, not petty violators of the civil code. They returned Johnno his papers with yet another warning, turned over the bedclothes while one of them covered him with a tommy-gun and the other went through the motions of a quick frisking, and it was over. Then my turn. And the others further up. Generally after a “visitation” Johnno’s nerves were too shaken to go back to bed, and after three or four minutes of futile argument I would agree to go out with him and walk until dawn. We would stroll along the silver-grey quays where the tramps slept, stop and have coffee at one of the all-night bars, play the pinball machines whose terrible crash and rattle, in those early hours, had a more violent effect on my nerves than any flic with his toylike tommy-gun.

  Then I too got my taste of things. Walking quietly one night in the Place des Vosges, we were suddenly driven into the wall by a screaming armoured car, and in a moment three men had us covered, we were being strong
-armed and frisked in a blaze of headlights, my mouth was bleeding, Johnno lay crumpled up on the path. A week earlier, at Easter, an English girl had been caught in a blast of crossfire on the Pont Neuf, and killed. Now, in the edgy rough-and-tumble of the moment, in the panicky look of the boy who held a gun at my stomach (he couldn’t have been more than nineteen, he was red-faced and sweatily ham-fisted) I saw just how it might happen. I had a surge of real fear. With the flush of adrenalin, the realities of the world I had stumbled into, which up till now I had accepted with equanimity — it was so ordinary, the sandbags, the barbed wire had seemed as much a part of Paris as the bookstalls along the quay — suddenly slammed home. What flashed into my head were those moonlit newsreels that had also made up, for a time, my childhood nightmares: people crouching in just this position against just such an iron-spiked wall, while uniformed figures questioned them and dragged them away. It was as if I had suddenly found myself in Europe in the wrong decade — when the Jewish grandmother on my mother’s side who had died six years before I was born would have been just enough to make me too a victim of the times. I had broken through into my own consciousness; and Paris — Europe — was a different place.

  I also saw now what it was that had happened to Johnno, what it was that was so different about him. His violence was no longer a private disorder. It was part of a whole society’s public nightmare. He was free of himself. Cured.

  All this time he was full of plans for “getting us out”.

  “Look,” he called excitedly one morning from the bottom of the stairwell, “all our problems are solved. We’re going to Sweden.”

  “Sweden?” He was coming up the stairs two at a time. “Isn’t Sweden supposed to be the most expensive place in Europe?”