Page.
Memoir is the most unreliable of genres. Even more so
than fiction. Because memoir purports to have a factual basis, and yet as one
ages the line between fact and fiction blurs to the point of being
indiscernible. Like all dichotomies, when pushed, it turns out to be a
continuum. Between black and white there are too many different greys.
How does one talk about Page for example, a place long
ago in my history, and a time when, even when I was awake, life was quite
blurred, whether by alcohol, drugs, or just confusion. How does one write a
page about that time, when it should be a larger tome? What did I learn in
Page? Well, don’t live with junkies for one. Secondly, don’t live
kleptomaniacs. Thirdly, and most importantly, don’t live with junkies and kleptomaniacs
at the same time. That’s a good rule to take with you through life. And
fourthly, that no matter what meal you contrive in which you get rid of, either
beetroot, gherkins or mayonnaise from the fridge, they will always be replaced.
Page is a suburb of Canberra. My sister now lives in
Macquarie. It is perhaps telling of our introspective solipsistic lives at the
time that I could not have told you where that suburb was, even though the sign
for it was clearly visible from my bedroom window. We lived on Belconnen Way,
just down from the Coulter St lights. It was, and is, a big white house, with a
concrete forecourt. At the time the landlord’s mother lived downstairs. I hope
she was deaf.
My parents had moved to Canberra after I had left home
to go to University in New England. After two years of struggling through a
zoology degree I decided to have a year off and make some money. We didn’t have
the term gap year then, but that is what I guess I was doing. It turned out to
be an eight year gap followed by 17 years of study but I had no idea at the
time that would be my future, of course. I came down to Canberra and got a job
working on the gas pipeline that was being laid into Canberra at the time. It
was with my father’s company and he was happy to see me following in his
footsteps. 5 months later, one month from the supposed end of the job, after
having three car accidents in a day, I quit. He didn’t talk to me for years. I
headed north to go rock-climbing, the real reason I had struggled at University.
I spent the summer in southern Queensland and around
Armidale, on the dole, and climbing. On leaving University I’d transformed a
grubby little climbing magazine, that now would be termed a Zine, into a more,
and I stress slightly, national publication, Screamer. It was this plan that
would lead to an interest in Journalism and Editing, a Degree in Journalism and
a PhD in Literature. But in the early 80s it was just something I did to amuse
my little subculture of rock-climbing, or if I’m being truthful to gain kudos
in a sport where I lacked a little in ability.
The first and second issue had been printed in
Canberra, so I came back to that city, to lay out the next issue before heading
off to climb again. It was 1980. I moved into the house in Page where some of
the friends I had met the year before were living. And the printer lost the
proofs for the magazine. I was trapped in Canberra, in the depth, and I do mean
deep, of winter. The large cavernous lounge-room had one small bar heater,
around which we all huddled in front of the TV. Soon another friend turned up. I met him in a sandpit when I was
six. We’d been climbing
and studying together up
north. He brought with him his girlfriend, S. whom we’d met one night the year
before.
I tried to
get all my contributors to re submit, but this was before computers and most of
the stuff I received was hand written on scraps of paper, the inside of tampon
boxes, or crudely typed.
The household played a dice game called zilch for
everything. Whose turn to make coffee, who’s turn to cook, empty the bin. For
everything. And UNO. We spent a lot of time deciding who would do things.
It was a
sparse life. My bed only had three legs and I never realised until someone
joined me, and we fell on the floor. P. similarly brought a woman home one
night, and a spring from his mattress pierced her side. We were very classy.
The night my bed collapsed I had drunk a lot of tequilla. I
woke to hearing P.’s girlfriend screaming “There’s a turd in the sink. There’s
a turd in the sink!” I staggered out. She was standing in the hall pointing
into the bathroom. I looked in past her and there on the edge of the pink
enamel was a small piece of shit. I walked closer. As my field of vision
extended to the whole basin I realised that the small piece was just a
precursor to a huge turd, about 20cm long.
We played zilch to see who would clean up the turd. I went
out first, meaning I had the high score and the lowest lost. P. Lost. He was
throwing up as he scraped the shit into newspaper. We coined the expression, ‘
a bad zilch to lose’. The weird thing was that it was only a small party, a
select group of friends. We knew everyone well. I only found out years later
that I was the prime suspect because I had disappeared early in the night. I
maintain that it could not have been me because I would have been lying beside
it in a pool of blood. I have never passed a turd that big in my life.
About once every two weeks we ran out of cups. They were
always all in I.’s room. He was incapable of bringing them back to the kitchen.
The journey into his room was a journey from light into darkness. The blind was
always down and the bed far worse than Tracey Emin imagined. Clustered around
the sides were half filled cups of coffee, with cigarettes jammed in the scum,
and the odd dead blowfly.
Only one of
us was working. There was no thought of budgeting. Our payments went on
expensive deep fried stuff, the sort that tastes good when you wasted, which
only lasted a week. For the second week I’d concoct what they called ‘gunges’,
sometimes little more than rice and a packet of soup, with some gherkins thrown
in. We invented Kellogg’s Special K, extra weight watcher’s breakfast, which
was black coffee and a couple of cones. We never had milk or sugar. When this
got too much, P. and I would ride his motorbike into Civic. We had some
friends, two single mums, living in the Bega Flats. They’d order pizza and we’d ‘arrange’ some alcohol, and end up sleeping on their
floor, being woken by small children.
When we could,
we went out to see bands in the town’s bars. It was a time of punk (though
there were a handful of
Skins and two persistent and heterodoxical Mods, complete with green jackets
and Vespas. One of the Skins attacked me in the broad daylight of a Civic Sunday,
because I dared to wear a Dead Kennedy’s shirt that I had made myself. Unlike
his expensive store
bought uniform of docs and Exploited T-Shirt. Mostly we coexisted relatively
peacefully and drunkenly. In places like the Jameison Inn, the Cock and Bull,
the Jam Factory in Phillip and the almost mythical ANU bar. I used to
wonder what were all these
people wasting their lives as students for? Musically it was a very rich
period, and I’m pleased to say I saw some of the finest of Australia and
England’s new wave at the time. We couldn’t go to see the big names, because we
couldn’t afford it, but it didn’t matter. When you have seen the Cure and Elvis
Costello play at the Uni, most others gigs fade from your memory.
On other
days P. and I would ride, heavily laden, up into the mountains to Booroomba and
go climbing. It was a magic world. Some days the fog in the city would not lift
and all you could see from thousands of feet above was the fairy castle of
Black Mountain poking out of the fog. We’d take our shirt off and bask in the
winter sun, and scare ourselves shitless on some of the most terrifying climbs
in Australia at the time. We’d come home, on an adrenalin high, sunburnt faces,
to find the other denizen’s of the city all gloomy and morose and Vitamin D
deficient.
One day,
after sleeping on the floor in the Flats, I listened to Tom Waits before going
for a walk around the lake, savouring the autumn chill and the colour that
Canberra turns on in that season. The lake was glass smooth and reflected the trees that overhung its banks. The water
spout was tall and thin,
falling back on its self. I went back to the flats and wrote two poems. One of
the women in the flat, S. was a little older than me, and read books. She
bought me a black journal and a pen, and I fell totally and totally
unrequitedly, in love with her. But that simple act of kindness led to a life
of words, in all their myriad forms.
After one
such trip into town, I arrived back in Page to chaos. It turned out that J’s
girlfriend S. was a kleptomaniac, and had been stealing, amongst other things
(we later worked out) B., the junkie’s money. He thought we all knew, and
were guilty of complicity, though
we were totally clueless. He turned up in the lounge-room waving an axe and
yelling strung out accusations. He was
talked down, but moved out that day.
There was much laughter associated with living there. Maybe
the dope. And sadness. I met a Hungarian woman at a party one night who talked
of removing curses and who asked if I found the age of 22 was when my friends
started dying, and I laughed and said no.
Not long after, one of my friends, M. Got knocked off his
pushbike by a drunk and died. Another, a beautiful young woman in her thirties,
died of leukemia shortly after being diagnosed. Over the next few years the
Australian rock-climbing scene would be decimated by mountaineering accidents.
So many beautiful talented young men died.
Winter finished. The printers found the proofs. I finished the magazine. I hitched off
with a pack of copies to distribute then in Melbourne and Sydney. When I
returned, the house was breaking up. People had found other places,
relationships had broken up. We gave notice, and started to clean up. This was
tiring work, so we went and got some beers and pizzas. We rang some people,
they brought more beer. I woke in the morning realising that the landlord was
coming at one and the house was more of a mess than when we started. And we
were all hung-over, terribly.
We didn’t
have a rubbish collection. The laundry was full of garbage bags. Some weeks
previously someone had optimistically pulled a frozen chook out of the freezer
and put it on the bench. A week later, remembering a little from my
microbiology lectures, I swore at their stupidity and threw it in the garbage bin.
Ph. Started to grab the bags to take them down to the car. One split open, and
I watched the still plastic wrapped chook slide from the bag and hit the floor
with a dull thud. Engorged maggots exploded over a three metre area of the
kitchen floor. Ph. Took one look and vomited onto the floor as well.
When the
landlord arrived we were all standing in the lounge-room surreptitiously hiding
damage to walls or standing on cigarette burns or worse. He explained that B.,
the junkie, had owed him some rent so we wouldn’t be getting the bond back.
“Well boys.” He said,
“Let’s call it quits.”
We all
withdrew from our positions and left via the front door. I hitched back to
Melbourne the next day. I have not lived in Canberra full time since there,
until now, but my Mother and Sister are there so I visited regularly. And over
the years I have seen many different collections of cars parked on the concrete
forecourt of the large white house. I hope the occupants of the house are
having as much chaotic fun as we did, and are also enjoying their tenuous youth.
