Death in Brunswick Read online

  BOYD OXLADE was born in Sydney, and educated by the Jesuits in Ireland and at Xavier College, Melbourne. While at boarding school he developed a love of reading and began to write fiction.

  Oxlade attended Monash University in Melbourne during the heady years of student protests, then lived in Carlton—for a time in a converted chicken shed—before the suburb became gentrified. He worked occasionally as a cook and as a gravedigger, but was mostly on the dole: once for nine years straight.

  Hoping in vain to make some money, Oxlade wrote Death in Brunswick. It was published by Heinemann in 1987 and acclaimed for its finely tuned comic depiction of Melbourne’s ethnically diverse northern suburbs.

  He co-wrote the screenplay for a film adaptation of the novel with the director John Ruane. Released in 1991, the movie starred Sam Neill, Zoe Carides and John Clarke, and became a cult hit. Its grave-digging scene remains one of the most famous moments in Australian cinema.

  Oxlade subsequently wrote screenplays and stories, ‘mostly with no success’. He has had poems published in overseas magazines, and has returned to work on a project called ‘Ron Elms, the Flying Butcher of Alamein’.

  SHANE MALONEY is the author of the award-winning and much-loved Murray Whelan series—Stiff, The Brush-Off, Nice Try, The Big Ask, Something Fishy and Sucked In—which is characterised by a strong sense of humour, and an acute sense of Melbourne’s political and cultural nuances. He has been published in the UK, Germany, France, Britain, Japan, Finland and the US.

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  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

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  Copyright © Boyd Oxlade 1987

  Introduction copyright © Shane Maloney 2012

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published by William Heinemann Australia 1987

  This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2012

  Cover design by WH Chong

  Page design by Text

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters

  Primary print ISBN: 9781922079800

  Ebook ISBN: 9781922148001

  Author: Oxlade, Boyd.

  Title: Death in Brunswick / by Boyd Oxlade;

  introduction by Shane Maloney. Series: Text classics.

  Other Authors/Contributors: Maloney, Shane.

  Dewey Number: A823.3

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  Grave Laughter

  by Shane Maloney

  Death in Brunswick

  IN 1980, give or take, I was a booking agent in the music business, pitching rock bands to a circuit of Melbourne’s inner-city pubs and outer-suburban beer barns. The bands were forever changing their names or breaking up, the money was terrible, the venues were fleapits and the promoters were vile. It was great.

  The largest and most prestigious venue in the inner north was Bombay Rock, a former wedding reception centre on Sydney Road just past the Brunswick Town Hall. The Bombay’s blank façade was painted black and you entered through a side street, up a flight of bare concrete stairs. The door was tended by bouncers only recently descended from the trees. Raised by pit bulls and selected for their stupidity, violence and eagerness to take offence, they took great pleasure in pitching luckless punters down the stairs headfirst like ballistic missiles. In those days, there was nothing hip about Brunswick.

  Licensing regulations dictated that alcohol could only be served if accompanied by a substantial meal, so the punters got a ticket entitling them to choose either an all-leather dim-sim or a wedge of mystery pizza from a bain-marie at the bar. The food was cooked eight weeks in advance and lit like a crime scene. You had to be blind drunk or starving, or both, to go anywhere near it. But the crowd wasn’t there for the cuisine and the joint was usually packed.

  When I wasn’t selling rock bands I occasionally took a drink at certain watering holes in the FitzCarlton vicinity, an area not yet entirely gentrified. Boyd Oxlade drank in some of the same places. He had a mop of black hair, the demeanour of a private schoolboy going to seed, a watchful eye and a sarcastic turn of phrase. He made for convivially misanthropic conversation over a glass or three. Apart from that, I knew nothing about him. If he had literary ambitions, he kept them under his coaster.

  Eventually pub rock was killed by stand-up comedy, poker machines and food poisoning. I found other work, got older and moved into Brunswick—a suburb still industrial, ugly and woggy enough to be affordable. Boyd Oxlade drifted off my radar.

  Death in Brunswick appeared in 1987, as if out of nowhere. Boyd Oxlade had been hiding his light. Set in a recognisable recent past, the novel was vivid and raffish and mordantly funny. It attracted an immediate readership. Its production for the screen seemed both natural and inevitable, and a film adaptation was released in 1991. Starring Sam Neill, Zoe Carides and John Clarke, it became the Death in Brunswick that most people know. The corpse-stomping scene in the graveyard remains one of the most darkly comic moments in Australian cinema, but an add-on happy ending took the sharper edge off the book.

  The novel’s resurrection as a Text Classic provides an opportunity for new readers to go slumming and old readers to reacquaint themselves with the flaccid Carl, one of the most unlikely protagonists in Australian literature. The title alone is worth the price of admission. Forget Venice, it declares. Step aside Mann and Mahler, Visconti and Bogarde. Here is a book primed to take the micky.

  At thirty-seven, Carl is a washed-out barfly-bohemian, a man whose never-promising future is well behind him—along with a lesbian wife and their child. He can still squeeze into skinny black jeans, but his hairline is retreating and fiasco haunts his loins. At the fag end of his prospects, he slaves three days a week as the cook at a Brunswick music club called The Marquee—instantly recognisable as Bombay Rock—and gets around, like Nora in Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip, on an old pushbike, albeit with considerably less pleasure.

  His only friend, the staunchly proletarian Dave, is a gravedigger at Coburg Cemetery with a monstrously PC shrew of a wife. Carl lusts after a sassy seventeen-year-old Greek barmaid at the club, Sophie, and owes Turkish Mustapha, his kitchen hand, money for drugs. His boss, Yanni, is a fat suck and the thuggish bouncers terrorise him. Perennially hungover and broke, Carl invites his mother to stay for a couple of weeks while she recuperates from a heart attack. She chainsmokes and plays a recording of Mahler over and over again. He resents her and steals her medication.

  Carl’s Brunswick is a purgatory of shoddy houses inhabited by surly, vaguely menacing immigrants. It swelters in the summer heat, empty cans rattling along its bluestone gutters. Mahler’s Fifth drones in Carl’s ears, and in the greasy claustrophobia of the club kitchen true romance is a handjob against the coolroom door. Carl dreams of escape to the kind of comfortable middle-class life he already despises. Only when he hits rock bottom does his luck begin to change.

  He looked at Sophie again. My God! He heard not so much the bat squeak of sexuality as a low cockatoo’s shriek. She looked so young and healthy. Maybe I...

  She had finished the pots and was leaning against the sink; she wore his short apron. He saw her in profile, a very Greek profile, he thought; her round, soft face was dominated by a strong hooked nose. Jesus, what a conk! It was a bit intimidating, really. But what about that pouter-pigeon chest—that big shapely
bum—the uniform—even the apron—God, she looks like something out of one of those magazines!

  He felt predatory—like that well-known molester of young Greek girls, Lord Byron. However, not having the social advantages of that aristocratic harasser, he put a note of special appeal into his voice:

  ‘Sophie, listen, go and get us another drink, will you? A double, ay?’

  She smiled. God, look at those teeth. He thought of his own: twenty-eight left and sore gums.

  In the 1970s Helen Garner blazed a literary trail through an inner-urban milieu of sexual politics, drugs and drift. Boyd Oxlade’s Brunswick lies a bit further down that trail, just a few years on. The low life was becoming a rite of passage and a new generation of writers stuck their heads in the bucket. By the time Andrew McGahan’s Praise appeared in 1992 they were calling it Dirty Realism.

  Brunswick is much changed since Boyd Oxlade invoked its name as an ironic counterpoint to a more famous book, a more redolent setting. The factories are gone, the houses cost a small fortune, the pizza is thin-crust artisanal and only the faintest traces remain of the feminist graffiti. But scratch beneath the hipster bars and snazzy apartment blocks and you will find, not far below the surface, that Death in Brunswick still haunts the place—conniving, paranoid and laughing grimly up its sleeve.

  To Sara and Sarah and Teresa

  ONE

  Carl was in Sydney when his mother had her first heart attack. He felt uncomfortable in that beautiful city and envied and despised the people he knew there. But after his holiday he felt guilty enough to offer to look after her for a couple of weeks.

  Mrs Fitzgerald lived with her daughter and son-in-law in a large pink South Yarra town house. Carl went to his sister’s one Wednesday and, rather truculent with embarrassment, repeated his offer. His sister was surprised.

  ‘No, no, I want to!’ he cried, disliking her pastel house and her loose expensive cotton clothes.

  ‘Carl, you know you’ll fight with her!’

  ‘No, I won’t, I swear,’ he said, hopping in his eagerness to leave. ‘Get her ready, I’ll pick her up at four.’ He paused. ‘She does want to come, doesn’t she?’

  ‘Yes, of course she does, she’s so pleased. Now don’t let me down, Carl, she’s not well, you know. She’s only been out of hospital two weeks. And…what about your house…?’

  ‘Jesus! Look, I’ll be here at four, all right? Christ! It’s only for two weeks.’

  *

  Carl, who usually slept late, struggled awake at seven o’clock. A high wind tossed the wattles in his untidy street and he could hear cans rolling in the gutters. It was warm and close.

  He got up to find his mother making the first of innumerable cups of strong tea and smoking her first Rothman’s Plain.

  ‘Jesus, Mother, don’t smoke!’ He stepped down into the small dark kitchen. His mother glimmered blonde and puffy in the half-light. She slipped the cigarette into the sink and said gaily, ‘Ah, sure, one won’t hurt me.’

  Mrs Fitzgerald thought of herself as a fey, charming Irish gentlewoman.

  Carl felt a familiar mixture of disgust and pity.

  ‘Well, have you taken your pills?’

  ‘Yes, dear, don’t fuss,’ and she tottered back to bed carrying the tea. Carl noticed with irritation that she was wearing feathered mules, her hanging buttocks moving coquettishly through her nightie. Christ! Thirteen more days.

  Carl, too tired to piss standing, sat slumped in his outdoor dunny. The door was open; grimy white brick framed grey-green inner suburban bush. Sometimes his yearning for comfort became insupportable. Sighing, he stood, pulling up his pyjama pants, thinking of picture windows, rose gardens and indoor lavatories. And so to shave: Christ, I look tired—like an ageing blond rabbit.

  He marked his receding hairline like a man probing a decaying tooth, and with the aid of a second mirror he examined the progress of the bald patch at his crown. Was it any worse? Maybe. He put the mirror down sadly. Now, what’s today? Thursday. Shit! Work—oh no!

  A real stab of fear went through his chest. Three times a week he cooked at a rock’n’roll club. Its atmosphere of sleaze, danger and criminality, coupled with the strain and travail of cooking, carried him in the weekly rhythm of anxiety which only the true neurotic knows. Still, another seven hours till I need to go; I won’t think about it.

  He took a last look at his face, thinking of that time in middle age when you are a caricature of your own youth, and went to cheer up his mother.

  By four o’clock his irritation and anxiety were intense. Thoughts of his job pressed in on him, and his mother’s courage-in-adversity and false gaiety were maddening. By three he had given up trying to stop her smoking and, to make matters far worse, she had found a tape of Mahler’s Fifth. Carl hated Mahler. She sat playing it in his cluttered living room.

  ‘Such lovely music, dear.’

  He looked at her with exasperation: there she sat, a fat blonde female Dirk Bogarde facing death, defeated, vain, but brave. Jesus!

  *

  At five, Carl dressed to go to work. This was an operation of some skill. The right image was important as he had lowered his age to get the job and had to dress accordingly: a black shirt buttoned to the neck, hanging over tight Levis, and ripple-soled shoes—about right. But his hair—now that was a more difficult problem. He combed it forward in the front and back at the sides, fluffed it at the crown with his hair drier, and applied plenty of hair gel. He looked in the mirror—satisfactorily neo-punk.

  OK, onward!

  ‘You will be all right, won’t you, Mother? You know where to ring? I’ll be home about eleven.’

  Don’t die on me, you old bag. Imagine the horror of finding her slumped, those bulging green eyes fixed in accusation, all orifices open—Jesus! And what would his sister say?

  Mounting his rusty bike, he pedalled through Brunswick. The sky was low and grey. Past melancholy unemployed Turks he went, with their unfortunate wives muffled to the eyes in the thirty-degree heat; past decaying terrace houses daubed with feminist slogans, into Sydney Road, dodging the traffic, past the great white town hall and rows of bankrupt shops.

  At last he chained his bike outside The Marquee. This establishment had previously been a Greek taverna where big-breasted blondes sang to bazouki bands and had extraordinary amounts of money pinned to their dresses; where the police were paid handsomely to ignore gambling and prostitution; where the brandy was seven dollars a glass and a good time was had by all.

  But now the club was a rock’n’roll venue where the drinks were still exorbitant but the musicians were paid a pittance and nobody had a good time as far as Carl could see, and as for the rest, the funny business, well what about it? The less I know the better.

  Unlocking the scarred back door he walked down a cluttered passage into the kitchen where he was welcomed by the foul fatty effluvia which enshroud even the cleanest commercial kitchen: that complicated perfume of mouse shit, garlic, leaking gas and the dirty bilge which sloshes round the bottom of bain-maries.

  He looked around resentfully. The kitchen had once been well equipped and clean, but that was long ago; now it was squalid and nothing worked very well. There was a large coolroom, but the motor ran spasmodically; there were two big commercial stoves, but they were caked with grease and the burners half choked. The floor was a minefield of loose tiles, and the stainless-steel bench was scarred, its corners broken and dangerously sharp.

  And what’s on tonight?

  He walked through into the empty dark club; there was a heavy smell of stale tobacco. He strained to see the menu chalked on a blackboard: ‘Veg. Lasagne’, ‘Beef Curry’, ‘Ham Salad’—very Epicure. Now stop that! he told himself.

  ‘A real cook always tries.’ This maxim had been drummed into him by an old Scots cook at the hotel where Carl had finished his apprenticeship.

  ‘Yes, yes, Mrs Wohlst,’ the old man would say. (Mrs Wohlst was his straight man during these homilies.) ‘Yes, I
well remember in the last war, on the Arakan, making a Boeuf à la mode avec Bechamel out of condemned bully and custard powder—and they fucking loved it! Begging your pardon, Mrs Wohlst.’

  Carl truly admired the old cook not only for his genuine skill but also for his ability to work with crushing hangovers. Carl’s friend Dave had lent him Down and Out in Paris and London and Carl had recognized the kitchen philosophy, the ethos: Se debrouiller—‘We’ll get through!’ You have to try. The drunken old Scot had worked like this all his life and Carl, despite himself, always tried.

  OK, then, Veg. Las. No. Beef Curry first—let’s see what I have to work with. Unlocking the coolroom door, he crossed his fingers as he always did. No use! A kilo of fatty beef, dark and sinister, a case of pulpy tomatoes and half a packaged ham lay on a crusted shelf. Underneath was a box of limp salad greens. The rest of the coolroom was crowded with bags of heavily preserved potatoes.

  God! God! What am I? Fucking Jesus Christ! ‘What do you want? The miracle of the loaves and fishes?!’ he screamed through the door into the empty club.

  Shakily he sat down and lit a cigarette.

  Why is it always like this? God! How I need a drink and more, much more, a few pills…

  Carl, in his youth, had been an ecstatic consumer of every mind-altering drug he could get hold of; but now, flinching from experience like a snail, he craved only the bland delights of tequila and mogadon.

  God! That reminded him, not only did he not have enough food to cook with, but he didn’t have any pills to forget tonight’s fiasco after it was over. How could he sleep with his mother in the house on booze alone? Mustafa—where was he?

  Mustafa was Carl’s kitchen hand and pill supplier—a youngish, quietish Turk. Carl didn’t know much about him. He had four children and a wife, and he lived in a Housing Ministry flat. Carl realized at times that Mustafa must be pretty smart. What with his job, dope money and the dole, Mustafa must be gleaning at least five hundred dollars a week from the interstices of the black economy. Most of the time, however, Carl hardly noticed him. He was always there.