Read Online White Dog by Peter Temple - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Peter Temple
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trade unions.
Then young people began to appear. At first alone and shy as urban foxes, they grew in numbers, became bolder. Soon they were loitering in the laundromat, venturing into the pubs, daring to claim a table in the snooker dens. Places catering for their special needs – breakfast in mid-afternoon, for example – opened. Affiliation clusters developed, here dud musicians, here talentless artists, here the illiterate writers, here those who combined all these qualities in spades – the film people.
The old inhabitants, like many original owners, thought the newcomers were simpletons but harmless. So when the speculators arrived and offered to buy their once unsaleable properties, they hid their smiles, took the money and ran for a new brick-veneer in the west.
In the mid-1980s, on a spring Sunday morning, a Volvo stationwagon parked in Brunswick Street. A young couple got out. She was trim, blonded, tanned. He was already broadening in the midsection, sockless, short and hairy legs ending in boatshoes. From a restraining chair in the back seat, he unloaded a child, complaining, flailing. They took it into a cafe.
They were going to have brunch.
The old Brunswick Street was dead, Brunchwick Street born. There was no turning back.
I thought about these things sitting in my car watching a signwriter at work on the window of Morris’s two-down, two-up building. It had once been the premises of C. K. Dovey, printer of personal and business stationery, advertising material, invitations to occasions of all kinds, calling cards. People passing would see Ken standing at the cabinet, selecting each letter from its tray, placing it in the stick in his left hand, inserting spaces – en spaces, em spaces, line spaces. He put the metal down on his steel stone in a frame, a chase, cut decorative borders, mitred their corners, locked the assemblage up tight with quoins. Then he transferred it to the press bed and inked it with a roller.
On Ken Dovey’s window, the painter had outlined the word
Enzio’s
in a fat italic hand and was working on the E in gold paint.
I got out and crossed the street, made my way in the late-morning throng, young and youngish people mostly, modish, long-haired, hairless, the odd balding man with a small tuftsticking out of the back of his head like a vestige of tail, people in Melbourne black, people in Gold Coast white, people in saris, sarongs, the odd suit, the odd secondhand pink tracksuit, many naked midriffs, some not much wider than a grey-hound’s, some not much narrower than a 44-gallon drum but the colour of lard.
‘Going where I’m going?’ said a woman behind me.
‘In principle, I’m willing.’
She came up beside me, brushed against me, you could feel the solidness of her arm, the muscle, not an unpleasant feeling.
I didn’t have to look down to meet her eyes, slate eyes. She was letting her hair grow; it was almost army bootcamp height.
‘How’s business?’ I said.
Her name was Boz. I’d done the work when she gave up being a film grip to buy a two-truck inner-city removal business with a line in carting works of art. The seller was an apparently exhausted man ready for a long rest. When I tried to ensure that he didn’t start up a week later under another name and pinch the goodwill he claimed to be selling, he had to be wrestled to the ground and sat on.
‘Excellent,’ she said. She licked her lower lip, showing a viper of pink tongue. ‘I may have to get another truck.’
‘Wait a while,’ I said. ‘Till you see it’s all flow and no ebb.’
We walked. The oncomings seemed to part for us – well, for a six-feet-two woman, with a broken nose, in overalls.
‘Fussy bastard, this Enzio,’ she said. ‘We go to collect the gas stove he’s bought, it’s disgusting. It looks like it’s been in shearers’ quarters for fifty years, they fire up all eight burners and chuck on a dead sheep, turn it over at half-time in the footy. Just looking at the
Then young people began to appear. At first alone and shy as urban foxes, they grew in numbers, became bolder. Soon they were loitering in the laundromat, venturing into the pubs, daring to claim a table in the snooker dens. Places catering for their special needs – breakfast in mid-afternoon, for example – opened. Affiliation clusters developed, here dud musicians, here talentless artists, here the illiterate writers, here those who combined all these qualities in spades – the film people.
The old inhabitants, like many original owners, thought the newcomers were simpletons but harmless. So when the speculators arrived and offered to buy their once unsaleable properties, they hid their smiles, took the money and ran for a new brick-veneer in the west.
In the mid-1980s, on a spring Sunday morning, a Volvo stationwagon parked in Brunswick Street. A young couple got out. She was trim, blonded, tanned. He was already broadening in the midsection, sockless, short and hairy legs ending in boatshoes. From a restraining chair in the back seat, he unloaded a child, complaining, flailing. They took it into a cafe.
They were going to have brunch.
The old Brunswick Street was dead, Brunchwick Street born. There was no turning back.
I thought about these things sitting in my car watching a signwriter at work on the window of Morris’s two-down, two-up building. It had once been the premises of C. K. Dovey, printer of personal and business stationery, advertising material, invitations to occasions of all kinds, calling cards. People passing would see Ken standing at the cabinet, selecting each letter from its tray, placing it in the stick in his left hand, inserting spaces – en spaces, em spaces, line spaces. He put the metal down on his steel stone in a frame, a chase, cut decorative borders, mitred their corners, locked the assemblage up tight with quoins. Then he transferred it to the press bed and inked it with a roller.
On Ken Dovey’s window, the painter had outlined the word
Enzio’s
in a fat italic hand and was working on the E in gold paint.
I got out and crossed the street, made my way in the late-morning throng, young and youngish people mostly, modish, long-haired, hairless, the odd balding man with a small tuftsticking out of the back of his head like a vestige of tail, people in Melbourne black, people in Gold Coast white, people in saris, sarongs, the odd suit, the odd secondhand pink tracksuit, many naked midriffs, some not much wider than a grey-hound’s, some not much narrower than a 44-gallon drum but the colour of lard.
‘Going where I’m going?’ said a woman behind me.
‘In principle, I’m willing.’
She came up beside me, brushed against me, you could feel the solidness of her arm, the muscle, not an unpleasant feeling.
I didn’t have to look down to meet her eyes, slate eyes. She was letting her hair grow; it was almost army bootcamp height.
‘How’s business?’ I said.
Her name was Boz. I’d done the work when she gave up being a film grip to buy a two-truck inner-city removal business with a line in carting works of art. The seller was an apparently exhausted man ready for a long rest. When I tried to ensure that he didn’t start up a week later under another name and pinch the goodwill he claimed to be selling, he had to be wrestled to the ground and sat on.
‘Excellent,’ she said. She licked her lower lip, showing a viper of pink tongue. ‘I may have to get another truck.’
‘Wait a while,’ I said. ‘Till you see it’s all flow and no ebb.’
We walked. The oncomings seemed to part for us – well, for a six-feet-two woman, with a broken nose, in overalls.
‘Fussy bastard, this Enzio,’ she said. ‘We go to collect the gas stove he’s bought, it’s disgusting. It looks like it’s been in shearers’ quarters for fifty years, they fire up all eight burners and chuck on a dead sheep, turn it over at half-time in the footy. Just looking at the
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