Autumn Laing by Alex Miller Page B

THE LIGHT. HE was holding up Edith’s silver-mounted hand mirror, tilting his chin to examine himself. The glitter of his unshaved jaw in the chilly morning. His pale eyes looking down his nose at himself, a touch of dismay in his expression. It’s true, he was thinking, I’m not a serious-looking person. That other man inside him was rehearsing those insecurities of his that never left him free of doubt about the outcome of any project he set himself, hearing the doom of his dreams always in the voices of the bosses, hating himself for hating them for being born to what they were. The thought of appealing to one of Edith’s mob for help was oppressing him. The anxiety he had of them since his childhood, and from which he never liberated himself as a grown man. But who frees himself from childhood’s pains and dilemmas?
    Regarding himself that morning in Edith’s lovely little hand mirror, Pat was theatricalising the scene, Sir Malcolm’sreception of him later that day, an imaginary conversation that went something along the following lines:
SECRETARY: There’s a little Irish larrikin out here insisting on seeing you, sir.
SIR MALCOLM: Is that how you would describe him?
SECRETARY: He says he’s an artist.
SIR MALCOLM: A bullshit artist, is it?
SECRETARY: More than likely, sir. He says he’s been recommended to you by the director of the Gallery School.
SIR MALCOLM: Bernie Threshold? I’ll be damned.
SECRETARY: So he says.
SIR MALCOLM: Well, you’d better send him in then. We can’t go upsetting one of Bernie’s little angels, can we?
    Pat fingered his bristles and turned to look out the window, something catching his eye. It was the first of the sun lighting the highest point of Gerner’s hill, an emerald gold where he’d spilled the guts of that poor old nag yesterday. There was every reason to be anxious. Getting to where the money was had always been the hardest thing for the Donlons. The most unnatural thing, he might more truly say. He and his mum and dad and the uncles and aunts. So far he’d stayed honest, and what good had it done him? The best-paying job he’d ever had was serving pies and sausage rolls to the late-night drunks at Bill Tetley’s stall in Swanston Street. Keeping himself in tucker and saving the best hours of his days for painting and writing. He had seen men get so confused by the need for money they had robbed their mates. And in David O’Grady’s case, his ownmother. Poor bastard. There had been no need to step under a train because of the shame of that. A terrible mistake. David O’Grady. He had not been a bad man in himself. Not in his heart. Dreadful scenes of destitution and violent events along the way of keeping yourself sane and on some kind of track that would get you somewhere. He had gone to school with Dave. It had not been easy avoiding the traps. And then not bending your knee to the bastards.
    ‘You don’t get money,’ his dad tearfully told his solemnly assembled family that Saturday afternoon after he’d done his wages on a certainty at the Caulfield track. ‘You have to already have it.’ And he was right. The way of the world, they called it. It was the kind of family gathering that stuck in your memory, that one. But his mother wasn’t crying. Your thoughts take you back to those memories every time you’re faced with a crisis to do with not having any money. And wasn’t there a kind of fatalism in what his dad said that had an irresistible throb of the truth in it for them? Hadn’t the Donlons always repelled money? Wasn’t that the plain fact of what his dad meant? Wasn’t it something in the family make-up? An ancestral lack of merit, or something like that? If there is ancestral nobility and merit then there is surely a lack of it too. His own lot. There hadn’t been a single accomplished man or woman among them. Not one for all those six generations of trying their luck in Australia, the land of opportunity. A bunch of no-hopers. The