tiger, tiger coffee bar

They call me Billy the Kid, ‘cause of my age when I signed up; when I jumped aboard after I got out and I wanted to move, move, move; not stay in the same spot again, ever. Hoping I could put it all behind me, jam the miles up between here, where ever here was, and there.

As I said, we all had stories, all had ways - vices, devices - things to hold onto and keep us afloat. Me and the occasional phone calls to mum, placed collect from grubby pay phones, bugs of all sizes and varieties flitting against the glass and crawling on my sweaty skin. And me and me mum, going through the same conversation every time: her telling me about Flick and the kids and me telling her about this Fair and the next and the bugs crawling on my skin and signing off, telling her I love you and hanging up and promising to write, before going into the night to find Terry and Changi and the rest of them in the pub, where we'd drink to within an inch of our pays. Terry had his Terawara trout and the couple of ounces of grass we'd go halves in; the Viceroy of Misogyny his thick paperbacks; Changi the cats.

He'd first seen the cats at Luna Park as a child; dwarfed by the lattice and the flat burnt rubber smell of Hell's Drivers.

He went back there, in sixty-two, escorting the wife of one of the workers who'd broken his leg while packing up a show. The laid-up husband asked Changi for a favour: to take her up to Melbourne for the day, for the sales. Fond of the couple, he reluctantly agreed (he'd not been alone in the company of a woman in three, four years). The two said little on the train up and he was surprised when, on the corner of Swanston and Lt.Collins, she bid him farewell; instructing him to return to meet her here at five o'clock.

"Ten past five, at the latest." Upon which she turned and disappeared into the crowd, her mind set on some items of Manchester and a cashmere twin set she'd seen advertised in the Herald.

After looking over the city (the statue of Adam Lindsay Gordon and the Manchester Unity building highlights), Changi made his way to the cool of Young and Jacksons. While enjoying a glass and staring through the window, he decided - at a loose end for still half the day - on a tram ride. It was the number 16 that arrived moments later, and with the taste of the beer still on his tongue he watched the leafy boulevards turn into Fitzroy Street. Rounding the Esplanade, he remembered Luna Park and, hearing the machine-gun rattle of the Scenic Railway, decided on a visit.

It had been there in 1943 that he caught sight of a cheetah. It is said that the cheetah is the easiest of the big cats to domesticate, which to the ignorant (and none more than a boy of twelve with wide-eyed wonderment and a faint moustache of fairy floss) seems far, far from the truth. He watched them prowl silkily, across the cage floor; with their sandy-coloured coats and black spots, eyes slitted and glowing like pastis.

He kept returning to it, this boy with skinny legs and bony shoulders (he'd been christened Changi by his brutal schoolmates), marvelling at the petulance with which the cheetahs regarded him, rooted to the spot.

It had been raining on, or just before, his visit when he was twelve. Now, standing in the entrance twenty years on,he remembered the reflection of the ferris wheel twinkling in pools. And the loud Americans with their foreign accents and slick hair. The rest of Changi's visit was blurred by the memory of the cheetahs. All the rest fell away. Returning home, he constructed a life surrounded by the cats.

(The association in his memory of the animal and the Yanks was not far from the mark: the pair of cheetahs he had spied in St.Kilda had indeed been supplied by a member of the visiting forces; a US Liberator shipping the cats across the Atlantic: mascots for the flamboyant - and often impudent - 39^th Air Division; the cats released into the dense scrub of the Grampians in the west of Victoria, in celebration of the war's end).

After the return visit in sixty-two, and the memories of the big cats; Changi began to reformulate the plan he had borne on his way home from Luna Park as a child. He had worked in the Fair for Edmonds for eight years, and got on pretty well with Old Jim, having never asked him for an advance on a wage since starting as a hand in 1955. He had been to the Wimmera half a dozen times, the Mallee and the Gippsland a few more still, hoisting tent poles and tarpaulin, fixing the odd piece of machinery that broke down, without grumbling once.