9. Monkey Bar

Sunrise found an unusually quiet village. Most days the first beams of light would fall on an activity that was so common it had a name – the dawn shuffle. This was the time of day that caravan screen-doors could be heard to unlatch and figures would emerge to hurry, eyes cast downward, back to their usual sleeping place. Fishermen who’d told their wives they were staying on the boat, women heading back to the single quarters, single men relieved that a trawler at sea hadn’t returned during the night.

A code-of-conduct had developed that if you didn’t make eye contact you didn’t see each other. Some married couples arranged split night and day shifts at the factory specifically to avoid the embarrassment of arriving home from an unlikely story at the same time.

The coming of the new-broom Wild Bill had created such a stir that the villagers had chosen to spend the long Friday night discussing the implications with friends and declared partners. The only legitimate pedestrian would have been Big Stan dragging himself home to his semi-circular plywood van after the night’s drunk but he was locked in the urinal. Irish Bob, finding him snuggled up to the concrete pedestal, decided that waking him would be a danger to his health and moving him, a danger to his gag reflex, locked the door and went home.

This morning the first figure to stir emerges from the back door of the second company demountable into the horizontal shafts of light. He pauses and cocks an ear to the dawn chorus letting the cacophony of birds settle and separate into individual calls – the chirrup of Honeyeaters, the rich song of a Grey Shrike-Thrush, a Lemon Flycatcher, the boom of Bronzewing Pigeons, a red-backed wren, Magpies and distant Kookaburras.

It’s Neil. From the little aluminium shed he retrieves a wheelbarrow piled with fishing net and finds a good place below the acacia tree. He hangs the net from a branch and goes back into the house. He returns with a wooden chair, a mug of hot tea and a loaded net-shuttle. The steam from his tea stripes the shafts of light as he settles and makes the first knot. Peace.

The rest of the village woke slowly but soon the song of birds was blown away by the sounds of men and machines. Trawlers returning to port overnight were now discharging their grey-green cargo at the factory dock. Because it was tiger-prawn season they’d been fishing at night and brine tanks were still full with the last of the catch. Nets were still hanging from vertical booms.

Skippers, already grumpy from having interrupted a successful hunt were further frustrated by the confusion of so much traffic on the river. They were tied five abreast at the dock, engines revving, exhaust pipes spewing fumes into the air.

Deckhands in night-shift-zombie mode manhandled prickly, fifty-pound onion-bags of prawns from freezer to deck. They formed an unhappy human chain across the decks of inside boats to get to the dock and into the factory.

The sun came up way too fast and burned into the backs of men who, if it weren’t for Wild Bill, would now be sleeping.

Supermarket proprietor, Henry Jenkins and his wife Jenny, sensing a bonanza, hustled to open the doors extra early but everybody was busy elsewhere. The empty rows of shelves echoed with the atmospheric music tracks installed to improve store image, gladden employees and stimulate customer purchasing. This morning, on an endless, scratchy loop it was Sugar Sugar.

“I just can’t believe the loveliness of loving you” and so on.

Neil would’ve loved it. It was a hit song by The Archies (1968-1973) a fictional garage band founded by Archie Andrews, Jughead Jones and Reggie Mantle. It was bubblegum music.

Motivational music also played inside the factory over a tinny tannoy. It was Bad Moon Rising by Creedence Clearwater Revival (1967-1972). Rock music.

“I fear rivers over flowing.

I hear the voice of rage and ruin..” and so on.

All factory-hands had been called in to work to handle the overload but they were two distinct work crews. The company’s strategy of setting the two shifts in competition with each other proved unhelpful in this instance. Without the tools, the space or the attitude to coordinate with each other they began to argue. Minge Kerrigan and Toothpaste Lucy got into a fight over the sluice hose causing Toothpaste Lucy to slip, fall and split her cheek.

Normally this would have given Minge a boost in the female pecking-order but both women were so close to the middle of the rankings she knew there would have to be a rematch.

This lack of precise rules is the main problem with pecking-orders. Not every fist-fight was an attempt to move up the order either. Sometimes it was just boisterousness or entertainment. Big Stan and Wiremu te Pakeke, for example, had had seventeen engagements in the past twelve months. Nobody really knew which one of them was the current top-dog and it didn’t really matter because that wasn’t the reason for the fights. They fought because they liked it.

Wiremu te Pakeke, incidentally, was a direct descendant of Manu, one of the unknown founding fathers of Esperance. In his native tongue, his name meant William the Hard but another meaning for Pakeke is “old” in the sense of being made tough by age. His name was Old Bill. Spooky.

The only real value of the Esperance pecking-order was to tell you how far to take a dispute. If your discussion (say on the relative values of blast-freezers or brine tanks) escalated to an invitation out on the grass, you could gauge the risk of acceptance.

Nor did the fisticuff pecking-order have a direct influence on the workplace pecking-order. Wild Bill was indisputable leader in that arrangement since he could do the most damage to your employment but this didn’t mean he could avoid the social version. If you didn’t have a fisticuff rating you couldn’t participate in the society at all. It was a kind of initiation.

At ten o’clock that Saturday morning when Irish Bob opened The Monkey Bar he experienced a first. Not one customer stood anxiously awaiting the event. The only sound he could hear was Big Stan kicking the bars of his urinal cell and threatening to murder the first person he saw if anyone would let him out. 

Irish Bob turned on the lights and took down the chairs and barstools from atop the bar and tables. He rolled up the heavy iron shutters defending the bar, put the float in the till and flushed the taps. He then poured a cold foaming schooner of beer and carried it round the corner to the Gents. Big Stan's hair was caked with vomit and his shirt was soaked in piss. 

“You can have this,” said Irish Bob, “ but you have to sit out on the grass.”

Big Stan’s thinking machine crashed its gears. 

“Sweet,” he said.

At two o’clock that afternoon The Monkey Bar began to fill with tired, anxious and cranky citizenry. They found changes had already been made to this holy place. The pool table had been swung sideways and stood unevenly a yard away from the back wall. There was a stack of papers and two boxes of straight yellow biros neatly arranged on the worn, sickly-green baize. Wild Bill sat on a barstool behind it with a depilated yeti at his side.

When everyone had settled Wild Bill stood and thanked them for coming. He introduced Neil as his little brother. Neil blushed, smiled and waved a deprecating arm. 

Wild Bill announced that all fleet skippers and crew would be re-contracted to their existing positions. This would be an effective extension of their current work agreement. They would be paid a flat rate and a bonus share of every catch. 

The mood in the bar changed immediately. 

Big Stan let out a whoop in the expectation it would be taken up by the group to become a full-blown cheer but it wasn’t. He tried to turn it into a cough, gripped his throat to indicate some kind of pharyngeal issue and slunk to the back of the room.

The evaporation of their major concern had a marked effect on the group’s attention. Though Wild Bill carried on for another half-hour they only heard bits – something about loading to the mother-ship at sea, not cutting across each other’s lines, not firing shot’s at each other and so on. Independent skippers would be afforded all courtesies and the blast-freezers on Osprey might be available to them as well - blah blah blah.

When he finished everyone lined up to sign their new contracts, skippers went first and crewmen in strict pecking order followed. There was a dangerous air of relaxation. Everyone hit the bar. Someone dropped a dollar in the juke. It was The Rolling Stones (1962-) “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”.

But if you try sometimes you just might find

You can get what you need.. and so forth.

Irish Bob found time between filling jugs of beer to provide Little Davy with a bottle of sarsaparilla. Neil, still aglow with the thrill of Wild Bill’s acknowledgement of his little brotherhood clutched a caramel milkshake in an aluminium canister.

Wild Bill had been pushed out of reach by a posse of relieved skippers who vied to refill his beer and, in their own masculine way, flirt with him.

Big Stan, having overcome the embarrassment of his mistimed whoop, made use of his pecking-order position to replenish the schooner from the jugs of celebrating deckhands. He joined arcane conversations about otter boards and cod ends, venturis and freezers and tried to laugh in the right places.

Irish Bob checked under the bar for his marlin spike. Experience told him that it couldn’t be long before the rising liquor level would float a challenge. He was right of course. A booming voice cut across the happy hubbub of voices and brought the entire bar to silence:

“Hay Neil!”

It was Big Stan.

“Can’t you grow a beard? You must be a poof!”

At the far end of the room, back behind the pool table, Neil strained to see who had called his name. Everyone had moved away from Big Stan. There was a terrible tension in the silence. Neil finally identified Big Stan, smiled and waved. Laughter erupted. 

Big Stan was none for two.

Even a thinking-machine-damaged ex-pug like Big Stan has his limits. He decided to bypass Neil and go straight for the big Kahuna. He bulled his way to the table of Wild Bill and the coquettish skippers and tried to pick a fight.

“We don’t like blast freezers round here,” he said. “We like brine.”

That’s when Big Stan was blown into the air by an unexplained explosion. It blew him twenty feet along the wall, out the door and onto the grassy front yard. 

It was Neil.

The combination of seeing a threat to his brother and the sound of the hated name had turned Neil into a human torpedo.

He set Big Stan down on a convenient patch of grass to further subdue him with straight mechanical punches from alternating fists. When Stan fell down Neil lay down beside him and punched him until he got up. Neil's face was completely calm like a man doing a rather repetitive factory job.

Wild Bill, hampered by the crowd cramming out the door to see the show, arrived late. When he got there Neil was still pistoning punches at an extremely repentant Big Stan.

Wiremu te Pakeke stepped in to break it up and Neil punched him half way across the yard, over the bank and into the river. 

Wild Bill finally got to his brother and delivered a hard slap.

The shock of the slap brought Neil back to his senses. He stared unbelievingly into the face of his hero and his own face crumpled. A fat tear leaked from one startled eye and rolled down his face.

Wild Bill held him tight in a reassuring bear hug.

The crowd, except for Little Davy, looked away and eventually straggled back inside for more drinks.

The pecking-order question was settled.

© Ray Lillis 2012