Free Ten Pound Pom by Niall Griffiths Page B

world will quake.
    The boy likes Sydney. The big bridge and the surrounding sea and the towering buildings. He doesn’t particularly want to leave, and when they do, and overnight at Orange in a caravan park and his sister wakes up in the middle of the night being sick off the top bunk and his dad runs to help her in the darkness and cuts his toe open on a chairleg (‘CHRIST! Bastard! Me bloody toe!), the boy sees that as a sign. Should’ve stayed in Sydney. He liked it there. How the beer made people dance and how the people danced anyway. It is 1976.
NOW
    Love that sight of cities, particularly unfamiliar ones, getting closer as I move towards them. The buildings growing bigger. So exciting; all that glittering glass and steel and concrete, and the narrow canyons between them which will contain bars and music and lights and people. There’ll be a waterfront, full of dark dive saloons and salty air, there’ll be people of many races and there’ll be exhaust and neon and many different languages and many treasures to be found. Differences to be celebrated. Faces both hostile and friendly. Lots to discover, lots to explore. We check into the Palisades Hotel in The Rocks on June 14th.This is one of the oldest pubs in Sydney, in one of the oldest European-settled parts of Australia. The bar is brilliant, dust and log fires and smoking permitted, the rooms basic as hell – bed, wardrobe, side table and that’s it. Not even a telly. But it’s clean and cheap with a wide balcony that overlooks the harbour, the arc of the bridge swooping above and the ships coasting underneath and the skyscrapers in the foreground and also beyond the river, the early-evening sunlight striking their heights. I already like this part of the city. It seems old, or at least as old as European-settled Oz can get. I don’t remember Sydney looking like this, but then I don’t remember much of the city’s physicality at all, and no doubt it’s grown and boomed in thirty years. The Nullarbor is getting closer to us, as is Perth, and those are the things that appear largest and nearest in my memory.
    But The Rocks, The Rocks… this is the place where I first got drunk. My first ever taste of alcohol occurred here, in the Argyle Centre, which isn’t there any more. So I get drunk in The Palisades bar instead and it’s just as interesting and astonishing as it was all those years ago, the hum and hover in the head, raise the glass to your mouth and the world is one way then lower it and it’s another. It’s changed in those scant seconds of gulping. It’s always the same in that it always changes. Each instance of drunkenness is different from the other, yet connected, somehow, links in a long chain of intoxication. Roundabout midnight, drunk, a taxi carries me under the bridge. I look up at it. Think nothing but a big bellow of approval, untranslatable. Fall asleep thinking; I’ve been drunk, now, on six continents. I know it’s childish to feel proud of that. But now I’ve been on drinking sprees in six continents.
    I have things to do in Sydney. A month earlier, backhome, I’d received an email from a feller called Ian Peddie, a native of Wolverhampton who was teaching at Sydney uni and conducting email interviews with contemporary British writers, his field of study. Would I mind answering some questions? Not at all, I said, but if he liked, we could talk face-to-face in a month or so. Great, he said, and he’ll organise a reading for me at the uni. Bit of extra money for me. And my agent’s assistant had put me in touch with a Sydney-based journalist, Geordie Williamson, and we’d exchanged emails and arranged to meet so I bell him and tell him to meet me on the steps of the Opera House, which is why I’m sitting there, slightly hungover, frowning at the rain that threatens to grow in strength, wondering if I’m sitting on the very same spot that my arse occupied thirty years ago. Going from the sublime to the ridiculous. I