The Promise

by Tony Birch

  It was an ancient record player. My grandmother had had one just the same, when I was a kid. She’d called it a ‘three-in-one’. I lifted the veneer lid of the player and saw a record sitting on the turntable. I heard the old woman call me from the yard. She pointed to the overladen buckets.

  ‘We finish olives.’

  Her husband, who hadn’t spoken a word, had the ladder slung over his shoulder. He bent forward and picked up a bucket in each hand, as she attempted to explain the process of washing and preparing the olives to me, only some of which I understood. She guessed so, and smiled to me as they were leaving by the side gate.

  ‘No matter. I will come back and show. One week. Two weeks. I will have beautiful olives.’

  I stood outside the garage and watched as they left the yard. He was about half a foot taller than his wife. She reached up and rested a hand on his shoulder and they rhythmically waddled from side to side.

  Late that night I dragged the old record player into the kitchen with the idea of listening to the radio for company. I dusted off the player with a damp cloth. I plugged it into the wall socket and hesitantly flicked the switch, half expecting an explosion. Nothing happened. For the next hour or so I tried everything I could to get the radio working, pulling wires out of sockets and checking loose connections, with no success.

  Mucking around with the wires I accidentally knocked the arm of the record player. The turntable began rotating. I moved the needle across to the vinyl and heard the wonderful crackling notes of the first track on the record. I knew the song well. My parents had once owned the same record.

  I dragged one of the kitchen chairs over to the record player, sat down and closely listened to each track on the album. I felt a little sad. Not particularly because of the words or the melody, but with a strong memory of my parents dancing arm-in-arm together in my childhood lounge room. They had been really in love, my mum and dad. When he died of a heart attack, in his fifties, she fell apart and had kept to herself ever since.

  True to her word, the old woman knocked at my front door a fortnight later. It was a Saturday morning. The jar of olives she was nursing in her arms was enormous. I stepped onto the porch to greet her.

  ‘Your husband? Where is he?’

  ‘Oh, he fell from ladder. Sore back.’

  She pantomimed the fall, right down to clutching her back and moaning.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

  She waved away my concerns.

  ‘Better soon.’

  I invited her into the house. She looked at me a little suspiciously before following me down the hallway into the near-empty kitchen. Her eyes settled on the record player and chair in the middle of the room.

  ‘The house is empty. You live all alone?’

  ‘Yes. Alone.’

  ‘No good. This makes you sad. I see. You …’ she pointed at me, ‘enjoy the olives. They bring peace. They bring luck for you. They bring happy. Eat.’

  Before I’d fully comprehended what she’d said she had turned around and marched out of the house. I didn’t really know what to do with the jar. I didn’t want to offend her and had said nothing about not eating olives. I’d always thought they were a little too exotic. I rested my back against the kitchen sink and looked across at the jar. I walked over to it, bent forward and peered through the glass. There must have been hundreds of olives in the jar, along with slivers of red chilli, peppercorns and flakes of sea salt.

  I unscrewed the top of the jar, reached in, took out an olive and rested it on my tongue. It tasted warm and fresh. I bit into it. The olive contained many flavours. But most of all it tasted – not like the sea – but of the sea. I ate a second olive, quickly followed by a third.

  I quit smoking the next morning, and not because I’d made an effort to give up. Each time I took a puff on a cigarette I tasted burnt rubber in my mouth. I also felt sick. Until I ate another olive, which immediately made me feel better. That afternoon I felt motivated to tidy the yard and weed the garden beds. The next day I stocked the fridge with food. I even picked up a comfortable two-seater couch from the secondhand store down the road.

  A little over a week later, just as I was fishing around the bottom of the olive jar with my hand, trying to grab hold of the last of the slippery olives, the woman was back on my doorstep with a fresh supply. She smiled and told me I looked a lot healthier.

  ‘More fat,’ she said, laughing, as she grabbed her own well-proportioned stomach and jiggled it up and down.

  ‘Yes, more fat,’ I answered and lifted my shirt and patted my guts. ‘More fat.’

  Soon after the woman left there was another knock at the door. Maybe she’d forgotten something? I had not expected to find Rachel on the doorstep. She had changed. Her hair had blonde highlights through it and she’d lost weight.

  A little too much weight if you want my opinion.

  She was dressed differently too, in tight jeans, black leather boots and a T-shirt with bold sequined letters across the front – live for the moment.

  ‘Hi, Stephen,’ she chirped like a busy bird. ‘How are you?’

  I felt a little awkward and didn’t know what to say. I pointed at the T-shirt.

  ‘What’s that mean?’

  She tugged at the T-shirt.

  ‘It’s sort of like a Buddhist thing.’

  I was surprised. Rachel had always been more secular than Richard Dawkins.

  ‘Have you become a Buddhist? I’m surprised.’

  ‘No. I said like a Buddhist. Silly. It’s this cool idea that what’s happening now is what matters most. The moment. Live for the moment. You know?’

  No, I didn’t know, but couldn’t be bothered saying so.

  A car was parked in front of the house, a late-model sedan. Some guy wearing dark glasses was sitting behind the wheel.

  ‘He with you?’ I nodded.

  I spotted the nervous twitch in her eye.

  ‘Yes. That’s Robert from the media department. You must remember him. He’s been great to me, helping me get myself together. That’s why we’re here. Actually. I don’t know if you remember it, Stephen, but I had an old record player in the garage. It belonged to my mother.’

  I looked at her as vaguely as I could manage and said nothing. She tried prompting me.

  ‘We saw one just like it at a garage sale last weekend. You wouldn’t believe what they were asking for it. I’m planning to auction mine on eBay.’

  Robert got out of the car, took his sunnies off, rested his hands on the roof of the car and watched me closely. He seemed concerned, like maybe I was going to harm Rachel. I smiled and waved at him. He waved back.

  ‘I’m real sorry, Rachel, but I did a clean out after you left and gave some stuff away. A record player might have been in that lot. I can’t be sure. I thought you’d taken everything you wanted with you. I’ve still got your bed here. Maybe you need that? Or have you found another bed?’

  ‘I just wanted the record player.’

  ‘Well, if it’s any help to you, I gave the stuff to the Salvation Army store down on the highway. Maybe they haven’t sold it yet?’

  ‘That’s okay. It was just an idea.’

  She looked me up and down.

  ‘You look well. You’ve put on some weight.’

  ‘Yeah, a little. I’m good. I eat well.’

  ‘Are you seeing anyone?’

  ‘No. I don’t have the time. Work keeps me pretty busy.’

  ‘The car park?’

  ‘Yep. At the car park. It’s always busy. You know, moving cars, here and there.’

  I could think of nothing more to say to Rachel. She fumbled over a goodbye, walked away and got back into the car alongside Robert. I waited until they’d driven out of the street before closing the front door. I walked back into the kitchen, unscrewed the lid on the fresh jar o
f olives and scooped a few into a teacup with a large spoon. I took my seat in front of the record player, moved the needle across to the first track of the album and tapped my foot to the beat.

  STICKY FINGERS

  The Beatles had broken up a year ago and Sparrow had hardly left his bedroom. Once he’d worn out his original copy of Let It Be, their final album, he headed straight back to the record shop on Victoria Street and picked up a second copy. On weekends he’d throw open his bedroom window, turn his stereo up full volume and torture us with ‘The Long and Winding Road’. Or worse, the title track – more mournful, if that were possible. He had the best sound system of any kid on the estate, a foreign make with a funny name that his old man had lifted from the docks. He’d actually knocked off four of them, but no one on the estate could afford to buy one, even at half price.

  While the system produced a great sound, it couldn’t save Let It Be. Most of the tracks were fit only for a funeral, and are being sung at drunken wakes to this day. Despite our complaints Sparrow wouldn’t give the album a rest. Worse still, he skipped the only decent track, ‘Get Back’, to probe the lyrics of the more depressing songs for some logical explanation as to why the band had so suddenly and completely disintegrated, unconvinced by half the planet’s conviction that it was fucken Yoko.

  He lived with his parents and two older brothers in a first-floor corner flat. His window hung directly above where we wasted our days, catching the sliver of light that cut between two high-rise blocks. We would have been prepared to give up on the precious sun and escape his music if it were not for the fact that our competition marble ring was located on the same spot. When we weren’t lying around talking shit to each other, occasionally hurling abuse at Sparrow’s open window, or practising the art of blowing smoke rings, we played marbles, practising for the annual City Marbles Championship, the most important date on our sporting and social calendar. The CMC had been set up between the Public Housing Authority and some churchies, to keep kids out of trouble and off the streets. Rather than kick the shit out of each other, teenagers from inner-city public housing estates went to war over the game of marbles.

  The tournament was organised across the summer holidays and was run by the Salvation Army one year, and the Catholic Church the following year. Teams of four players, from each of the eight inner city estates, drew each other in a round-robin tournament before the four top-ranking teams played each other in the semis, with the two best teams facing off in the grand final. The team racking up the highest tally of keepsies – the number of marbles won across the early rounds of the tournament – got to play the grand final on their home ring.

  Each ring was unique, and having mastery over its peculiar habits provided a genuine advantage. For instance, although you couldn’t pick it with the naked eye, the Carlton ring drifted slightly from left to right. Once the pace of a marble had slowed it fell away from the targeted alley or even stopped dead in its tracks. Knowing how a ring played and gaining the valuable experience of regularly practising on it were very different. No home team let an opposition side near their ring until the first set down of a match, so practising away was impossible.

  The Collingwood ring was the hardest to play. It had pieces of glass buried just below the surface. While the team had been accused of sabotaging their ring to disadvantage opponents, they’d always claimed that the small shards of glass that popped out of the dirt like a white pointer’s fin were actually a ‘natural condition’ of the ring, as it had previously been used as another ring, for bare-knuckle boxing, where a drink was always had and empty bottles were sometimes smashed, both in celebration and anger.

  Dodging the obstacles was not easy. If a speeding alley collided with a jagged tip of glass the marble would miss the target and sometimes ricochet out of the ring altogether, resulting in a ‘double-keeps’ penalty. A second challenge of the Collingwood ring was that it was located in the middle of the estate, and was surrounded by four hulking towers, home to the most rabid supporters of the competition. When someone wasn’t screaming out of their window at you – ‘you’re going home with a Tom Bowler shoved up your arse’ – you were being pelted in the back of the head with a range of missiles as you hunched for a shot.

  We had sailed through the early rounds and felt confident. But the day we got the bad news that we’d drawn Collingwood in the semi-final, I came up with the idea that we should steal ourselves some hard-hats from the council yard to protect ourselves against concussion. Bunga Ward, the team captain, overruled me with a direct ‘fuck off’, and rightly pointed out that the psychological victory that such a sight would provide to the Collingwood team was as good as handing them the match on a plate.

  So we went into an important game without protection. And we won. It was possibly our greatest victory, and without doubt Bunga’s bravest performance. With the scores locked at the end of four rounds, he went up against the Collingwood captain, Claude ‘Fist of Stone’ McVicar, in a sudden-death game of chasey round the ring. With McVicar winning the lag and ordering Bunga to shoot, he fucked up the follow on and kissed Bunga’s alley with a breath of air as his taw skidded by and came to a halt on the far side of the ring.

  Bunga had to land just one punch and it was over. I ground my teeth down as I watched him hunching for the shot. He crouched like a cat and shut his bad eye that had been clipped by a stray slug from an air rifle when he was about six years old. He slipped his left hand down his pants and tugged at the end of his dick as he concentrated on the shot. It was a good sign. I’d been playing marbles with him since primary school and whenever he gave his foreskin a working over he was on his game. It was like conjuring the magical genie out of the lamp. I had no doubt he’d make the important shot.

  Until a homemade dart, thrown from a window high above the ring, speared him in the side of his head. Most any other kid would have collapsed. But not Bunga. He gave the foreskin a final rub and released the marble from his knuckle like a cannon ball. It slammed into McVicar’s alley and catapulted it from the ring.

  After the game McVicar shook hands with Bunga, which was customary.

  ‘Sorry about the dart, Bung. Someone upstairs must have had a few dollars on the game. I hope this doesn’t cause bad blood between us.’

  Bunga rubbed his wound and said there were no hard feelings and Claude wished us well against the Kensington team in the grand final the following week.

  ‘I hope you kick their arse all the way back to the western suburbs. Shit. They’re not even a city team. We played them out there in the round robin, and I needed a torch and a fucken map to get the boys home for tea.’

  Luckily, we were playing ‘The Ken’ at home, where we’d thrashed them four weeks earlier in the round robin. Over the years our ring had been beaten to hardened clay. It was the fastest surface in the competition and on a warm day played like polished glass. Any player unfamiliar with its speed found it hard to play.

  Bunga came up with the idea to add to our advantage by driving the opposition team crazy: he instructed me to have Sparrow ready with the miserable sighs of Paul McCartney on the morning of the match.

  ‘You tell him I want that sad stuff up full blast as soon as we hit the ring.’

  ‘You sure? It might fuck us instead. You hate the shit.’

  ‘But we’ve got these,’ he said, and pulled a packet of industrial earplugs out of his pockets. ‘We’ll put these in as soon as the music starts.’

  ‘You got enough for all of us?’

  ‘More than enough. My old man brings them home from the forge and puts them in of a night so he doesn’t have to listen to my mum talking.’

  ‘That must piss her off.’

  ‘Nah. She stopped talking to him a long time back, but he doesn’t know that because he wears the earplugs. He’s had to learn to lip-read off the TV.’

  The day after the Collingwood win, my dad loaned us a tarp off his truck s
o we could cover the ring when we weren’t practising on it. Any rain on the clay would slow it up. I caught Sparrow on his way home from school the next afternoon, just as he was climbing the stairs to his flat. When I told him Bunga wanted him to crank up his stereo on the day of the match, with the bad side of the Beatles album, and be sure his windows were open, he was surprised.

  ‘Are you sure that’s what he wants? I don’t want to get into trouble and my mum’s sick of him yelling out, “I’m gonna cut your fucken power if you don’t turn it down, Sparrow.” ’

  ‘It’s what we all want. You can help us win. I’m here on his say-so, so don’t worry.’

  He was unconvinced.

  ‘Maybe he’d like some Hendrix or Cream? My brother Dom’s got all their stuff. He’s into guitar solos. I could borrow some of his albums.’

  ‘He’s got some Hendrix? Shit. I’ve never heard any Hey Joe, where you goin’ with that gun in your hand? coming out of your window.’

  He tapped the side of his head.

  ‘He wears headphones and it’s sending him deaf. I thought he must’ve done it last year when he let off that string of tom-thumbs in his own face on Guy Fawkes Night. My mum took him to the doc and he says it’s the loud music that’s fucked him up.’

  ‘Don’t worry about Hendrix or your brother, Sparrow. We need you to concentrate. Stick with the Beatles. Okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ he shrugged. ‘If it’s what you want.’

  The CMC grand final was timed to coincide with the last weekend of the school holidays. We spent most of the week leading up to it at the ring, practising pressure shots, exercising our shooting thumbs and listening to motivational rants delivered by Bunga. He insisted we take a tram into the city and watch a re-run of Ben Hur that was showing at the Metro on Bourke Street. I came out of the film knowing something more about chariot races and a little about the Bible, but nothing revealing about the game of marbles.

  The two other members of our team were Bung’s younger brother, Fatman, a very good player for his age, who’d been described in the Richmond Gazette as a ‘sporting prodigy’, and Scratch, a Scottish kid who’d only been in the country for six months. He wasn’t too popular, seeing as he was always scratching at his arsehole, a habit that didn’t seem to bring him luck, good or bad. But his more hygienic hand was steady as a rock and he had a beautiful eye for splitting a pair of alleys when the pressure was on.