Weird shit

This is something that happened to me while I was researching King of the Cross. It is not a funny story, just faintly horrible and strange.
I had made one of my regular pledges to give up alcohol for a month, which left me with time on my hands in the long, warm evenings. My then three-year old son, Ben, did not want to go to bed, so I offered to take him out for a walk while darkness fell. I knew I was making memories for him, that the strongest, most affectionate images I have of my father are those nights we went out to buy freshly baked bagels, or drove back from my grandparents’ house down quiet roads at dusk.
I had been pushing Ben in the pram for about half an hour when he noticed a surfwear-style wallet lying on the pavement. I picked it up, parted the Velcro fastenings, and looked inside. It was fat with cards, including bank cards, business cards and a transport concession card made out to an address about 30 kilometres away. It also contained the owner’s – let’s call him “Mick” – front and back door keys.
I shuffled his cards looking for one that included a contact number. He belonged to a club of some kind but it had already closed for the night. He was a member of squash courts, but they could not give out their patrons’ personal details. One business card carried the name somebody at the Department of Corrective Services, but only a daytime phone number. Another belonged to a brothel on the other side of the road. The card was generic, but it was signed in biro, with a heart, by a woman – let’s call her “Sinead”.
I thought about taking the wallet to the brothel – where Mick had obviously just been – but figured that a prostitute probably would not have contact details for her client. There was also a photo in the wallet, of a wife or girlfriend, who might not be overjoyed to have her partner’s wallet returned from a parlour.
I wondered if I should take the wallet to a police station in the morning, then I thought to check that there were no drugs hidden behind the photograph. There were not, but the picture was signed on the back, with a mobile phone number. It was, in fact, a photo of Sinead from the brothel, and she had the same surname as Mick, an unusual spelling of a fairly common name – let’s call it “Sandersz”.
I phoned Sinead and told her I had found her husband’s wallet, and arranged to meet her at the pub at the top of my road. She was waiting with Mick, a solid, shabby, middle-aged bloke with a flattened face, who explained he had lost it because he was drunk, and had been so angry he had punched something. He showed me his fist, large and undamaged. Sinead and Mick wanted to buy me a beer, but I told them I was not drinking, and went home feeling like I had done a good deed for a couple who were clearly down on their luck.
Because I was working on King of the Cross, I was reading everything I could find about gang crime. The next morning – the very next morning – I picked up a library book that had sat unopened at my bedside for a week. It told the story of a savage gang of bashing murderers in the city in the 1980s. One of the killers was Mick Sanderz. He had served 12 years in jail. I looked him up on the internet, to see if I could find a picture of him. There were no images, but I did come across a newspaper story dated two years previously, in which he and his probation officer had been caught stealing from a sex shop. The probation officer had left her husband and two kids to move in with Sanderz. Her name was Sinead.

Rest In Pants

Alistair Hulett, socialist folk-punk and sound of the Sando, died on 28 January this year. He was a great man, and he once lent me his trousers. In return, I misspelled his name in my memoir, Sex & Money. Here’s the bit that mentioned him. I would’ve posted it earlier, except I still couldn’t work out how to paste from Word into Blogger.

I was intestinally uncomfortable with Penthouse. I did not have anyone I could talk to about this. Everyone I knew from typesetting had worked on porn, and all my politically inclined friends had gone back to the UK, so I took the desperate step of consulting socialist folk singer Alistair Hullet, the former singer of local Pogues cousins, Roaring Jack. On Sunday afternoons, Hullet and his acoustic guitar played revolutionary ballads at the Sandringham Hotel in Newtown. I used to take a seat at the bar sometimes, and soak in the socialism and smoke. I contacted Hullet through his record company and arranged an interview. He was happy to talk to Penthouse. He rarely got any attention from the media. In fact, he often had to fight for the attention of the dozen or so drinkers at the Sando.
Before I met him, I went for a run around Redfern Park, and dropped my house keys. I searched for them in the grass, but it was like trying to find house keys in a park. I turned up for the interview in running gear, and I looked more like a desperate, sweating junkie than a journalist. Hullet, a generous, trusting person, lent me a pair of trousers and a long-sleeved shirt for my next appointment, and listened impassively as I begged special dispensation to work on Penthouse. He seemed puzzled as to why I should think he possessed spiritual authority on behalf of the international working class. From the tone of his songs, I had assumed he was a member of the Australian political equivalent of the SWP. It turned out he was not. He was just this bloke who sang ‘The Internationale’ once a week in the pub.
In the end, he handed down a judgment. He said it was probably alright to work for the magazine, provided you did not take the photographs. I was ready for that. ‘But,’ I said, ‘I write the captions for the photographs.’ Nothing I could say would make Alistair Hullet damn me to hell, or ask for his trousers back. I did not know if I should be relieved that I had not committed a mortal sin, or disappointed that I had not debased myself sufficiently. I did not know what I was doing at all.

Books alive, book dead

Yeah, I know. I haven't written anything in this blog for ages, and what's the point of having a blog when you never actually post. Well, I've got a diary too and I hardly ever write anything in that. Hmmm, reading back, that doesn't sound like such a good argument.
I was supposed to complete my second novel, Spirit House, by the end of March, for release in September. I submitted a first draft, and my publisher said (a) I was trying to tell two stories at once, which is what he said about my first novel; (b) I had to beef up the subsidiary narrative, which is what he said about my first novel; (c) I had to link the stories more closely, which is what he said about my first novel. He was right about my first novel, and he was right about this one too. So I gave him a second draft, which was about 20,000 words longer, and he didn't like it much, and I didn't either. I had about ten days to produce a third draft, and halfway through I just gave up. So my second novel will now come out in 2011.
However, King of the Cross has been chosen as one of the books you must read by the Australia Council's Books Alive campaign. So buy it. You must read it. The government says so. The campaign will be supported by a book called something like "Ten Short Stories You Must Read". I will have a piece in there, and you must read that as well. Or face prosecution.