Of White and Shady: Michel White’s Coming-of-Age

Essendon

Acknowledgements

The chapters dealing with Tick Tock’s diaries draw upon E.E. Dunlop, The War Diaries of Weary Dunlop: Java and the Burma – Thailand Railway 1942-1945, (Melbourne, Nelson, 1986)

I thank all my readers for their time and valuable comments. In particular, I thank one of my very first readers, Jan Goldsmith, for her enthusiasm and encouragement and advice on earlier drafts. To Diana Giese, much appreciation for her insights and guidance and professional judgement in steering the manuscript through its various drafts to its final form. And to the team at Vivid Publishing my heartfelt thanks for the quality of their work and collaboration in getting the book published. I love the cover! Finally, to Andrea and Dash and Digby, I couldn’t wish for a better team in my corner than you.

PART ONE

MADE IN WILLIAMSTOWN

ONE

LIFE IMITATES ART

‘Man Walks On Moon’ was the headline on the newspaper on the floor of my bedroom. Neil Armstrong was in the history books for sure, in there with Christopher Columbus and Captain Cook. The only way I’d get into the papers would be to drown or get run over.

My mother called out from downstairs: ‘Michel, are you up there?’ Of course I was, on my back on my bed right beneath the life-sized poster of Jimi Hendrix. Without waiting for an answer she yelled: ‘Your father’s about to start.’ Before being disturbed I’d been contemplating my existence—or more precisely, the lack of it. When would I amount to anything?

My grandfather Val had died a few days before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. Everyone knew him as Tick Tock, because whenever he saw anyone wasting time he would mutter, ‘tick tock, tick tock.’ His story wasn’t on the front pages like the Moon walk. It was in the obituaries, right in the middle of the Herald Sun, before the classifieds. There were seven notices in an edition that sold a record number of copies. So by dying when he did he had probably come to the attention of more people than he had in his entire life. Lots of people read the obituaries. Mother said so.

‘Don’t make me come upstairs,’ called Mother. ‘He’s already started.’

My father, Len, was the executor of Tick Tock’s will. For the reading of the will he wore a suit, not the black one he wore to the funeral, but one in a vivid shade of paisley green. He had worse in his wardrobe. The safari suits were worse.

Our living room was packed tight with people. There were four rows of makeshift seating, six to a row, about the same as the number of chocolates in a full Cadbury’s Milk Tray, which Len would buy for Mother every Friday night. The air was thick with an off-putting mix of Old Spice and Chanel No 5. Uncles were buttoned-up in suits and aunts in best dresses. To a man, each was Brylcreemed and braced.

Len had said to Mother the night before: ‘They’re like everyone else. They’ll measure Tick Tock’s love by how much they get.’ Mother had replied, that the only thing her father owned of any value was the Ballet Shoe Factory.

The audience was wise to that too. Everyone held their breath as Len’s gruff monotone fell temporarily silent. Had he lost his place? Maybe he’d scanned ahead and seen something unexpected. A name that shouldn’t be there?

‘… and I Valencia Michel Fiorentino leave all my estate in the property at 6 Little Nelson Place Williamstown otherwise known as the Ballet Shoe Factory and represented on Certificate of Title 3980 Folio 2547 to the man to whom I owe my greatest debt, and for whom no words or gift can adequately express my appreciation—Shady Green…’

Who? The Ballet Shoe Factory, a prized piece of real estate worth a fortune, had been left to some unknown? Shady Green? Was that even a proper name?

But Len wasn’t finished:

‘In the event that he cannot be found all the title in the property passes to my grandson, Michel White.

There was a collective gasp as the words of the will rolled through our living room like the fragmenting of a hand grenade. ‘An absolute disgrace!’ shouted Aunt Myra, to a chorus of Hear hears. Uncle Alf, her husband, rocked back and forwards in his chair like a patient in a psychiatric ward. As the chair rocked he eased his braces in and out over his gut as if trying to digest something not too pleasant. ‘Shady Green my foot,’ I heard him say.

Tick Tock’s chickens were the only bequest that I thought I stood a chance of getting. He and I had spent a lot of time together in the chook pens out the back of the Ballet Shoe Factory. No one knew the chooks as well as us.

On the family’s last visit to Tick Tock in hospital he had made me promise him to look after his chickens. I told him, ‘Honestly, Tick Tock, I sometimes think you love your chooks more than people.’ There, out of sight of everyone else, he had slipped the key to the Ballet Shoe Factory into my hand and whispered: ‘Remember.’ Which I’d thought was a strange thing to say to a boy not known for forgetting.

Much of my family thought Tick Tock was not quite right in the head, mental. A man who sat for hours in a chook pen talking to chickens and a boy in pidgin-Japanese might give this impression. I guessed what they were thinking: Shady Green was a figment of Tick Tock’s imagination. More proof of the damage the War had done to him all those years ago. But I knew different. When I was younger, no more than eight or nine, Tick Tock told me stories of Shady Green in which he had always seemed so real. These were stories of drains and tunnels and jockeys and racehorses and not for a moment did I think Shady was anything but an actual person.

Mother touched me on the shoulder: ‘Take these in,’ she said, and passed me a large plate of scones, ‘it might keep them busy.’

Anger and disappointment hadn’t dented the crowd’s appetite. When I extended the plate to Aunt Myra, who would normally pepper me with the latest academic achievements of her children—‘Suzanne got an A for her latest essay, I think she’ll do Medicine,’ would be typical, and as Suzanne still hadn’t finished playing with dolls, this might have been jumping the gun—selected a scone, but uttered not a word merely fluttering her eyes as if they were covered in an invisible frost. Only Uncle Graham made any general enquiries about my well-being, ‘How’s that new school going, eh?’ To which I lied and told him it was going great. When it came to schools and academic success there was no greater competition than between the cousins.

After I’d done a complete circuit of the living room there was a loud snap, not unlike when Len did his Achilles tendon, trying too hard to beat me at squash. Behind me, Uncle Alf lay sprawled on the carpet, his chair and its shattered leg beneath him. Startled, I all but dropped the near-empty plate on the dining room table. Under her breath, from the kitchen and not aware that Uncle Alf was destroying her furniture, Mother declared: ‘You’d think they were house bricks the way you treat them.’

If I hadn’t been the centre of attention, I might have scoffed one of the remaining scones. But it struck me that a mouth stuffed with scone might be an image I could do without—greedy-guts. I resisted the temptation.

Len came up beside me. ‘I thought I’d see if you’d broken the table. I could put it out in the garage with Alf’s chair.’

‘I’ll try harder next time,’ I assured him.

‘Who’s Shady Green?’

I shrugged. ‘You know old Tick Tock.’

Len swallowed the last morsel of a scone, wiping butter from the corners of his mouth that left his lips shiny and red. ‘Not as well as you do,’ he said and squinted in that way he had of intentionally conveying suspicion.

My right hand felt for the sharp ridges of the key to the Ballet Shoe Factory in the bottom of my pocket.

‘Don’t bother to answer. Now’s not the time,’ he said, casting his eyes around the room where conversations had begun to bubble again. ‘Make yourself scarce. We’ll talk about this later.’

I needed no further invitation, bolting out the front door and grabbing the Malvern Star bike that lay spreadeagled on the lawn. As I raced down the Esplanade Mrs Wilkinson gave me a smile, and old Mrs Murray a little regal wiggling wave. Bud Brown, peered at me through his bottle-thick dark-framed glasses before he stopped reversing out of his drive to let me snake around the rear of his late model shark-finned sedan. Nobody could do a thing in this town without being spotted. I was off to Gerry Nelson’s, my best friend, to give him ‘The news’ and I’d gone no more than one hundred yards and had three eyewitnesses.

For the record Michel was pronounced just like Michael—Mother had insisted on the Italian spelling. For all of my sixteen years I had lived in Beau Vista a western suburb eight miles from the Central Business District of Melbourne.

Much of Beau Vista was resumed swamp. It lay almost cut off from the world, serviced only by a two-carriage spur-line train and the Sitch Bus Company. A suburb held in the jaws of smoke-belching petrol refineries on one side and, on the other side, what passed for a beach. Beau Vista was where the water of Hobsons Bay met its most westerly suburban settlement; where after a sweltering summer’s day the southerly change would arrive first, and I would ring our cousins on the other side of Melbourne and say how cool it was out here already, secretly hoping that this might make them jealous of where I lived.

The beach and the great expanse of choppy blue-grey bay could make you forget how unsightly the factories were, even though the beach could hardly be described as spectacular. It wasn’t a beach like Williamstown’s with its wide and handsome boardwalk. Seaweed and kelp would pile up after heavy weather in drifts so deep I could hardly see the sand. The sulphurous stench would be awful and last for days, covering the whole town like a blanket. When our cousins came over for a swim, I would hope it didn’t stink because they would all make such a fuss and say it was worse than not having a beach at all. Still, when the seaweed didn’t wash up, and it was blazing hot in the height of summer and the northerlies seemed to blast all the way from the withering Wimmera Mallee scrublands, and the blowflies were as big as ten-cent pieces, I was glad it was there no matter what anyone else might have thought of it.

Gerry lived in a house without a front fence. The lack of a front fence created the impression that the house was abandoned, and that the front yard was a sort of no-man’s land. Built of fibro-cement there was a whole sheet of it missing from beneath the lounge window, making it look as if the house had got a punch in the eye.

The front door was chocked open and the fly-wire door shut. The hallway was empty all the way down to the open back door and the plastic-coloured strips of fly screen, blowing in the draught. There was no sound from inside. The Venetian blinds of the lounge room window were open, the big old phonogram on full display where a TV would otherwise be. The Nelsons didn’t have a TV. Gerry’s father didn’t believe in them.

Gerry and his two brothers lived under a military-style regime where a thrashing was never too far away. Gerry’s father’s great fear was that Gerry or one of his two brothers would disgrace the family. Mr Nelson hung a leather belt on a nail in the kitchen, right near where they pencilled the straight ruled lines on the walls that measured the boys as they grew. There wasn’t a week went by that the strap didn’t come off the wall. Gerry’s father would get out the strap, a fine-looking one made of camel-brown leather and double-stitched the whole way round. He would deliver three or six ‘cuts’, never more nor less, no matter how minor or major the infraction, three or six that was it. Gerry would ask, ‘Three or six?’ And he would be told with the authority of an archbishop what was coming.

Gerry’s father would beat the boys butt naked, bent double over the kitchen table, trousers around their ankles, telling them while he dealt out the thrashing, why it would do them good, although the only good it seemed to be doing was to Gerry’s dad. The curious thing was the more Gerry’s dad leathered those boys, the harder and tougher they got, and the more likely they were to do exactly what he feared the most.

I went around the side of the house to the backyard. Like most blocks of land in Beau Vista the Nelsons had a large backyard. Unlike most houses in Beau Vista the toilet—the thunderbox—was in the very middle of it. The thunderbox, although old and wooden, was an oasis, covered in lush green vines and a trellising that wove plump passionfruit throughout the foliage. Inside it was dark and cool with just enough natural light to read by. The can filled a round hole in a long wooden bench. On one side of the bench was a pile of newspapers and magazines. On a nail on the wall were stripped sheets of newspaper. In the pile of newspapers and magazines there was always a copy of Playboy right at the bottom as if that hid it. Gerry’s father could spend most of a Sunday morning in there. It was his favourite place. That wasn’t a guess. He told us.

Gerry’s blue gym boots stretched out into the doorway of the thunderbox.

‘Gerry?’ I ventured.

‘Who’s that?’ Came the voice from within.

‘It’s me.’

Gerry knew who it was. ‘Why don’t you come over here where I can talk to you?’

‘I’m not coming over there while you’re on the throne.’

Lately Gerry had taken to sitting on the can for extended periods. I think he thought that this was what all men did. Paper rustled from inside the thunderbox. It might have been the Playboy.

‘What are you afraid of?’ The sound of lips and gums, sucking what turned out to be the soft insides of a passionfruit, emerged from the thunderbox.

‘You’re not eating in there, are you?’ I was not faking my disgust.

More noises came from the thunderbox, the harsh rasp of paper being rubbed. ‘Jesus, do you mind?’

‘No.’ The toilet flushed and the purple shell of a passionfruit flew out of the open door.

Gerry emerged with a red and black plaid shirt hanging over his jeans. Puberty had come early for Gerry. He had thick sideburns the colour of rusty corrugated iron and hair only his mother could have cut that was always a bit long at the front, and had to be flicked back to keep it from covering his eyes. Mrs Nelson didn’t use a bowl, but there was always a definite lopsidedness to it. His hair gave the impression that he had something to hide.

He lifted a leg and scratched his groin.

‘Do you have to?’ I asked.

‘Some of us do, yeah.’ He grinned like a sailor going on shore leave.

‘Can’t you think of something else?’

‘Not often. Can you?’

‘Of course I can.’

‘That’s your problem.’

‘I don’t have a problem.’

‘You have a problem. You know you have a problem.’

‘I need to talk to you about something.’

‘OK, what?’ Gerry asked.

I told Gerry that Tick Tock had sort of left the Ballet Shoe Factory to me.

Gerry shrugged. ‘Who’d want it?’

‘Are you crazy? It’s got to be worth a mint.’

‘S’pose it might help pay for that new swank school of yours.’ His face did its best at a sneer. Gerry had still not adjusted to my new school that lay in far-off Essendon and for which he had not quite forgiven my treachery in wanting to attend.

‘What’s wrong with you?’

‘Fancy school…money…doesn’t mean you get a girl.’

‘Aren’t you listening? The whole bloody great Ballet Shoe Factory might be mine. Don’t you know what that could mean?’

Gerry acted as if he didn’t care. ‘It’s just a big old house…’

I finished the sentence for him, ‘…that’s worth a fortune. I’m thinking panel van, trip to Fiji, you and me.’

The mention of a panel van had worked like a dose of smelling salts on an unconscious footballer. ‘A shagging wagon would be good,’ he mumbled.

‘Jet black, surf racks, a chick with tits like Raquel Welch painted on the outside.’

‘V-8, Ford, of course?’

‘Of course.’ I had Gerry in a stupor. For a moment I thought his eyes might roll over into the back of his head as he imagined himself at the wheel of the panel van. ‘I’m not sure your mother would let you get away with Raquel Welch.’

‘OK, Hayley Mills then.’

Gerry groaned.

‘Come on. Let’s get down there.’

Gerry flicked the hair from his eyes. ‘Yeah s’pose anything to get me out of this place.’

The Ballet Shoe Factory lay four miles away in Williamstown. In no time we had sprinted the length of the Esplanade and were out on the abandoned Williamstown racecourse. Up ahead were the ruins of the old grandstand and beyond that Kororoit Creek and the petro-chemical and oil refineries, and the neat ordered clusters of massive oil storage tanks that were regarded as the border between Beau Vista and Williamstown. The tanks were so big and contained so much oil that I periodically wondered what might happen if they ignited and would the blast make it to where I lived.

We veered right hugging the coastline and skirting the old rifle range until we reached the Williamstown foreshore. Not only did Williamstown have a fancier esplanade than Beau Vista—nineteenth century merchant mansions stretched from one end to the other—but its main streets were as wide as in the City of Melbourne itself. Streets lined with elms so big and broad that they reached out and entangled in one another, forming leafy archways high overhead. Williamstown was not really like Beau Vista at all.

The fastest way to the Ballet Shoe Factory was up a narrow passage between a cluster of grand Victorian shops on Nelson Place. This passage led to a cobblestoned lane known as Little Nelson Place—and one hundred yards along from there was where you would find it.

The Ballet Shoe Factory rose before us tall and magnificent with its massive, grey slate cross-gabled roof commanding our attention. The house, built almost entirely of wooden shingles, was like an elaborate doll’s house made of gingerbread. The intricate white tracery beneath the eaves appeared so delicate and brittle that it might snap off as easily as the decorative frosting of a birthday cake. Beautiful rounded oriel windows and the little balconies they circumscribed, hung in the second-storey air, seemingly supported by nothing but the scent of the gardenias that flowered beneath. Painted in a glossy white, it shone self-importantly in the late afternoon sun on its impressively deep, wide and private allotment. Upon the façade just beneath the eaves was the shape of dark, faded letters that spelt: Gorham’s Ballet Shoe Factory. It was like a house from a children’s fable. A place where, if you believed in fairies and goblins you wouldn’t be surprised in the least to find them inside.

The Ballet Shoe Factory was a great nineteenth-century boom-time folly with no recognised architectural merit beyond its quirkiness. Both its practical and cavernous working premises, and the chicken pens out the back undermined any pretensions to grandeur. The safety of a Heritage Listing had been denied before and would just as certainly be denied again to anyone who cared to apply.

The working premises, or salon, as Tick Tock had called it, swept along the entire southern side of the Ballet Shoe Factory virtually the width of the block—too big for any domestic use. In it every sound was an echo. Untouched for years, it was preserved like a memory.

Nothing appeared to have changed since we were last here, more dust and cobwebs that was all. The sewing machines were where they had always been. The ballet shoes were on their shelves and the fitting stools scattered about as ready as ever to receive the fine heel-print of a dancer’s foot. It was all neat and tidy just the way Tick Tock liked to keep it.

Around the side of the house was the front entrance for which Tick Tock had given me the key. It was in the shape of a ballet shoe with an inscription: My Time Flies. Beneath the inscription was the tiny engraving of a horse in full stride with a jockey on board. Two thin ribbons were threaded through the eyelet of the key. One was pink and the other was green, and both shone with a silky sheen.

The door opened as smoothly as if the lock had been oiled yesterday. Before us was the carpeted imprint of where a desk had once stood, and above that, the faded outline of a painting that had been removed. A picture rail ran head-high the circumference of the entrance hall. The passage on our left led to the salon its door ajar. We entered the wide-open space of the salon. A fourteen feet ceiling and windows that stretched the length of the salon let the light stream in. ‘What’s up here?’ Gerry asked. An open door in the back wall of the salon led to a staircase bathed in the red light of high, stained-glass windows. Royal blue carpet runners swept down in broad pinned folds, leading our eyes up through the mahogany banisters to the upstairs rooms.

Unlike the salon, the rooms upstairs were in a state of disrepair as if they were being dismantled. The living room had been stripped of its flooring. Carpet sat lumped and rolled into corners and beneath the torn-up timber floor the joists lay bare. It seemed the wooden floor had been used as wood for a fire. Inside the fireplace ash had burned to a soft grey and black powder. I stuck my head up the chimney. The flue was covered with dark moist soot. I rubbed my finger along the surface and drew a greasy line.

‘Deros,’ said Gerry and reached over the iron grate of the fireplace and grasped the only thing of material shape: a lump of wood that was burned through, but somehow whole. He held it up to me and with a hand on either end compressed the wood to the ash it really was. It vaporized with barely a puff into the remnants of the fire. Gerry rubbed his smoky-gray hands together and cleaned them down the sides of his trousers. ‘Warm,’ he said.

‘Yeah be a dero for sure,’ I replied with false conviction.

I didn’t need a second reading of the will to tell me that if Shady Green couldn’t be found that the Ballet Shoe Factory was mine alone. Yet I knew as I stood before the remains of the fire that Shady Green and I would meet. I can’t really tell you why I believed that. It’s like explaining why I believed Jesus was the Son of God and not, say, poor little Philip Wilkinson who lived down the road with his deaf and dumb mum and dad. And right then it was as if I could see Shady Green with his legs crossed in front of that fireplace.

‘Hey, bit of art as well. And some old papers full of writing.’

Gerry clutched a painting in one arm and two bundles of loose-leafed paper in the other. Both bundles of paper each individually tied with string, were aged and yellowed, and in the unmistakeable handwriting of Tick Tock.

‘Where were they?’ I asked.

‘The painting was on top of the sideboard. The papers underneath the rolled-up carpet.’

The painting was of a jockey in full racing silks and skullcap seated upon a big bay racehorse. The jockey was in profile, facing straight over the head of the horse. Even though one side of his face was visible, I didn’t recognise him. His silks were striking pink with green hoops. I opened my fisted hand and examined the key. The key with its inscription My Time Flies twinkled in the light, the little bands of pink and green ribbon tied through the eyelet, spread wave-like over the palm of my hand. The colours of the key’s ribbons and the silks of the jockey were identical, more stunning than a normal pink or green. In a racing Best Bets guide they would have been magenta and chartreuse.

Memories are funny things. They pop into your head unannounced and unexpected. Tick Tock is speaking quietly to me, and it’s a long time ago. I’m on his knee. My attention is absolute. I strain for the words. Tick Tock is very close to me, closer than normal, his mouth above my ear, my straight hair moving under the force of his breath. I can smell the hops of beer and the perfume of loose-pouched tobacco from a packet of Drum in his top pocket. The turned-down corners of his mouth are moist with saliva—too much talking and they’ll drip. As his saliva is about to drip, Tick Tock raises an old green jacket sleeve and wipes the drip dry. Behind him a jockey in silks slinks by with a sly grin on his small face. The jockey goes by virtually