A Dancing Man

The car’s new enough that I don’t have an e-tag for it yet, so I ask my son to piece together the motorway toll from the shrapnel in the ashtray. It’s a vastly premature request; the traffic begins to thicken ominously as it passes the airport, then grinds to a halt at the mouth of the tunnel. I look at the clock and groan in frustration. Just under forty minutes to pick up Dad and get him to his appointment. Should’ve given breakfast a miss and grabbed some McDonald’s on the way.

“That’s a shiny dollar,” my son observes, pushing the coins around in his palm. “Look, it’s like gold, almost.”

“Hang on—” I headcheck and switch lanes, then turn to look at the coin he’s holding towards me. “Yeah, that’s a nice one,” I agree. “Must be newly minted. Hot off the press.”

My son studies the coin for a while, then remarks: “Says 2005 on the Queen side.”

“It’s in pretty good nick if it’s been circulating this long, hey?”

He nods. “Maybe it didn’t get used or something. Maybe someone was keeping it.”

“Could be.”

I want to elaborate, explain it might be pilfered from a collector set, or perhaps one of those pay-two-dollars-get-a-dollar-back souvenirs from the Mint, but I’m concentrating on getting into that gap in front of the dirty white Isuzu truck that struggles to accelerate whenever the traffic begins to move. I indicate to begin pleading my case to its driver.

“Who’s that?” my son asks, and I follow his gesture into the car beside us, glancing at its demurely pretty occupant. I’m about to answer that I don’t know when I realise he’s holding the coin out to me again.

“Hold on a sec, mate,” I say, waving thanks to the Isuzu for letting me edge in before the traffic stops again. “Right, give us a look.”

The standard troop of kangaroos is replaced by a lone man, frozen mid-revelry: unbuttoned jacket billowing, legs bent, arms extended, hat raised high in a jubilant salute to victory, the gesture duplicated by a long shadow that angles out behind him.

“Don’t know his name,” I say, handing back the coin. “Don’t think anybody does, really. They just tend to call him the Dancing Man.”

“If no one knows who he is, then why’s he on our money?”

The traffic crawls underneath the tunnel entrance, metres of promising progress, then stops again. I thump back against the headrest and blow a wet, irritable mouthful of air between my lips.

“Dad?” my son presses.

“The Man. Right. Well, there’s some famous footage—it’s an old documentary, fairly sure it was shot here in Sydney, actually. Shows that fellow and all kinds of other people celebrating the end of the War.”

“World War One?”

“Two.”

“Oh.” He continues examining the coin. “So, he’s not like a Prime Minister or anything?”

“No, just a normal young guy having a bit of a dance because we’d finally beaten the Japs.” The faux pas takes a second to register. “The Japanese, I mean.”

“So he’s a soldier, then.”

“Well, no—not that I know of.”

“Why wasn’t he away fighting the Japs? Or the Nazis?”

“Who knows? Might’ve been in a protected trade like your grandpa was. Maybe he was sick, might’ve had a disability or a war wound—something like that, anyway.”

“But if he’s dancing he can’t have been that sick, right?”

“Who can say? It’s all a bit of a mystery, mate.”

Still gazing quietly at the dollar, he seems dissatisfied with my answers, so I offer: “Tell you what. We’ll go see if we can find that footage on the internet when we get home. Should be kicking around somewhere. Maybe you can figure out who the Man is—that’d be a heck of a school holiday project, hey?”

“Yeah,” my son nods. “Okay.”

When the clock ticks over to the arranged pickup time, we’re still locked inside the tunnel, trapped beneath its malarial lighting, caught in its droning, echoing ambience of strained engines and overhead ventilator fans. I can hear my father fretting and cursing already, but there’s no mobile reception to placate him until, countless stop-starts later, the western opening comes into view. When I try to call him, however, the phone rings out.

Sunlight warms the traffic into a timorous flow, and I begin some opportunistic manoeuvring, darting between lanes, earning a couple of irate beeps that I dismiss with a flick of my hand. Inspired by the reckless few who’ve already sped by, I consider making use of the breakdown lane, but my deliberations last long enough for the traffic to finally hit the speed limit near King Georges Road.

Approaching the bank of toll booths, I hold out my hand and request the coins my son has been dutifully minding all this time. He hesitates, then asks, “Can I keep that dollar with the Man on it? I kind of like it.”

The car ahead gets the green light and accelerates away. “That’s fine, but you’d better be quick in replacing it.”

He fetches two fifty-cent pieces, passes me the revised toll, and I toss the warm, heavy handful of coins into the gaping plastic basket. An LED sign counts down through the various denominations and lingers excruciatingly at $0.70 DUE.

“Christ, mate. Are you absolutely sure—” I sigh impatiently, shake my head, and open the ashtray to scratch around for the remaining balance.

“It’s green, Dad.”

I look up to see the sign has clicked over to THANK YOU and in my haste to get moving again, the tyres emit a sharp squeak.

“Burnout,” he grins. “Cool.”

I internally thump myself for doubting the boy, and watch in my periphery as he carefully polishes the coin with his shirt and wriggles around to tuck it into his pocket. The intrigue of that dollar, an object which would normally mean so little to my son’s generation—and why should it, when it can’t even buy a basic ice cream any more?—had led him to vest the little alloy disc with worth far beyond its intrinsic value. The gesture reinforces my love for the boy, affection beyond anything, anyone, that I have loved before, and I apologise with a long squeeze of his thigh.

“What?” he wonders.

“Nothing. Just glad to have you along for the ride, that’s all.”

I tell the car to dial my father’s number again and tap an absent rhythm on the steering wheel while a ringtone purrs through the speakers. 

“Hello?”

“Dad.”

“What’s going on? Supposed to be here quarter of an hour ago.”

“I know, I know. Got caught out by traffic, the M5 is atrocious today.”

“Should have called sooner, I was beginning to worry.”

“I did, but—look, never mind, we’re on our way.”

“How far—” He coughs, a long bout that disappears into the distance when he clamps his hand over the receiver.

“You right?”

“Fine.” It sounds strained, and he clears his throat. “How far off are you? Should I call a taxi?”

“Just heading past Liverpool,” I say, lying in anticipation of the truth. “Be there in five, ten at the most.”

“Right, well—I’ll wait out front for you, then.”

There’s more than a touch of speeding required to stay true to my word, and I pull into the retirement village with about two minutes to spare before Dad’s appointment.

“This the new Prius, eh?” he says, approaching the car in a hobbled swagger.

“Not a Prius, a Honda Hybrid.”

“Still runs on Fijian spring water and farts roses out its exhaust, I’m sure.”

My son giggles and exits the car to give his grandfather a hug. “You can have the front seat if you like, grandpa. Your legs are longer than mine.”

“Well, don’t mind if I do, little fella.”

“Right,” I say. “Let’s get going, hey?”

Speeding north along the Hume Highway, Dad instructs me to back off a little. “Just an appointment. Not the end of the world if we miss it, you know.”

I pull my foot off the accelerator and he watches the digital speedo roll gradually down into the mid-seventies.

“Man could have an epileptic fit with all those lights on the dashboard,” my father observes. “And what happens if the electrics short? How do you tell how fast you’re going?”

“By the cars around you, I suppose.”

My father grunts. “Bells and whistles aside, all this hybrid, dual-drive business isn’t as new as people have been led to believe, you know.”

“Oh yeah?”

He senses my scepticism immediately but pursues the story regardless.

“Mate of mine, Harry Lalic—you remember Harry? Used to service the car for us when we were living in Annandale.”

“Well—no, not really. But go on.”

“Harry was a certified genius with cars. Truly was. Kind of man that could pinpoint any problem, fix it on the same day usually. Hell of a mechanic—”

I nod, check right and left and sail through a Give Way sign.

“—and an inventor, too,” Dad continues. “Came up with the design for an electric-petrol motor back in the early sixties. Decades ahead of his time, he was. Took his idea to General Motors to try and sell it. Or perhaps it was Ford.”

I patiently wait for the fallacious punchline.

“Either way, doesn’t matter. They turned him down, thought it was a useless idea. Plenty more oil in the ground back then, and it’s not like anybody gave much of a stuff about the envi—”

 His words clench into another rasping fit of coughing, and he claws at the contours of the door.

“What are you trying to do, Dad?” I demand, halfway to yelling from fright and impatience.

Mouth gummed with phlegm, he replies indignantly, “Get the bloody window down.”

“Just press the—” It’s not worth explaining, I decide, and roll his window down using the buttons on my armrest. “Look, there you go.”

He spits, wipes his mouth on the back of his arm, then turns to face my son. “Sorry about that,” he smiles.

“That’s okay. You’re not well, grandpa. You can’t help it.”

“Suppose you’re right. How’s school going?”

“Still on holidays. But good, I guess. Hey, check this out.” My son fumbles around his pocket and produces the dollar coin. “How shiny is it?”

Dad takes the coin and flips it around a few times, stares at the tails side with its jovial Dancing Man for a few moments, rocking it back and forth to glint in the sunlight. “Yeah, that’s a nice one alright,” he agrees, passing it back. “What’re you going to buy with it?”

“Not going to spend it,” my son says. “I’ll keep it. It’s too precious to spend.”

“Good lad,” says his grandfather. “Be worth more in the future, anyway.”

By the time we reach the hospital we’re seven minutes late—I figured it would be worse, actually—and I drop Dad outside the radiology department while I go to find a parking spot. When my son and I return, Dad has already been spirited away for his scan, so we find a quiet place to wait. My son—birth notwithstanding—has never been inside a hospital before, and I field his questions as best I can until Dad emerges from a consulting room around half an hour later. The three of us stroll, line abreast, back to the carpark, Dad making wisecracks with his grandson.

“Well,” I venture finally. “What did they have to say?”

“Oh, this and that,” he shrugs.

“This and that?”

“Yes.”

I shake my head, frustrated, and am about to continue the blood-from-stone interrogation when Dad cuts me off by gently grabbing my arm.

“Please,” he says, quiet but firm. “Not in front of the boy.”

I nod, and leave the matter to rest for the time being.

The silence in the car on the drive back to Casula lulls my son into a doze, and Dad swivels around to check he’s asleep before announcing, “That’s me on the dollar coin, you know.”

I laugh, the derision more apparent than I’d intended. “That right?”

“Yep.”

“You’re the famous Dancing Man, are you?”

“If that’s what you want to call him—me—then yes, I suppose I am.”

“Lot of men have made that claim, Dad.”

“I’m not claiming anything. A claim implies there’s an element of doubt. I’m telling you: I am the Dancing Man.”

Of course he is. And of course Harry Lalic invented the hybrid engine. And of course we’re distant relatives of the Kennedys. And of course Mrs Stevenson from next door was just inspecting the décor in the bedroom. The steam from all the bullshit forces out another sharp laugh.

“Never seen you dance a moment in my life,” I sneer, then reconsider. “No, actually—you danced at my second wedding, I remember that. Mum had to drag you onto the floor and push you through the waltz like a sack of potatoes.”

“Yes, well, I wasn’t a septuagenarian on VJ Day, let’s not forget.”

“Right, right.”

“Fine if you don’t believe me. Just thought you might like to know.”

“Did you ever tell Mum?”

“No.”

Of course not. “Why not?”

“Those two girlies off to the side of the footage I’m in, the ones off to the left. You know what I’m talking about?”

I run the scratchy images through my head, last seen many, many years ago on some ABC program, and come up short. But I humour him with a Yes all the same.

“Well, one of them was my first girlfriend, my high school sweetheart.”

“Right. Okay. And that kept you quiet for sixty odd years, did it?”

Dad shrugs and lapses into a sullen silence, which is undermined by another fit of coughing that he struggles to contain in the crook of his arm for fear of waking my son.

“You okay?” I finally ask, reaching across to pat him on the shoulder.

He nods, tears in his eyes from the effort of stifling the cough, wincing as he swallows down the phlegm, too proud to ask to roll the window down.

“So,” I say, waving a timid olive branch. “This and that, hey?”

“Yep. Won’t know for certain until the biopsy, but—yes. Probably.”

“Shit.”

“I’ll be right. Can’t complain about the innings I’ve managed, all things considered.”

My son stirs when we pull into the retirement village, and he exits the car again to give the old man a farewell hug.

“Make sure you hang onto that coin,” Dad reminds him. “Could be worth a mint some day.”

My son nods earnestly. “Plus, me and Dad are going to figure out who the Man on the front is when we get home.”

“Well, good luck with that,” says Dad, meeting my gaze and tipping a sly wink. “He’s a bit of an enigma, that fellow.”

We end up getting McDonald’s for lunch, and when we arrive home my son dashes inside to stand in front of his Nintendo machine and wave its magic wand at the bright cartoon characters that fill the plasma screen.

“Still want to check out the Dancing Man?” I ask, watching him bob and weave to fend off an onslaught of smiling swordsmen.

“Great!” shouts a cheery voice from the game system.

“In a minute,” he replies, customary code for “an hour or two”—which I’m happy to oblige, as he’ll at least burn off a bit of junk food in the process. I leave him be and head up to the office to boot up the computer.

It doesn’t take long to find the Movietone News reel—it’s on a government archive site of some sort—so I set the clip to fullscreen and hit play.

“The years of blood and tears had ended in resounding victory,” the clip’s narrator announces, his voice intermingling with the tinny cheers of Sydney’s exultant masses. “Australia joined her allies in an outburst of rejoicing, the likes of which her cities had never seen before!”

A thick cascade of shredded paper tumbles down upon the revellers, the rough confetti layering the streets in a flurry of refuse that’s trampled by the throngs of smiling, waving women and the soldiers, sailors and airmen they link arms with.

“This day of victory meant loved ones would now be safe,” the narrator continues. “Families once again reunited to enjoy the things for which their men and women had fought. So let’s go mad—”

There. The Dancing Man.

“—for one unforgettable day!”

I pause the clip, rewind a few seconds, and let the Man do his dance again. A hop, a spin to tip his hat to the camera, a few skips down the street, and a final pirouette before the camera loses interest and pans to capture a digger holding out a newspaper that yells PEACE!

I rewind again, poise my finger above the mouse, watching carefully, and—click!—pause at the point, thirty-four seconds in, where the Man is midway through his first spin, capturing him with pinwheeling arms, hat raised, right leg kicked up at the rear, just as the coin depicts. I study the figure for a while; the original image is grainy, and isn’t helped by the blocky resolution of the streaming video. The basic build is right, but his more definitive features are harder to tell—the Man keeps his head bowed for much of his fleeting cameo, and offers only a cursory glimpse of his grinning face.

All the same—

I make my way down into the basement and retrieve the boxes of Dad’s personal effects that the retirement home couldn’t accommodate. A few minutes of rummaging unveils my parents’ wedding album, which I carry back upstairs and open to the grand portrait of the young bride and groom, Mum in her Nursing Service uniform, Dad in his pinstriped Sunday best, holy matrimony a few weeks after Hiroshima.

But even a side-by-side comparison of the portrait and the frozen Man makes the match no more—or less—likely, so I lean back with a long sigh and stare at the paused image on the screen. There’s the two “girlies” Dad mentioned, left of screen, one of them looking over her shoulder to take stock of the handsome loon who’s dancing past them. Pretty girls, presumably, given the appreciative double-take they’re being afforded by a pair of passing diggers—

Oh, for Christ’s sake.

I’m excited and outraged all at once, and my hands are shaking as I pick up the phone to dial my father again.

“Hello?” He sounds sleepy.

“Dad.”

“You woke me.”

“I know. It’s important, though.” I hear him yawn, and continue: “You and Mum got engaged in ’43, correct?”

“May of 1943, that’s right. I proposed just before the army sent her up to Townsville.”

“So the girlie, your sweetheart. What was her name?”

It’s his turn to laugh, which becomes a cough, a spit, and a laugh again. “Believe me now, do you?”

“What was her name?”

“Frances Routledge. We met during fourth year, rode the same tram. I got to know your mother through Frannie, actually, though that wasn’t for another few years. They worked together at Saint Vincent’s until your mother enlisted.”

“They were friends?”

“Well, for a time. Frances eventually wanted to claw your mother’s eyes out for stealing her man, and your mother certainly didn’t want me having anything to do with—” He searches for a euphemism. “With someone I’d been so intimately acquainted with, I guess. So Frannie and I fell out of touch for a while.”

“But Mum went up to Queensland, and—”

“Yes, pretty much. Long time for a man to be alone, son. Long time for anybody to be alone.”

I rub my eyes, clear my throat. This is a séance, I tell myself. I’m channelling a disembodied historical figure, not chatting to my father on the phone. “VJ Day,” I say, addressing the blurred Man on the monitor. “What happened, exactly?”

“Well, after word got out that the Japs had surrendered, the boss knocked everyone off early. I’d arranged to have lunch with Frances and her sister in Hyde Park, and we’d only met a few minutes earlier when we ran into the Movietone man on George Street. ‘Hey there handsome fella, pretty ladies!’ he says to us. ‘Why don’t you show Australia just how happy you’re feeling,’ or words to that effect.

“There was a silly, giddy atmosphere in the city that day—it was a hellish six years, mate, even for those of us who didn’t go overseas—so I suppose I got a bit carried away and did my little dance.”

“And that’s that.”

“Yes. That’s that.”

“No bullshit? Because frankly, you’ve—”

“Cross my heart and hope to die.” He coughs abruptly, and I fall silent for a moment, staring at the screen, the Man, my father, his lover, the dozens of inadvertent extras that rove about the background of the iconic scene.

“What about Frances? Why didn’t she dance with you?”

“She was too shy, she and her sister both. But didn’t they give me a hiding once the camera had stopped rolling.” Dad raised his voice an octave, pinched his nose. “‘You looked like a bloody poof dancing like that,’ Frances told me. ‘Pirouetting like a ballerina amongst all these soldiers, what an embarrassment.’” He coughs again, steadies himself. “Horrible girl, she was. Don’t know what I ever saw in her. Personality-wise, at least.”

“So you up and left her?”

A pause. “Soon enough. Wasn’t long until your mother returned to Sydney, so—yes, eventually.”

“Unbelievable, Dad. Bloody unbelievable. How could you pull something like that?”

“Stones in glass houses, mate,” Dad reminds me, and I’m checkmated into silence.

“Right then,” I continue finally. “What do we do from here?”

“What do you suggest? You want to go to the newspapers or something, I suppose.”

“Well, that’s probably a good start. Or the War Memorial, at least.”

Dad clears his throat. “No.”

“No?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Why? I mean, I can understand wanting to keep the affair under wraps, but—this is important, Dad. Those eight seconds of film mean a hell of a lot to this country.”

“Exactly. That’s exactly right. Let the people have their symbol, son. It doesn’t matter who the man behind the Man is—only what he represents. Particularly when he’s the kind of man that can’t keep his dick in his pants.”

“Tell that to Shane Warne.”

“I’m serious, mate. I told you because you’re my son and you deserve to know. Now I’m asking you to let the matter rest. Don’t tarnish the icon.”

A series of prospective headlines, DANCING MAN FOUND, derivatives thereof, run through my mind like a tickerbar.

“Please,” Dad continues, sensing my thought process. “If not for me, if not for Australia, then at least for your mother’s sake.”

“Fine.”

“Good man.”

We make arrangements for his next appointment, wrap up the phone call, and I slump back in the chair, lost in the paper-strewn image of George Street, considering my promise.

 If the only evidence is infidelity, how inclined would people be to believe him? Amidst all the clamour of talkback debates, letters-to-editors, investigative pieces and protests from the Dancing Men fraternity, what might Frances say—assuming she was even still alive? Oh yes, I bedded the Dancing Man alright—just as spry in the sack, he was! I pick up the wedding album and gaze at the handsome young woman in the portrait, a slight-but-stern smile on her face, ever the responsible half, ever the selfless half of the marriage, diligent caretaker for a houseful of boys—Dad included. Please, my pinstriped father begs. For your mother’s sake. I slap the album closed.

There is, I figure, only one way to decide.

I head back downstairs into the living room, where my son is now wielding the magic wand as a bow. He releases a virtual arrow dead onto the bullseye.

“Ten!” cries the game system, an unseen audience delivering politely excited cheers and claps.

“Do you have that coin with you, mate?” I ask.

He reaches into his pocket and passes the dollar to me. “You figure out who the Man is or something?”

“Maybe,” I say, sitting back in the sofa and rolling the coin around in my hand. “Not sure yet.”

My son resumes his archer’s stance, draws back the creaking string, and concentrates on centring the reticule over his target. I wait for him to release his arrow, which strikes at the outer edge of the bullseye.

“Nine,” the system mutters, and my son groans in frustration.

I place the dollar on top of my curled fingers, thumb pressed in and tensed beneath it.

“Heads to stay quiet, tails to go public,” I announce. “What do you reckon?”

He’s confused, but intrigued enough to pause the Nintendo and join me on the sofa. “Sure,” he shrugs. “I guess.”

“Ready to catch?” I flick the coin up, high enough to almost graze the ceiling, and we watch intently as the blurred orb, ringing and humming, spins through its steep arc and back down to my son’s open, waiting palm.