Percy, the old rebel Swede

Percy, the old rebel Swede

There are no other sounds here at Kangaroo Point besides the heavy traffic passing over The Story Bridge. Main Street is always quiet. It is like being at a dead end and yet there is so much life there in the city across the river. This seems to be a secret place where the fruit bats hang in the paw paw trees at night and the rain flows under the wooden houses like a never-ending river. It is hot, humid and it smells of frangipanis and the tropics. We like sitting in the park under the big Moreton Bay fig tree in the evening watching the city lights from the glasshouse skyscrapers mirroring in the water and we take the ferry occasionally to the other side just to feel the pulse of the city.

It is our first month here staying with Wayne and Linda in their old wooden apartment house on Main Street. I have not been to Queensland before so I find life here in the tropics exciting. We sleep on a mattress on the sitting room floor, unfortunately it is right in front of the tv so we have to wait until they have finished watching it before we can go to bed and we roll the mattress up every morning while Linda sprays the floor looking for cockroaches and mosquitos. Richard the American, lives across the corridor from us. He has a signed photo of Richard Nixon on the fridge and says he is an astral traveler. He can go anywhere, not just around Brisbane but any place he chooses. Linda and I half expect him to come flying through the door one day into our kitchen. It feels a little creepy, as if we are being watched.

We only arrived from Sweden a couple of months ago so it is all very new to me. This is the early 80’s and my husband, who is Australian, warns me that this can be a place of contradictions, and that not everything is what it seems to be.

Life beyond Main Street is at The Story Bridge Hotel where happy hour every night between 5 to 6 bring the locals together for a cold beer at the bar. It is the central hub, the place to socialize and meet. I am working day shifts at The Golden Circle Pineapple Factory for a few weeks and hurry home to wash off the itchy, sticky pineapple juice that has accumulated on my legs to get there by 5. No matter how much I scrub I can still not get rid of that itchy irritation. I have to wear thick rubber gloves, a shower cap and a thick rubber apron as I stand there by the conveyer belt cutting the skin of pineapples with a very sharp knife. The factory is hot and humid. The woman working next to me comes from Thursday Island. You would not want to get on the wrong side of her and I try my best to be civil and friendly. She tells me that you get used to it but when she looks at me up and down, I know she thinks I won’t be there long.

A warm, humid late afternoon at the Story Bridge Hotel, 1 dollar for a schooner of beer and there is a rush in the last fifteen minutes to order as many as you can before happy hour finishes. There are jugs and glasses all over the tables for the next few hours. We soon learn the trick from Wayne and Linda and the sessions go on until 8 when we stagger home to have dinner. The characters at The Story Bridge Hotel are individuals from all walks of life. Charles always sits in the corner. He smokes Marlboro and is dressed in a white suit with a tie no matter how hot it is, an old habit from his days as an accountant in the city. You could set the clock by him; he is always there between 5 to 8. There is a plaque on the wall which says “Charles Corner” and anyone who dares to take his place is soon told to move out of the way. He is old now and says he hopes to die right there in his chair with a cold beer in his hand.

The round table next to the pool table is unofficially reserved for the Pirate and his companions. We are invited to sit there occasionally and when I sit across from the Pirate and he looks at me with his deep, black eyes I can feel his power. I knew instinctively why they called him the Pirate. He would smile and take anything he could away from you. Handsome and deceptive with dark curly hair and beard, a gold earring and a very infectious smile showing a gold tooth. A charmer at that, and a dangerous one. His companions Steve and Peter are rather plain and sometimes comical in their dialogue and it is obvious that the Pirate’s word rules no matter what the subject is. Fortunately, he likes us and sometimes buys me a beer. We even play pool together and I have worked out he likes to see a girl hanging over the pool table with a cue in her hand.

Steve and Peter are busy drumming up a business plan involving a cray fishing venture up north and are trying to lure Wayne into investing in it. All it takes is 50.000 dollars. Wayne is rather naïve and listens with wide blue eyes. They patronize him and call him “Wayneee” while they promise him a fortune. Linda hears all this but she is quiet. This is a man’s world and her words would not be heard. There is something very “red neck” about them and the Pirate grins as he listens.

Charlie and Lou are the most incompatible couple you can imagine. Lou comes from Papua New Guinea, she is a buxom girl, dark skinned with a big afro hairstyle, dressed in colorful clothes which shows off her full figure. Charlie is a pale, skinny newspaper clerk, slightly bolding with horn rimmed glasses. It is obvious from the beginning that this is a marriage of convenience, at least to us but Charlie seems to be oblivious to the situation. Lou flirts with everyone especially when she has been drinking too much and leaves Charlie alone at a table looking rather rejected.

Ken, the long-haired blond Englishman with the yacht anchored just a stones throw away from the Story Bridge, has a black cat called Kaya. He brings the cat with him to the Hotel where he gets a free meal in the kitchen and is spoiled by the patrons. We all love Kaya. Ken dreams of sailing around Australia but likes it so much here that he finds it hard to leave. He has hung his colorful sarongs to dry all around the mast and says it is his trademark.

It was there, on a humid Thursday night that I met Percy, the Swede. He waits for the pub to open at 10 in the morning to have that very first shot of vodka before he goes on with the business of the day. This tall, suntanned, blond man owns the tug boat down the river and takes tourists out on day cruises. I am very happy to meet a fellow Swede and to sit with him at the bar. His face is rugged and worn after spending many years at sea and his laughter is deep and infectious. I speak Swedish, he listens but replies in broken English and when I ask him if he can still speak Swedish, he tells me the words get all mixed up and he forgets how to put the sentences together. He left Sweden as a very young man working on a tanker going to Seattle. After a season or two of trying to find work there he gave up and took to sea again. He ended up in Australia and stayed. He was a young man of barely twenty when he hitchhiked the long way from Sydney to Proserpine where he finally settled. Boats was all he knew and he got a job on a yacht taking tourists to the Whitsunday Islands. A small note on the local deli door in Proserpine advertised a tug boat for sale at a cheap price in Brisbane. Percy took a chance and hitchhiked once again down to Brisbane to have a look. The boat was in a very bad condition but he saw his future there and decided to give it a go. He bought it for next to nothing and started renovating the old tug with the help of his meager savings. He now had free accommodation and once the council approved of his mooring, he could start the business he had always dreamed about.

Life on the boat was lonely and it was The Story Bridge that handled the bookings for the tours so Percy made the Hotel a big part of his life. He never met anyone from the old home land and gradually started to forget his mother tongue.

I listened to his story and told him I had heard of a similar story of a man who jumped ship in Australia who had also come from Sweden. He could not speak any English and lived in a small house somewhere down south, isolated without family and friends where he received a pension. He managed to do the shopping by pointing at things and soon began to forget his language. In the end he knew no Swedish and very little English and became a total hermit.

Percy listened to me, his English is good and I tried to assure him it would not happen to him. When I win the meat tray raffle at the Hotel, he invites us to the tug boat for a BBQ. It is a clear, warm and starry Brisbane night. We party on deck until long after midnight, listening to music from his cassette player, laughing and dancing, knowing that these fleeting moments are precious and to be taken as gifts. This was the night Lou asked my husband to come down to lover deck and have sex with her. He laughed it off but I could never look at Lou with the same eyes again and it created a bad feeling between her and me, we became strangers in the night, both aware what the other was thinking.

Percy drank too much; I seldom saw him sober and there was always a trace of alcohol on his breath. They called him “The Rebel Swede”. Linda and I invited him home one night and cooked a Swedish meal. It was very hot and humid but I was determined to cook something that he might remember from his childhood and settled for “kroppkakor”. This involved a few hours work, boiling potatoes, frying bacon and onion, mashing the boiled potatoes and mixing with flour making potato balls that I filled with the bacon mix. It was a lot of work and the little kitchen was literally steaming. We were hot with sweat rolling down our brows, but very happy with the end result and when Percy arrived it was all served up beautifully. He remembered eating “kroppkakor” as a child and reminisced about times long gone.

My dad had sent a parcel with newspapers from Sweden and Percy looked at the pictures in them. There were the sights of Stockholm and he said he did not recognize much of his old hometown. There were pictures of actors and other characters he knew from his youth and you could see the joy on his face. and it felt so good to be able to share some memories of my Swedish life with him.

The last time I saw Percy was the night before we left for Cairns. We said goodbye on his tug boat and I told him to cut down on his drinking and look after himself. I left a bundle of Swedish “Expressen” newspapers and a card I wrote in Swedish. He waved as we left and said he would practice reading them. When I looked back, I saw the wild, rugged blond-haired Swede standing on the old dock with the run-down tug boat behind him. He was the one who chose to live a life away from the everyday pressures of society. An old rebel Swede on an ancient dock somewhere under the Story Bridge.

We returned a few years later and found the old Hotel owner who was only too happy to fill us in on what happened to our friends. Charles passed away of a heart attack, not on the seat at the pub as he had wished but quietly at his home. The plaque is still there on the wall and his chair remains empty. Charlie and Lou separated and rumor has it that she eventually went back to Papua New Guinea. The Pirate stole the 50.000 dollars from Steve and Peter and moved to Cape Tribulation. Steve was sentenced for fraud but passed away before he got to jail and Peter was still living somewhere in the city. There was a postcard on the wall from Ken and Kaya in Broome and as far as the owner knew they were still there.

And Percy, the old rebel Swede, that wonderful laughing madman sadly fell overboard and drowned on one of his excursions.

I walked down to the waters edge where his dock had been but there is no longer any sign of the rusty old tug boat. I remember the long zigzagging wooden stairs that were overgrown with creepers, leading down to the dock. We would stumble down there in the dark, down those rickety stairs to that tug boat on the river and I always wished I had a torch.

I throw the flowers into the water and say farewell to Percy. He still lives on in my memory.

Main Street is quiet as usual. The fruit bats have had their evening meal and throw the leftover paw paws onto the ground while the white moon reflects the city lights in the river. It is a secret world here….under the Story Bridge.