Pieces of Clootie

By Robert Dalvean

This is the story of Manfred Clootie?

Rest assured, he exists, not perhaps as someone you could bump into, but certainly as an embodiment of poetic larceny (which is poetic licence applied to minor crime, in his case manticulation, commonly known as pickpocketing).

Nobody is quite sure that he is still among the living. He has twisted and turned his biography so grievously that some people have reported that they attended his funeral more than once. Certainly he took his first breath some time before the Second World War; whether or not he has yet taken his last is a difficult question but not one that is beyond all conjecture.

The compiler of these recollections has attempted to gather Clootie’s writings and to place them in a single archive. Alas, the man was a slovenly organiser and so his slaves, ex-proofreaders and minor editors, some of them barely literate, have been forced to gather up the scattered leaves that contain his scribblings and have tried to bind them together into one volume, which is this book.

The poor old manticulator has no real use for mobile phones or blogs. His phone number is unlisted,

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robert Dalvean
• Release date: Sep 5, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370516216

Book preview

Prologue – fish wish

I want to be a fish, I said, and they said, Why?

I said, it’s cool down there and green,

Like bottle glass.

And they said, You are mad, think of the nets,

And fish that feed on fish and worms with hooks.

And I said, those are traps for fools.

And they said, How will you talk down there?

I’ll sing alone, I said, in bubble notes.

The wise old doctor shook his head

And told my grieving wife, You’re right,

He’s cracked, we’d better call the van.

And I was caught by two big men in hip boots, carrying nets,

Who threw me in a tank and drove away.

At the aquarium they gaffed and hauled me out,

And dumped me in a bowl so small

That I could hardly stretch,

And now two days a week I’m put on show,

And visitors drop worms over the side,

Which I must eat - I’m given nothing else.

This wasn’t what I planned,

But it’s a beginning

Something of myself

I, Manfred Clootie, being of unsound character and not nice to know, am the ideal chronicler, annalist, scrivener, or whatever the word is, of my own family. A crew I first encountered on the day of my birth. I knew the strange and disaffected men and women who saw this queer construct, the extended Clootie family, as a kind of Purgatory through which they might pass, shedding sin and guilt, to emerge at last into the blissful heaven of normality. The poor bastards!

I’m not claiming to be superior to this mob. I’m not claiming anything. I’m just looking for an easy berth, a place to sleep where the police can’t find me; for I am Manfred Clootie, the pickpocket poet, gleaner of secrets and reader of destinies, and people like me can’t quite manage to function in societies that pretend to reward the virtuous. Of course, when I contemplate my disastrous life I can only say that to me it looks perfectly ordinary. Anyone in my position would have done what I did. But then I think of my father, that sober plumber whose talents were as limited as mine, and I think: Well, he wouldn’t, but he was an exception. And then I think of other exceptions, and the exceptions pile themselves up until the whole of humanity forms a great tottering heap, alongside which I stand, muttering to myself and wondering where the next meal is coming from.

I am perhaps the greatest of the unknown sonneteers (a mute legion of in-the-head versifiers who never cease to write five-footed lines and set them into fourteen-line grids). I am indifferent to publication unless it leads to wealth, which, given the lack of demand for sonnets, it’s unlikely to do.

My work is all in the poisoned-word category. I use verse to wound, to kill, and as a scalpel to vivisect, and as a fixative, to embalm. I could suck the liver from your body and you wouldn’t even know it, for you’d be held in one of my rhymes like a fly in aspic - or is it amber? (The sound of demolition - wrecking balls thumping merrily into old walls, that sort of thing- is interacting with my hangover.)

As I teeter on the brink of my eighth decade, my three-score and ten years laden with biographical dross, I can hear the susurrus of my hair falling out. My eyeballs bulge goiterously, almost touching the lenses of my superannuated bifocals. And is that a smoker’s wheeze, that half-heard trombone note that drones in time with my breathing? There, that disposes of me.

My reasons for writing this chronicle are purely selfish. I am not one who stands up well under cross-examination. A good lawyer - or even a bad one - would tear me into tiny pieces, if I were not prepared. Too many of my brain cells have succumbed to a diet rich in alcohol and saturated fats. My memory does work, but it works slowly and imperfectly; and when it fails I involuntarily invent. The fiction-building faculty must be the brain’s last frontier. Only yesterday I found myself telling someone how I came to have a broken nose. And only later did it occur to me that the facts had been otherwise. The story I told involved heroic conflict. The story my memory subsequently released had to do with falling downstairs while drunk.

So I write to clarify my memory. But life is not all memory. Much of it is speculation. We say, He thinks so, or She’s afraid of, but how could we know? Yet how could we survive if we did not make these guesses? So I shall not pretend to know exactly what Uncle X thought, or what Aunt Y - not a great thinker - feared. I shall use my poet’s intuition. Where it fails, fiction will take over. So be it.

Happy birthday dear Me

On the day I was born I opened my eyes, saw my father bending low over me and heard my mother’s voice, saying: Let’s not call him Colin.

Why not? said my father in the voice that I would come to know so well, liquid chocolate with pebbles in it. What’s wrong with Colin?

He knew what was wrong. His brother, whose name the newborn was meant receive, had recently offended the new mother by holding her grandmother up to ridicule and laughing at the wrong time

She had said during an ill-advised attempt at conversation with this Uncle Colin (one of nature’s buffoons who could not let a quip remain unspoken), when my mother was young, she looked a lot like Lillian Gish.

And Colin said, Yeah, a plateful of it.

It took me some time - forgive me, I was very young, and my foetal recollections were clashing with my perception of the here-and-now- to understand that this was rhyming slang, that my maternal grandmother had been likened to a plate of fish. Simply because fish rhymed with Gish.

Colin and Grandma Dolly, got on perfectly well, but when a joke or a gibe occurred to Colin, he simply couldn’t keep it in. Out it would come, creating instant foes. He didn’t even know who Lillian Gish had been. But the quip had been uttered and could not be erased from the monstrous scroll that was stored in my mother’s memory, a scroll on which was recorded every slight, every insult she had ever suffered. So I was not to be Colin.

But who else could I be?

I want to call him - and here she paused, as if for breath, but really for effect – I want to call him Manfred.

My father started back. His face faded from sight (I speak of the inner sight of newborns. So far I hadn’t any of the other kind). He trod heavily as he walked towards the window of the large, crowded maternity ward. He looked out on a brick wall. Perhaps he was thinking: She’ll come around. When she’s well again.

To him, childbirth was a medical condition. His wife would get over it as one got over a cold.

There was no argument, except from me, young Manfred. I shouted and snarled and wailed my disapproval. I didn’t want to be Manfred. Sooner or later I would have to go to school. And what would the other kids do to me when they discovered that I was a Manfred?

All those Johns

and Toms

and Franks

and Bills

and Kevins

and even Alastairs and Simons

would kill me.

But I couldn’t say this clearly. Newborns can seldom say anything clearly, or at all. They’re restricted to a yowling that may be full of meaning but cannot be interpreted by adults.

My father went away. A tranquillising nipple stopped my mouth. All protest drowned in an ocean of milk.

I know this much: that my father recorded my name as Colin and that my mother never again fully trusted the man. She insisted that the name Manfred be used, and that is why I grew up with two names, the one I used from day to day and the one on my birth certificate that no one ever used. Perhaps this dual identity underlay my later determination to keep my true nature secret.

We were the Clooties. Even now the name seems strange to me. I never bothered to trace it, but I have a cousin who was mad to know where the Clooties came from. He traced the name to a shearer or blacksmith (I can’t imagine how anyone could be both), a man of uncertain ethnicity who appeared in New South Wales in 1890. Before that, nothing. But how did she decide on the name Manfred? This is still a mystery. She may have taken the name from the Byronic hero of that name . . . Nah! I think she just came across it somewhere and liked the sound of it.

But her son certainly didn’t. He wanted to be a Tom, Dick or Harry. Occasionally, as he aged, he would meet people who would call him Manny. At such times he longed for power, power to beat them senseless.

Manny sounded vaguely Jewish. He had no objection to being thought Jewish, but he simply didn’t like the sound of Manny, any more than he liked the sound of Clootie. Perhaps he thought that he truly deserved to be a Clootie, but nobody deserved to be a Manny.

Clootie’s craft

I have always had more relatives than I needed. And many of them have disapproved of me, but none more than my cousin Reginald. Yes, Reginald, never anything as informal as Reg. His full name was Reginald Alderson Pomphrey, a name that suited him perfectly. Perhaps before I show you the scurrilous report he made about me and my craft, I should tell you how I came to be an unrepentant thief.

I picked my first pocket before I could read. The act of picking didn’t thrill me. I dipped, seized, retracted and re-pocketed. That was all there was to it. No great pleasure, no warm feeling of achievement. There was just the knowing that you could get and hold without asking first.

When I was much older, I discovered that it was possible to earn money by working for it, but that was something I never became good at.

Here’s how I came to pick the pocket:

We lived in a pleasant street that might have been seen from the centre of the City of Melbourne if the whole area hadn’t been hidden behind a hill. I didn’t know how pleasant the street was. I didn’t know any unpleasant ones. To me it was just the street.

To get to the centre of the city, you had to walk for nearly a mile (it would be wrong to give the distance in kilometres; we didn’t then know what they were). Then you got on a cable tram, which climbed up High Street, dipped down a hill and then, even though it ran on rails, seemed to wander through Clifton Hill and Fitzroy, as if it wasn’t sure of the way. It went up Smith Street, turned into Gertrude Street, headed for the Exhibition Building, turned left at Nicholson Street – which, after crossing Victoria Street, became Spring Street – and then turned right at Parliament House. Then it wobbled down Bourke Street. If you made this journey you had covered a distance of ten kilometres and felt that you deserved a reward.

There are some crazy old people who talk as if travelling on cable trams was fun. It wasn’t. It was just uncomfortable, impossible to remain upright for long (one of my earliest memories is of swaying passengers) and curves were taken by disconnecting the tram from its cable and letting it career by its own momentum until it reconnected. Sometimes it didn’t, and everyone would have to get out and push.

My mother often hinted that the irritation of going by cable tram to the Women’s Hospital in order to give birth to me was sufficient to explain why she subsequently developed nerves.

(This is not a chronicle of Melbourne life in the 1930s. The only reason I can give for mentioning these 19th-Century tumbrels is, as I have said, that I began my professional life on one of them.)

Early in the 1940s those who decide such questions found that the cable-tram infrastructure was simply not worth replacing. So they erased it from the streets of Melbourne, replacing trams with double-decker buses, which managed the rare feat of being more uncomfortable than trams of any kind. But before this occurred, I got my hand into a pocket not my own and stole from it a thin wafer of foil-wrapped Nestlé’s chocolate (value, twopence).

We were riding on the dummy, the exposed part of the tram that could strike terror into your vitals. To be a dummy traveller you needed fortitude and tenacity. I never knew of anyone actually falling off and landing in the street to perish miserably in the traffic, but perhaps that was because of the sheer peril that anyone undertaking to ride on the dummy must have accepted as his or her lot. Reality was brutally present out there where the weather lived. Dummy-travellers were cautious travellers. Mind the curve, my mother would say as we approached one of the four or five bends on our route, and I would grasp the nearest thing, which on one occasion happened to be someone’s overcoat. That is how my hand found its way into a pocket. Once inside, my fingers ran about like maddened beetles. And then I touched something metallic but feather-light.

Disregarding the danger of letting go, I drew out my hand and found wedged between my index and middle fingers a wafer-thin confection of the kind that used to be dispensed by slot machines at railway stations. I slipped it into my own pocket, and then grasped frantically at my mother as the tram took the curve.

Of course I had to throw it away. Mothers being the insanely intuitive monsters they are, she would have found the thing sooner or later.

Within days I had been sent to bed without my evening meal - then as now called tea. My father liked to leave small amounts of money in various places. When he was going out he would reach for the nearest pile of coins and pick it up. My new consciousness of universal availability asserted itself and I pocketed one of these piles.

There could not have been more than a few pennies in the little heap I took from the small table on my father’s side of the bed. Elsewhere in the house I could have scooped up a shilling’s worth. But these were my trainee days and I was content to resist the urging of ambition. I walked into my parents’ bedroom, looked for money, found it, took it and then announced that I was going for a walk round the block. All right, my mother said, but don’t cross any roads.

I had no need to cross a road. You only had to turn right after coming out of our front gate and walk for a minute or so to come to a shop referred to as Wilson’s corner. Shops were mysterious entities. I could not imagine how you could make a living by purchasing and selling goods. There would be no money left over. Therefore, the shopkeeper must be a thief. He stole the goods and then made us pay. My mother later straightened me out on this. He sells them for more than he pays, she said. That’s what’s called making a profit.

I was shocked. Sell for more than you pay! It was disgraceful. I would rather he stole them. But this disillusionment came later. On the day of the stolen coins I walked in innocence down to Mr. Wilson’s corner shop and bought a few pence worth of broken biscuits. These were sold so cheaply that I had a huge mass of paper-wrapped goodies to eat before completing my circuit of the block. I managed it, however, and at length tottered through my front gate and walked down the sideway to the back door. We never entered the house through the front. Bloated and crumb-bedecked, I walked nonchalantly into the kitchen, and was met by what I remember as a roundhouse right from my mother’s fist. Since it left no marks and stopped hurting within minutes, it must have been merely a slap, but I remember it as a punch.

You rotten thief! she said. Go to your room and go to bed, and don’t just lie on it. Put your pyjamas on and go right to bed.

Stunned not so much by the force of the blow, but by the realisation that thievery could be so easily detected, I went to bed, dreading the arrival home of my father, a muscular man who was likely to throw a punch when angry.

I remember brightly saying to my mother, who had come to make sure that the blind was down and the lights out, Good night.

She slammed the door so hard that the house shook. I lay in bed thinking how unfair it was that Mr. Wilson could steal as much as he liked and sell it to the public, whereas I couldn’t even pick up a few odd pennies without being punished. Some time later, after my father had visited me and displayed a terrifying, if merely simulated, anger, it dawned on me that my sin had been to be caught in the act.

I was not sufficiently frightened to give up stealing, only to make sure that in future I would steal with more care.

Years passed and, although I never was successfully prosecuted for following the dipster’s trade, the news of my activities eventually percolated through the entire family. That’s why my evil cousin compiled the report, which fell into my hands only decades later after a number of relatives had died and their personal papers had been untidily distributed.

Here’s Reginald’s report:

He was highly skilled, no doubt of that. His talent went beyond craft and became pure artistry. We in the family thought it was such a pity that he couldn’t find an honest job. My mother, his aunt, used to pause in her ironing when she thought of him, remembering of course to turn the iron so that it didn’t burn the cloth. And ten minutes later she’d still be standing next to the ironing board, shaking her head and muttering, Poor Ada.

Ada was her sister, Ada Clootie, and the reason that she was poor Ada was that she had only one child and that one had turned out bad.

Well, not really. The trouble was that Manfred Clootie had wanted to be a poet, and, as everyone knows, you can wish until your head falls off and still not get your wish granted. For all I know, he may have had some talent as a writer, but nobody would publish his work. So he concentrated on his one outstanding ability: he picked pockets.

It’s a sad necessity, but I have to put some of his doggerel in to indicate the limits of his skill.

Clootie, Dracula’s little helper

Manfred Clootie, alias Dracula, leech

Of the soul, I’ll ransack your poor head

Until there’s nothing in it. I will bleach

Your skull, extract your marrow, and unthread

Your knotted bowels - none of this in malice,

But because it is my nature to x-ray

And vivisect. I seek to fill my chalice

With your life’s blood, and then to walk away

Bearing within me that which once was yours

Alone, and is now mine. You’ll not be aware

That your essence now drips from my ample jaws,

You’ll never know I’ve eaten you, or care.

Your life has meaning now, you may relax;

For I’ve embalmed you in my own syntax

The report (at last!)

Everyone in the family knew about his activities, but of course nobody ever actually said anything. Some things can’t be talked about. My mother’s fear was that he’d be caught and his deeds would become public knowledge. But the powers that had conferred on him the ability to nick wallets seem also to have made him immune to detection.

And yet he should have been caught. He stood out in a crowd. He was tall, gangly, with an uncombed mop of hair and a big moustache. He was near-sighted, with bulging eyes that had never been assisted with glasses. When he stared, his whole body peered, leaning forward so far that you were amazed he didn’t fall on his face.

I have a literary uncle who once said, Have you noticed how much Manfred looks like Henry Lawson? I wonder if he does it on purpose – can’t be a poet, so tries to look like one.

I hardly knew my cousin until he was in his mid-twenties. He had decided to marry. This would not have concerned us if his fiancée had not been the daughter of people my family did not want to offend. They had several rental properties and my father was their favourite plumber.

For some reason, I was detailed to reason with him. I was supposed to get him installed in a job and away from other people’s pockets.

Put it to him, my father said. Tell him he goes straight or we tell the girl’s father about him.

Why don’t you do it?

Too busy.

Manfred Clootie lived in a huge, ratty, rambling house that had been cut up into rooms for people – well, for people like him. When I knocked on the front door, I was sure it was going to fall in. But eventually it was answered by the man himself, who stared at me and then beckoned me in. He led me to his room, which was neater than most of the rooms in that house. He asked me how I was, how various family members were. He must have known my business, because he said as soon as the door was shut, I am going to marry her, no matter what anyone says.

I put the family’s view of the matter forward and he smiled.

I’ve beaten you to it. I have a job.

A job? You? But you’ve never had a job.

I have, you know. In fact, I’ve just left one. It didn’t go well.

I said nothing, so he rushed in and said, But the next one . . .

Tell me about the job, I said. What happened?

So he told me.

These are more or less his words.

I knew myself well enough [he said] to stay away from panelled offices, to avoid government buildings. I knew I’d be hopeless in a shop and I couldn’t see well enough to drive a truck. Only the factory remained. I knew I could find work there and be ignored. I wouldn’t have to pretend. Nobody would ask what I was really like. Nobody would care. So long as I turned up on time and did the work, I’d be paid. It was enough.

I had to start work at 7.45 each morning. I didn’t know there was such a time. I’d lost touch with mornings. Morning’s a place where other people live. I moved into morning the way you move into a new house, but I never got used to the place.

I hadn’t been able to find work close to home, so I had to travel. I don’t like travelling. I felt as if my enemies had set out to punish me by making me move from one place to another. But I did it.

I used an old-fashioned alarm clock to wake myself up, and I came to know the full horror of early rising. The air itself seemed unnatural. It was too clear and smelled of nothing. The sound of traffic was indecent. I just couldn’t imagine that persons of good repute would poke their heads out of their lairs before ten-thirty. But now here I was, up at six, running the old and dangerous toaster and the crusted electric jug, fuelling myself with Nescafe and buttered toast. Have you noticed how butter always tastes rancid early in the morning?

There was competition for the bathroom. Often I lost interest in waiting and went out dressed but unwashed, unshaven. Somehow I’d manage to dress myself and then go tumbling down the front steps into the street, almost always on the edge of disaster. I knew that some day I’d fall asleep half way through the descent. Then I’d surely dash my brains out on the kerb, and the world would never know what a treasure it had lost.

Each day I found transport, somehow. I had to take a tram, then a bus. I could never quite remember taking either. And at last I’d come to full consciousness standing next to a machine that prattled brainlessly to me all day long.

The job almost required some skill. I had to stand next to a huge machine, some kind of automatic lathe, which had been set up for me by a tradesman. The actions I needed to perform were set out for me in a document that hung on a frame at eye-level. Nothing could go wrong. Nothing. Clever men had calculated everything, allowed for all contingencies.

I followed instructions and, day after day, machined metal that looked to me like aluminium.

I’d taken the job out of desperation when I was going through a bad period. I had a serious case of thief’s block. I couldn’t function at top professional level. So, you can imagine, I resented being there. But after a few days, the repetitive motions and the sound of the machine and the feeling of actually producing something - making, fashioning - all these worked together to calm my mind. I never did find out what the bits and pieces I turned out were used for. But that didn’t matter, because I was beginning to fall in love with the machine.

But one thing I didn’t like was having kerosene gush over my hands. And I couldn’t stand the smell of it.

You see, when metal is being cut it eventually becomes hot. I knew that. It was one of the few things about the job I did know. I knew too that to cool and lubricate the cutting tools a stream of liquid was needed. What I couldn’t understand was the reason for having two sources of coolant - one dispensing kerosene, the other a milky, water-based liquid. The foreman, a man grey all through - grey hair, grey eyes, grey dustcoat, and another man who had set up the machine had told me always to use kerosene as a coolant. This I did. But after days of diligent machining, I rebelled. I switched off the kerosene flow and turned the tap on the other tube.

Now milky liquid gushed over the spinning rod that I was converting into a tubular artefact that would eventually find its way into the interior of some machine. The huge tray under the lathe slowly accumulated a mass of cuttings. Every now and then someone would come along with a barrow and remove these cuttings so that the metal could be sold for scrap.

Oh it was good not to have that filthy kerosene gushing over the