Fresh Fields

by Peter Kocan

  The station gradually became busy. The only plan the youth could think of was to return to the library and spend the day there. It reopened at eight-thirty, he knew, for he had made a point of checking the notice outside the doors. He went out of the station and trailed through the streets and waited on the front steps until the bronze doors opened. He got David Copperfield off the shelf and went to his place at the big table and tried to read. But he couldn’t focus on it. He leant forward with his head resting on his arms, but that didn’t help. He was thinking about the dogshit smell in the phone box. He wondered whether he had that smell on him and was stinking the place out. He looked at people out of the corner of his eye to see if they were looking at him. They didn’t seem to be, but then he wondered if they were deliberately not looking at him.

  He left the library and went to the large park alongside. It was called Foundation Park. It had paths and trees and statues. The youth was looking for a spot to lie down. He found a nice patch of grass between a big spreading tree and a statue of Henry Lawson. He remembered how one time at school a teacher had recited a poem of Lawson’s. It was called “Faces in the Street” and the youth had liked it. It was about someone studying the looks on the faces of people as they go past his window. One or two lines came back to him. The day was cool but sunny and the grass felt dry, so he put his piece of blanket down and lay on it and went straight to sleep.

  He felt so hungry when he woke that he went immediately to a shop and spent the last of his money on a meat pie and a small carton of strawberry milk. The pie was a bit runny and the pastry wasn’t very strong and it kept sagging in his fingers. Finally, half the pie fell on the ground. He drank the strawberry milk carefully so as not to waste a drop.

  The youth did not know what to do. The imposing building on the opposite side of the park from the library turned out to be the State Art Gallery. He thought of seeing if it cost anything to go in, but wasn’t sure he’d be allowed in anyway. He had never been in an art gallery and didn’t know how they worked. Maybe only toffs were allowed in. Besides, there was the thing about the dogshit smell.

  He made his way slowly back through the city to the railway terminal, going through the grubby park where the phone box was. He looked into the box and saw the smear of something running up one wall. He tried to think whether he would have touched that part during the night.

  The youth sat in the crowded terminal. It was quite late in the day. Making contact with his mother was the key thing. That meant phoning Mrs. Stott to see if she had heard anything. But he didn’t have the money for a call. He wondered whether he should walk to the Miami, but Bankington was a fair distance, and he didn’t really feel up to it. Besides, he was scared of meeting Mr. Stavros. And it’d be for nothing anyhow. Why would his mother go out of her way to ring the Miami after she’d got the sack? And it wasn’t as if she was aware of his situation. As far as she knew he was up in the bush having a great time.

  The noise of the train announcements was giving him another headache, so he went out of the big hall and into the street. The evening peak hour was starting and there were lots of people coming to catch trains. The youth wondered whether he could ask someone for some money. Just enough to ring up. But he knew he couldn’t do it. All those Oncoming Looks were too real. It wasn’t like in the poem, where the faces in the street are passing a window behind which the watcher is snugly hidden.

  The youth felt so much at a loss that he thought he might cry.

  “It isn’t that bad is it?” said a voice beside him. There was a nicely dressed man with a briefcase.

  “Pardon?”

  “From the look on your face, anyone would think you hadn’t a friend in the world.”

  “No, just thinking about something,” the youth said.

  “Are you travelling?” the man asked, indicating the youth’s bag and the terminal building.

  “I’ve come down from the bush.”

  “Ah,” the man said. He looked into the youth’s face for a longish time.

  The youth did not mind being looked at as much as he might have. There was something attractive about the man. He seemed very clean and fresh and there was a smell of aftershave. And there was something else that was giving the youth a very odd sensation. The man had cool blue eyes and gold-rimmed glasses. The youth had a photo of Grace Kelly gazing all cool and blue-eyed through gold-rimmed glasses just like these, giving him that very same look.

  “So, do you have a place to stay?” the man asked softly.

  “My mother’s living here somewhere. I need to contact her.”

  “I see.”

  The man kept regarding the youth as though trying to decide something.

  The youth gathered his nerve and blurted out: “Could you spare the price of a phone call please?”

  The man smiled.

  “Of course. But perhaps I could buy you a meal as well. There’s a place just along here that’s quite nice.”

  “No, I’m okay thanks.”

  “Are you sure?” the man said. “I have the time to spare, and you look as though you need some pampering . . . Yes, definitely some pampering, I’d say.”

  The youth felt a rush of grateful emotion. Some pampering would be awfully nice. Or a good hot meal anyhow.

  “Just the phone money would be great,” he murmured.

  “Of course, if you’re positive that’s all you need,” said the man. He fished a coin from his pocket and handed it over. His manner had become a bit more brisk. “Perhaps we’ll bump into each other again,” he said. “I hope we will. I often go past here.”

  He paused, as though giving the youth a moment to say something. Then he turned and went into the flow of people going by.

  The youth felt panic. He almost ran after the man. He wanted his kindness back. He wanted to be gazed at again in that intense way, and to have more of that peculiar sensation of seeing the blue eyes through the gold-rimmed glasses. He thought for a moment he might faint. It occurred to him he might be coming down with something.

  When he got through to Mrs. Stott he learnt that his mother had been in touch that afternoon and had left her address and phone number.

  THE WOMAN was working as a housemaid at a hotel called the Viceroy’s Arms, about ten minutes walk from the railway terminal. The youth found the place and went into the reception area. There was no-one around so he went back outside. He was leaning against the wall, lost in his thoughts, when the woman came along the footpath. She had to say his name twice—the second time quite sharply—before he realised she was there. She led the way to a cafe and ordered a pot of tea and a plate of chips. The youth explained about being sacked from Dunkeld and having no money and nowhere to stay. He told it in a halting way, trying to minimise how bad it sounded, but he knew it was confirming how stupid and useless he was. The part about him coming away from the job with almost no money, for instance. The woman seemed to think he’d let himself be diddled.

  “Where’s this gear, then, that took so much of the wages they owed you?”

  “I had to leave it behind.”

  “Why?”

  “It was a bit bulky to carry.”

  “So you left a coat and boots and hat that you’d paid through the nose for?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because you didn’t want the bother of carrying them?”

  “It was really bulky,” he said again, staring down at the table.

  The woman’s voice went harder. “You’ve been a pretty bulky item for me to lug around for the past fourteen years. But I made the effort, didn’t I?”

  They agreed that he had to smarten his ideas up.

  For the time being, the woman decided, he’d have to stay secretly in her room in the staff area of the hotel. She had no money to give him for accommodation elsewhere, and it would have to be secret because the owner, Mrs. Kincaid, was a prize bitch
who’d jump at any excuse to be nasty.

  “She’s already shitty about me having your brother here. If she sees you occasionally, we can say you’re living somewhere else and just visiting.”

  They went back to the Viceroy’s Arms and up to the woman’s room where the boy was watching cartoons on TV. The room was small and dark and the window looked onto a brick wall and a network of pipes. The youth used his piece of blanket and a rug to make himself a makeshift bed on the floor in a corner. They decided that he shouldn’t leave the room between eight in the evening and eight in the morning. He had a tin to pee in so he wouldn’t need to go down the corridor to the Gents. And the rest of the time he shouldn’t hang around the premises. If Mrs. Kincaid queried him in the corridors he was to say that he was on holiday from his job as a jackeroo, that he was staying at a friend’s place nearby, that he just popped round mornings and evenings to see his mother and brother, and that he’d soon be going back to the bush.

  At about eight-thirty each morning the woman started her cleaning work, the boy set off for school and the youth wandered into the city. Each day the woman gave him enough money to buy the paper with job ads in it, and to get a sandwich for lunch.

  The first few days he bought the paper and looked at the columns under “J” for Junior Positions, but couldn’t see anything that related to him in any way. He would look at, say, “Junior Shop Assistant,” and know that it was pointless to try. Or he’d see “Junior Process Worker,” and realise that he didn’t have the faintest idea what that meant. So he stopped buying the paper. That gave him a bit extra lunch money.

  He went to the State Library every day and finished reading David Copperfield. He found a book of Henry Lawson’s poems and read “Faces in the Street.” Then he discovered “The Ballad of the Drover”:

  Across the stony ridges,

  Across the rolling plain,

  Young Harry Dale, the drover,

  Comes riding home again.

  And well his stock-horse bears him,

  And light of heart is he,

  And stoutly his old pack-horse

  Is trotting by his knee.

  But then they come to a flooded river:

  Now Harry speaks to Rover,

  The best dog on the plains,

  And to his hardy horses,

  And strokes their shaggy manes:

  “We’ve breasted bigger rivers

  When floods were at their height,

  Nor shall this gutter stop us

  From getting home to-night!”

  And so they plunge into the river, and Harry Dale gets dragged under, and Rover goes back to find him:

  The faithful dog a moment

  Sits panting on the bank,

  And then swims through the current

  To where his master sank.

  And round and round in circles

  He fights with failing strength,

  Till, borne down by the waters,

  The old dog sinks at length.

  The youth couldn’t think of that poem without wanting to cry. He thought it must be the best poem ever written. It was almost as tragic as King Harold and his people going down.

  He had found a really good book about 1066 and read and reread the main parts of it. When the emotion got too much he would lean his elbows on the table and cover his face with his hands, pretending to rest his eyes. That meant he could let his face crumple up and the tears run down. And if he looked flushed and red-eyed afterwards, people would assume it was from the strain of so much reading. Sometimes he worried that people knew he was crying behind his hands, but mostly he was too full of his feelings to care. If he felt especially emotional he would go out into the park and pace up and down by the statue of Henry Lawson and sob the feelings out. He knew that Lawson understood everything. Harry Dale and King Harold were the same. They were the knights and warriors and horsemen who bear the brunt and face the odds. It was always the same story:

  The thunder growls a warning,

  The ghastly lightnings gleam,

  As the drover turns his horses

  To swim the fatal stream . . .

  They were the heroes who defy the thunder and lightning, and whose faithful companions remain at their side through thick and thin. Diestl was one of them, except that he was alone. He didn’t even have a faithful dog to swim back and drown with him out of devotion. The youth felt how sad that was.

  He would be so drained that by the time he returned to the Viceroy’s Arms in the evening he had no courage left for his own needs and was full of nervous dread of meeting Mrs. Kincaid. So far he had only glimpsed her through the window of the main bar area. His mother had told him that Mrs. Kincaid prowled the corridors looking for things to nitpick about, and that she could tell if so much as a pin was out of place.

  The youth pictured Mrs. Kincaid as a gaunt figure in black, with piercing hate-filled eyes and probing fingers like a witch. In the room at night he’d listen for sounds outside the door, and would imagine a long hooked nose sniffing at it, and long claw-like hands rubbing across it, as though seeking a way in.

  “HERE’S A job to apply for,” the woman said flatly one evening, putting a copy of the classifieds down in front of them. “The one I’ve circled.”

  It was for a pageboy at the Majestic Cinema in the city.

  “What does ‘pageboy’ mean?” the youth asked, a knot of anxiety forming in his stomach.

  “General dogsbody, I suppose.”

  “How would I know what to do?”

  “They’ll tell you.”

  The youth looked as dubious as he felt.

  “Cheer up,” the woman said. “You might not get the job. But you are going to ring up and apply for it. How do I know this? Because I’m going to walk you to the phone in the morning, then stand and watch you make the call.”

  There was no way out.

  A lavish musical was showing at the Majestic Cinema. It was called Pacific Paradise. The youth hadn’t seen it but he knew some of the songs because they were often on the radio. The door of the manager’s office was open and a burly man sat behind a desk. The youth fought the urge to turn and run. He showed himself in the doorway and was waved in. He stammered that he’d rung that morning, about the pageboy job.

  “How old are you, again?” asked the manager.

  The youth said fifteen. The woman had told him to say that because fifteen was the school-leaving age.

  “The job is evenings only—from seven till eleven. That okay?”

  The youth said it was. The manager told him how much he’d be paid and the youth said that was okay too.

  “In the cleaner’s room there’s a couple of uniforms. See if they fit.”

  The cleaner’s room was a sort of large cupboard with mops and brooms and buckets in it. Two navy-blue uniforms were hanging behind the door. The youth tried both of them on and found that the second one didn’t fit too badly except for being a bit long in the sleeves and legs. He went back to the manager’s office and the manager looked him up and down in the uniform.

  “You’ll do,” he said. “Are you ready to start?”

  The youth mumbled that, um, he had to get home because, um, his mother wasn’t very well . . .

  The manager looked irritated and told him to front up the next evening then, at a quarter to seven.

  The youth spent the next twenty-four hours sick with dread. The woman gave him a pep talk. She said that he’d taken the bull by the horns and now he just needed to continue in the same spirit and do his best and show a bit of gumption. He didn’t reply. He couldn’t explain that he was afraid of the usherettes. Just going through the foyer to the manager’s office had exposed him to the glances of three of them. He’d wanted to sink through the floor.

  He turned up at the proper time the next evening and the head us
herette explained his duties. Her name was Sharlene. She was middle-aged and had a hard face and a busy manner. The youth took in almost nothing of what she was telling him. He was thinking that he would make a dash for it. If he could get into the street he could disappear within a few seconds. There was a laneway through to the next block . . .

  But somehow he found himself doing the first of his nightly duties, sweeping the front footpath with a straw broom. It wasn’t so bad out there, away from the foyer where the usherettes were. The front was all lit up and there were big glossy photos and posters on display. The youth felt stirred by the glamour of it. When people went past they would look at the photos and posters and peer through into the red-carpeted foyer. You could tell they were impressed.

  He tried to hold himself in a more dignified way and sweep with a certain pan-at-chee. At the same time, he had to appear to take all the excitement for granted and be quite relaxed. So he swept like a person who is connected to all the fame and glamour of the world but is unaffected by it.

  That lasted only a few minutes before he had to go inside and sweep the foyer and then the staircase that led to the Dress Circle. He kept his eyes on the carpet and tried desperately not to drop the broom or trip over his own feet. He could feel the eyes of the usherettes boring into him, but once or twice when he gave a furtive half-glance in their direction they were looking away. He was halfway up the Dress Circle stairs when one of the usherettes came down them. She was the nicest-looking one, the youth thought. He had heard another usherette call her Natalie. The youth kept his eyes on the carpet and stepped close to the wall to give her plenty of room to pass. He sensed her coming level with him, then saw her nice legs and high-heeled shoes beside him.

  “You’re doing a good job,” she said.

  He didn’t dare look up.