Jacko Read online

  Jacko

  The Great Intruder

  Thomas Keneally

  Also by Thomas Keneally and published by Sceptre

  Blood Red, Sister Rose

  By the Line

  Confederates

  Flying Hero Class

  A Family Madness

  Gossip from the Forest

  The Place Where Souls Are Born

  The Playmaker

  A River Town

  Schindler’s Ark

  Towards Asmara

  A Victim of the Aurora

  A Woman of the Inner Sea

  1

  If people ever wondered how Jacko Emptor was the video trespasser he became, they should have seen where he came from. In the country in which Jacko spent his childhood, a person could have travelled five hundred miles in all available directions without encountering a single locked door.

  Those who, against the odds, understood and loved big Jacko were aware of how this childhood want of locked doors, this paucity of barriers to entry, so drastically directed his later life.

  You could argue that factors other than locked-door deprivation governed the direction Jacko later took. You could claim, for example, that Jacko would not have come to the most crowded and locked-up city of the western world, to the Rome of its day, if Basil Sutherland, the Australian media colossus, had not raided America. Sutherland chose to found his own network in the United States, and invited in the television producer Durkin and his friend Jacko to bring peculiarly Australian tele-mayhem to an already vulgarized medium.

  Starting a new network was, on the face of it, an extraordinary thing even for Sutherland to attempt. It had certainly occurred to no American to try it. It was a given of American culture that the soul was made up of three networks, three apish and like brains, with a little supernumerary cerebellum on the side called the Public Broadcasting System. These were fixed deities: The Trinity and the Virgin Mary.

  Basil Sutherland, who had never been governed by such a cosmology, came from the irreverent city of Perth on the Indian Ocean. Perth, after all, had a tradition of doing racy, hectic, barely legal business.

  Even so, no seer leaning over Basil Sutherland’s birthcot in the Perth Presbyterian Hospital could have predicted it. That he would try to break the hegemony and balance of power of the three electronic sisters who held America’s, and thus a large part of the world’s, mind in bondage.

  But back to Jacko, who worked for Sutherland. If you were a friend of Jacko Emptor’s, you would have seen Sutherland’s electronic ambitions as a fore-ordained mechanism to bring Jacko to the Mecca of locks. I could certainly have foretold it. That Basil would go to all that expansionary trouble just so that Jacko could come to a populous city in a populous nation, a city choked with doors, doors barred not once, but multiply barred, triple-locked, and electronically guarded. Not to mention doormen! The city of most bolts, most bars, most locks, most guards.

  Basil Sutherland existed as a mere trigger to bring Jacko to it.

  Behold Jacko Emptor then. Far from his home and his kin, he is at his work in New York: trying with his cameraman to get inside someone’s walls. He wears a silly porkpie hat of a kind never found in all his Northern Territory father’s millions of acres. Though on Jacko’s great loaf, a Stetson might look like a porkpie! He is also wearing earmuffs and a mohair overcoat and a Burberry scarf rustically knotted. The uninformed might say that he dresses in tune with the flippancy of his vocation: the comic but utterly serious business of circumventing doors.

  The earmuffs and the mohair coat aren’t all for comic effect though. It’s bloody cold, brass monkeys this morning, especially in the cherrypicker bucket which is rising up the face of the Second Avenue apartment block he has chosen for a target. The cameraman and the cable handler who share with him the cramped bucket of the thing are both dressed like skiers. The wind is – as it always is around these big city buildings – subtle and circular. A cornering and recurring demon.

  This is the building he wants to get into, and the cherrypicker, paid for by Sutherland, his implement of entry.

  If Jacko wants to bring a peculiar, cold astringency to his genitals, he can look down, over the waist high parapet, and see the aimed white dish of the microwave truck looking homely: an electronic hearth more than a hundred feet below. Ecstatic to be trying this new method, and drunk with fear, he does, however, in his early thirties carry a disadvantage: the beginnings of the same gut which ten years ago he’d hated in his father, Stammer Jack. He is concerned about how, once he has parlayed entry to someone’s apartment, he will get from the cherrypicker over a fourteenth floor window sill.

  The unwieldy, belly-freezing prospect that morning caused Jacko Emptor to begin muttering his bush mantra:

  —And the man from Snowy River never shifted in his seat—

  It was grand to see that mountain horseman ride.

  Through the stringybarks and saplings on the rough and broken ground,

  Down the hillside at a racing pace he went;

  And he never drew the bridle till he landed safe and sound.

  At the bottom of that terrible descent.

  —Give me a break, said the cameraman, when Jacko finished. The man’s smoky disdain rose in a cloud above the cherrypicker. He was such a sour bugger, this freelancer. Vixen Six – Basil Sutherland’s New York channel – had used him only once or twice before, and he told you as fast as he could that he had five kids by two marriages – this to explain why he considered some jobs too risky or ill-paid. He wouldn’t have been here if poor old Clayton didn’t have the flu. Clayton would, of course, try anything Jacko or Jacko’s producer Dannie suggested, even at the pain of having his camera and his person attacked. Whereas this bloke! Anything other than straight camera work in clear weather on a flat surface, and he was up to the corner to call Durkin in the studio and negotiate an extra fee.

  —I’m freelance, was his cry.

  —He doesn’t belong to anyone, Jacko had murmured to Dannie, his producer. Especially not to himself.

  Arrived on location this morning and, having seen the cherrypicker rig come down the dawn street, the cameraman said in his tight, convinced-of-malice way, No one said cherrypicker.

  And then he was off to the corner. Could have used Dannie’s phone, but did not want anyone overhearing his negotiations.

  Three jobs past, Jacko had christened him Fartfeatures. Now the bugger was complaining about The Man From Snowy River.

  —That’s Banjo Paterson, said Jacko. Great Australian balladist, you ignorant bastard.

  And Jacko persisted then:

  —He was right among the horses as they climbed the further hill,

  And the watchers on the mountain standing mute,

  Saw him ply the stockwhip fiercely, he was right among them still,

  As he raced across the clearing in pursuit.

  Then they lost him for a moment where two mountain gullies met …

  This, Jacko’s talismanic verse, was better not intruded upon. He uttered the verse with a big, forced smile, apparently genial, in Fartfeatures’ direction. Jacko had some special gifts, and the sparing use of contempt was powerful amongst them.

  The unhappy camera oaf would, however, be responsible for guiding Jacko over the window sill and into the chosen room, so that a certain fraternal feeling had to be maintained in the bucket of the cherrypicker.

  I am for the moment being dishonest, relaying events from Jacko’s point of view, as if I knew quite what that was. I am, as you’ll see, his friend and confidant in two cities, and have enough vanity to believe I know him. So for a time I will persist in it.

  I know how delighted he was with the cherrypicker: the supreme device of trespass. I was always attracted by the hubris and triumphalism of
all this! Jacko in a bucket on a hydraulic arm, going vertical in his desire to bypass all the locks.

  Under my H-l visa, I lived a more orderly life than Jacko. I was allowed to teach at NYU – holding seminars in a room above a deli in University Place – for as long as I wanted to. I had a reputation for being good at teaching graduate writing classes, the sort of class which is rare in my native land but is found everywhere in the United States. I had no internal knowledge of how my reputation had been achieved. I shared the city with a wife as tolerant and generous as Jacko’s wife Lucy appeared to be to Jacko.

  We – my wife Maureen and I – were not in New York all the time either. We returned to Sydney every year for at least five months. Given that Sydney was such a pristine city, I should have been a very contented man with my two wonderful locations. But I was unhappy somehow with my own writing, with my publisher, and with my purely literary prospects.

  This is typical of people who follow my craft. There are only a few novelists of my acquaintance who are pleasant human beings meant for inhabiting families. For most, the measure of their happiness is the perceived state of their present work or the likely critical and commercial response to their last. Even delusions concerning the quality of what they are writing utterly govern their sense of well-being or their lack of contentment. We are therefore like alcoholics, and some of us make the comparison incarnate by drinking to celebrate or to soothe ourselves for shifts in talent.

  In that winter I found comfort in the company of unreading, berserk Jacko, and in the mornings would get up unrefreshed by a furry, starting, unsettling whisky sleep, another rewrite of my novel on China awaiting me. And I would scratch myself and watch Morning Manhattan for a distracting sight of my turbulent friend Jacko.

  Though vertigo and his bulk might make him graceless at the sill that morning, he possessed as his spiritual model the Man from Snowy River, who had ridden up and down vertical descents for characteristically antipodean motives: the approval of his mates in the male world.

  Things were of course different in New York. The approval that counted here was the approval of hard-nosed, talented young women – the kind Jacko was always in trouble for calling girls – who were the centurion producers of New York morning television. Jacko would speak to me of how they had watched their strenuous mothers expose the vein of fatuousness in their fathers, quite successful men outside the home, but eunuchs within. These girls had an eye for that seam of stupidity in every man they met from the age of five onwards.

  Dannie (short for Danuta), Jacko’s producer, seated now in the production van below, was the paradigm of such wonderful but well-armoured women. She was barely twenty-five, a graduate of a communications school in Southern California, and full of acrid ambition. It was worth your while not to be indeliberately flippant with Dannie.

  Generally, as site producer, she accompanied Jacko past the doors and barriers, but there wasn’t room even for someone as small-boned as Dannie in the cherrypicker bucket. Video was the technology she seemed to have been born to and which operated today: she would talk to the cameraman, who had earphones; she would have two pictures to choose from when they went to air, the one provided by Fartfeatures, once he started running the tape, and one from the camera crew on the roof of the opposite building; and both she and Jacko had little plugs in their ears through which Durkin, producer-in-chief back at the Vixen Six studio, could speak to Dannie and Jacko.

  The age of tongues had come. The age of many voices in the head. It had supplanted for Jacko the age of his father’s cattle, the outrageous proteins of beef amongst which Jacko had been born and, sometimes in adolescence, feared he would be sunk and lost.

  Here – in view of his producer Dannie’s feelings for him – we have to look flatly at the truth which will be richly validated by this account: Jacko had not even addressed himself to the earnest struggle for self perception which most really modern people were embarked upon, especially in this city of locks. It had not yet come to him that men who said persistently and in all company how much they loved women were in fact misogynists.

  Jacko took not only his bones from Stammer Jack Emptor and from Australian maledom, but, as well, a sort of half-chosen incompetence at sorting out the apparent polarities: desire and fellow-pilgrimhood, which connected and confused man and woman. He shared with and inherited from Stammer Jack the habit of confusing lust with tolerance, but then between peaks of sexual frenzy, of being frankly bewildered.

  Urban and urbane men in New York applied themselves to the mystery. In Jacko’s tradition, though, you knew you couldn’t get anywhere with the mystery, and you went away and drank instead.

  In New York, the Jacko in the cherrypicker bucket had actually been encouraged in these habits. Irrespective of his marriage of a year and a half and the bride named Lucy he had brought with him from Australia, he had found time to become a novelty in a city whose women normally praised men of a different sensibility from Jacko’s. He was pleased to find himself so anachronistically incorrect that someone like Dannie had either never met anyone like him, or even, perversely, against all the rules, admired him for the integrity of his brashness. (I’m not being hard – I suppose I’m trying to be an anthropologist.)

  Jacko himself both exulted in and was frightened by Dannie. He frequently noted both to me and to others that you didn’t know why these New York girls wasted time on you. He feared they might have a missionary fervour, a task of consciousness-raising in mind.

  The cherrypicker was ten floors up now, its great lazy forearm traversing the face of largely opaque or draped windows. The cable handler was coiling cable on the floor of the bucket so that it could in turn be played out into whatever apartment they were successful in penetrating. If any, of course, given all this stoically tinted and draped glass.

  It was not until about the eleventh floor that Jacko began to think, This cherrypicker thing might return a dividend. At that height he was more prepared to focus on the face of the building than on the gulf below, and was gratified to be swung across a window which gave him a view into a kitchen.

  The kitchen was rather well done – copper fittings, blond panelling, microwave. A woman of indeterminate age held the door jamb with one hand and was calling down the corridor to somebody. The primal mother summoning to nutriment.

  —Ah, murmured Jacko as the yearning for such a maternal call struck him.

  —What’d you say? asked the despised cameraman.

  —I was thinking of my old mum, Jacko confessed.

  —Okay, said the despised cameraman.

  Now a living room on the twelfth. Wonders beyond the glass. Very heavy mittel-European sofas. Poles or Hungarians dwelt there for sure. A gilt-framed still life. Could be Corot, only this wasn’t a Corot district. This was a district chosen by Jacko as one of mid-rent and mid-intent, the sort of building whose tenants and owners did not have a law firm on a retainer. Ordinary, genial, tentative New Yorkers.

  By the thirteenth floor Jacko loved this middle class tenement for yielding him so much already. For warming to him. For distracting him from the space below and from the curmudgeonly technician with whom he shared the cherrypicker.

  —And the Snowy River riders on the mountains make their home,

  Where the river runs those giant hills between;

  I have seen full many horsemen since I first commenced to roam,

  But nowhere yet such horsemen have I seen.

  This time Fartfeatures said nothing. For Jacko could hear an echo of Dannie’s fluent, muscular commands coming through the despised cameraman’s earphones.

  —We’re doing the intro, said the cameraman.

  —The name’s Jacko, Jacko reminded him.

  But the cameraman ignored him. Bending over his viewfinder, he said, On the nod.

  Durkin was telling Jacko the same thing through the nodule in his ear.

  —Intro five seconds, said Durkin from the studio eight blocks south and two blocks west of the bucke
t.

  Jacko counted in his head and then the cameraman gave a marginal, negligent nod. Jacko knew he thought, This is just light television anyhow. Who gives a damn about crass morning timing. Jacko smiled with a poisonous brilliance therefore. Just for the mongrel. Just for the drongo bastard.

  —Good morning all you tousled, dressing-gowned, somnolent and bemused inhabitants of Babylon-upon-Hudson, Jacko began. This is the Australian invader, Jacko Emptor. The nightmate of the dawn. Weary of doormen who lack the correct sporting attitudes, I am at the twelfth floor of the Delancey Apartments, and although there doesn’t seem to be much of interest going on beyond the glass, I hope to be able to talk my way into the window of someone on the fourteenth floor, which is as high as we can go.

  In the nodule in his ear, Jacko heard Dannie briefly conversing with Durkin. They were going first to a shot from the building across the road. Then cut back to the studio for news and an interview with an actor.

  —We’re off, said the cameraman.

  Above him, Jacko could see a male face looking down from a closed window. It was curiously aged and yet firm-chinned and composed. It had the cropped hair which generally went with muscular men.

  —Tell the operator to slow down, Jacko ordered the cameraman. See, that window. There. There’s a feller.

  Casually, Fartfeatures spoke into his mike.

  —Stop, fourteenth floor. Ten o’clock.

  —Steady as she goes, said Jacko.

  They slid a little way past the man’s window. He regarded his visitors curiously yet without surprise.

  This is the fellow, Jacko knew. The cameraman gave instructions which eased them back until the balustrade of the cherrypicker stood level with the man’s window.

  —We’re live, the cameraman muttered, and Durkin said the same thing into Jacko’s ear. Jacko beamed his yokel smile.

  —We’re fourteen floors up now, he said. Colder than the nether extremity of a witch, and where I come from they never make a morning as braw and mean as this one is.

  Dannie would be undercutting shots from the building opposite so that people would see that Jacko Emptor stopped at nothing.