Clement races the State-school boys
Clement’s mother makes it a rule that the boy must be home from school by four o’clock every day. In the late afternoon, long after he has changed into his old patched pants and gone out into the yard to play until tea-time, Clement still sees groups of children dawdling along Leslie Street on their way home from school. The children stand staring into any yard where someone may have devised a game that lasts for more than a few minutes. The biggest boy from one straggling group unfastens the Killeatons’ front gate and comes in to see what it is that keeps Clement contented for so long behind his cypress hedge. The others follow the boy through the gate. Margaret Wallace remains leaning on the front gate. One of the boys is her brother. Clement persuades the boys to call the worn dirt track around his house a racecourse for horses or men and the panel of greenish-gold glass in his front door that glows with late sunlight the winning post. He lines the boys up beside him and asks the girl standing beside Margaret to clap her hands and start the field on a race of twenty laps. Clement calls to the girls to keep a count of the laps and judge the finish, but they do not answer. The bigger boys sprint from the start and vie for the lead. They swing on the blistered posts of the veranda and tear off branches of twigs from bushes to stop themselves veering off the little circuit of their course. Clement drops far behind them, breathing easily and conserving his strength. He soon loses sight of the boys ahead. As he passes Margaret and the other girls he glances at their faces. They look with pity or contempt at the tail-ender. Clement still runs deliberately slowly. After two or three laps the girls are ready to give up watching the race. Clement tightens the muscles of his face and pumps his arms harder. He believes he is starting to gain on the leaders, who are still out of sight ahead. The girls suddenly seem interested again as they notice the outsider making his long slow run. Their faces show first sympathy and then admiration as Clement gains a few more yards during the next few laps. Soon afterwards the reckless leaders hurtle off the track and into the thick front hedge where they wrestle and tumble and laugh among the dust and dead twigs. Clement sets out on another lap but they order him to stop. One boy asks what the prize would have been anyway if they had bothered to keep going. Clement turns his back so the girls will not hear and whispers that he thought the winner might have been allowed to go down with one of the girls to the big drain under the McCracken’s Road bridge on the way home from school next day and look at or touch or play with or tickle those white shapes of skin that he is sure the boys are always looking for on all their rambling walks after school among the dull front fences and pebbly footpaths. A boy tells Clement that that prize is no good because he and his gang have been coming home along the creek and through that drain for years now. The others are already tired of the Killeatons’ yard. They peer out through the fence into Leslie Street. As they are all leaving, Clement calls Margaret Wallace back into the corner between the hedge and the fence. He makes a sign that he hopes will tell her he is still waiting every afternoon for her to come with him into some shady corner where they can pull down each other’s pants. She tries to kick him in the shins and then runs off to catch up with the others. Clement is relieved to see that at least she does not tell them what he wants to do with her.
Clement conceals Tamarisk Row
Clement takes a week to establish a farmhouse and stables in every sheltered nook and neglected corner of his backyard. Then he spends several days collecting small stones of distinctive shapes and colours. To each farm he allots a certain number of stones. Every Wednesday and Sunday he reads the Sporting Globe newspaper after his father has finished it and chooses from it attractive names for horses. He writes names such as Gold Watch, Night Life, The Trapper, Icene, Scaramouche, Hiatus, Orthodox, and Rubantine in the back pages of an old exercise book. His mother discovers him writing names and snatches away his book and the racing paper. She tells him to stop playing racing games for good and to go outside and smash up the racecourse behind the lavatory and never to mention racing again to his father. He walks around the backyard, carefully concealing the farms and their stables and scraping with his bare feet to wipe out all trace of the roads that once connected those places to the racecourse. He takes the greatest care to hide the spacious house and the tree-lined paddocks in the corner beneath the ragged tamarisks. He pulls up the lines of tiny stakes around the racecourse but leaves for anyone to see the smooth paths of its straights and curves. His mother finds him loitering around the lilac tree and says she will buy him a packet of seeds so he can plant a little flower garden and water it himself where he tried to build an old racecourse. On a lonely road that is almost obscured by trees the priest stops to talk to the owner of Tamarisk Row. The priest says – I’ve decided that perhaps you shouldn’t think about racing so much for a while – how about you and your wife forgetting about that big race you’re always trying to win and ask God to give you a baby instead – and then when your little boy is growing up you can let him watch you training your horse and racing will be just good fun whether you win a big race or not.
Clement visits the Riordans’ palatial home
On a Saturday morning late in 1947 Augustine takes Clement for a walk to the home of Stan Riordan, half a mile away on the edge of Bassett. After his father has gone inside to talk to Stan in his carpeted office, Clement wanders across a courtyard of flagstones on the cool southern side of the big stone house. Creepers with green leaves like drooping silk ribbons cover the trellis high above him. He enters a fernery with walls of damp logs and searches for a hidden doorway among the trembling fronds and the rigid pale-green spikes as dense as sheaves and behind the cascades of dark feathery stuff that spill down from hanging wire baskets. Outside the fernery he discovers behind a palisade of tall irises a fishpond overlaid with water-lilies. A green lattice tufted with moss bars his way and he turns back. He finds at last a path to the front garden, which is hidden from the road by a towering hedge of cypresses, green with a golden sheen all down it. An abrupt colonnade of pillars fluted with granular cream-coloured plaster draws him towards the front doors of the house. They are double doors with great panels of flawless glass and nothing visible behind them but the abundant folds and flounces of pale satin draperies. From behind him on the lawn come the sounds of girls’ voices. He walks down resilient laneways between tall shrubs until he finds Therese Riordan, about twelve years old, and another girl of about the same age whom he does not know. The two girls are playing a game with small red and orange berries. They take no notice of Clement. Sometimes as they stand up to reach for more berries or fling themselves down on the deep cushion of buffalo grass Therese Riordan’s skirt slips up high above her knees. When she is busy counting her berries she does not bother to pull it down to cover her thighs. Clement walks quickly round her but her pants are well hidden. The other girl guesses what Clement is looking for and reaches across to pull down Therese’s skirt. Clement asks the name of their game, and Therese answers – how many eggs in the bush today. The other girl invites him to play it with them but he finds the rules too confusing to learn. They tell him to go away and come back when he can play properly. He finds his father and Stan Riordan talking earnestly together. Before they see the boy approaching they agree that Stan will lend Augustine fifty pounds and won’t be in a hurry to get it back. Stan says – I’m genuinely surprised that you’re in so deep with your bookmakers Gus and I wish you’d have come to me earlier about it – I always thought you were doing well with the information you got from that chap Goodchild and his team at Caulfield. Augustine sees Clement standing in the spacious shade of a loquat tree. He lowers his voice and says – they’re having a lean trot at the moment Stan but they’re still my best chance of getting out of trouble again. Augustine leads Clement down the front path past Therese and her friend who are looking down to discover how much of Therese’s thigh the boy might have seen. Even before the boy and his father are outside the front gate the girls are playing with the berr
ies again, hiding them behind their backs, guessing how many there are, prising open each other’s fists to see them again, and laughing quietly about the true meaning of the handfuls of glossy red and gold fruits.
Clement and Augustine talk about marbles
One Saturday afternoon Augustine stays for a long time in one of his fowl sheds. Clement looks for him to ask why he is not listening to the Melbourne races. He finds his father sitting with one of his purebred Rhode Island Red pullets in his lap. Augustine stares vaguely ahead while he gropes with one hand between the bird’s legs. If he can fit three fingers between the pelvic bones it is a sign that the pullet will soon begin to lay. When Clement asks him about the races he explains that he is thinking of giving up betting altogether and just keeping Sternie in training as a hobby. Clement tells how his mother has forbidden him to keep a racecourse behind the lilac tree. He asks his father may he start building one again because it is lonely in the backyard without some sort of racing each Saturday to train for. Augustine says – it might be an idea if you just played with your marbles behind the lilac – you could call the marbles men and race them in heats of the Stawell Gift – there isn’t as much gambling on foot-running as horses and your mother mightn’t be so upset if she sees you. Clement tells him about the strange marble that was buried under the racecourse and asks whether the boy Silverstone could have run races with his marbles when he lived there years ago. Augustine says he doesn’t think so because not many boys nowadays are interested in professional running although a few years back you would often see a young chap marking out a track for starting practice in his backyard.
Tamarisk Row is narrowly beaten
Clement takes his jar of coloured marbles to the place between the lilac tree and the lavatory where his racecourse once stood. He arranges a dozen marbles in a ragged line at the place where the six-furlongs barrier used to be. If his mother had not told him to destroy his racecourse he would have been able to close his eyes and push the marbles carefully around the track with his fingers to decide the Handicap Maiden Plate at a small inland town. But now that the fences of twigs are gone there is only a patch of gravelly Bassett soil to stare at while the story of the Maiden Plate unfolds. The owner of the property that lies out of sight beneath the far cloudy tamarisks fastens the door of the float behind his utility truck and kisses his wife goodbye. He reminds her that she has promised to walk around naked for an hour after Mass tomorrow if Tamarisk Row wins the Handicap Maiden Plate at a small town many miles inland. She smiles and says she will offer up a prayer for their horse when she hears from the wireless that the barrier is down. The man drives carefully for hours across plains and through infrequent towns. At noon he parks his truck and float in the shade of some untidy trees near the curve of white rails on the turn out of a straight. He meets his best friend who has travelled many miles to the course from another direction and gives him a thick roll of notes to put on Tamarisk Row. As the field walks out onto the track for the Maiden Plate the owner of Tamarisk Row sees how each set of coloured silks has been designed by the horse’s owner and his wife or girlfriend to tell the story of their lives, to remind people of the hardships they once endured before they met each other and went to live among comfortable paddocks, or to hint at the peculiar pleasures that they enjoy after their horse wins a race. He looks proudly at the single pink stripe, pale and pure like his wife’s naked skin, that is protected on all sides by the wide dark-orange of the shadeless soil in the districts he has travelled during all the years since he was a boy among the gravel streets of Bassett, then at the sleeves and cap of acidic light-green, the colour of the unvisited places that he and his wife will discover in heaven after they die in the state of grace or that they see past the corners of their farm when they stand on their veranda in the late afternoon and half-close their eyes, remembering the under-sides of leaves in corners of the backyards where they first wondered where they might be standing one day in the late afternoon after they had found a person to love and go naked with. As the barrier strands go down he notices how one owner’s defiant purple is contradicted by a colour that grudgingly admits that he will probably never find after all the contentment that he once sought so eagerly. Another man’s wife has used their colours to boast unashamedly that she enjoys naked games and mating in sunlit places even more than her husband likes touching and kissing and grasping her. One man’s discreet colours say simply that for most of his life he has had no friend or wife but that he would feel a sort of lonely satisfaction if ever his horse came home ahead of the strident reds and flaunted blues. Tamarisk Row is forced back almost to last as the closely grouped field rushes to the first turn. His owner watches undismayed as the black colt, galloping with long easy strides, drops well behind the leading bunch in the back straight. He grows a little alarmed as the leaders approach the turn with Tamarisk Row still many lengths back. The lead changes and changes again while the black horse is still out of sight somewhere in the middle of the field. Between the brilliant sashes that boast of pleasures and the diamonds and stripes that tell of memories or hopes, a streak of light-green appears at last. Tamarisk Row’s jockey tries frantically to find a clear passage for the horse that is only now beginning to stretch his powerful legs. When the leaders are almost at the post a gap opens in front of him. With a few great strides the black horse bursts clear of the whole pack of struggling horses and reaches the line with just two horses ahead of him. The owner says almost nothing to his best friend as they lead the horse into the float for the long journey home. Around them in the car park other people with weary faces are preparing for long silent journeys. From only a few cars come the sounds of cheerful talk and the laughter of women. It is almost midnight before the float arrives back at the property named Tamarisk Row. The owner spends a long time making sure that the horse has a clean bed of straw for the night and the correct amount of oats and molasses in his feed-box. When he finally goes into the house he finds his wife still cheerful despite their loss. She tells him how she sat all afternoon in the lounge-room while a north wind thrust through the cracks under the doors. The sound of branches sweeping the walls and windows was the only noise in all the wide space between the empty back paddocks and the road where no car passed all day. Wind or a far thunderstorm crackled in the wireless as Tamarisk Row’s race drew near. The horse’s name was mentioned only twice during the brief time while the race was run. She understands without being told that the horse was unlucky and should have won easily. She takes off all her clothes and leans backwards with her legs wide apart just as she promised she would if the young black horse had won. Her husband touches between her legs for a few minutes but then tells her quietly that her little pink lump cannot console him after all he has lost that day. She puts her clothes on and they talk of waiting patiently, perhaps for many months, until Tamarisk Row has another chance to prove himself. They agree to sell one of their promising young unraced horses to get the stake for the next bet on the black horse. Clement Killeaton puts the last of his marbles back into their glass jar. His mother walks past on her way to the lavatory and asks – were you doing something sneaky just then? He tells her he was running a Stawell Gift with his marbles. She says – look out if I catch you with that racecourse again. Clement sits for a while and wonders whether, if he had been allowed to guide the field around the rails of a real racecourse, he might have been able to clear a passage through the field so that Tamarisk Row would have been able to win as he deserved.
Clement tries to find out about girls
Clement keeps watch on the aviary every afternoon until he sees Mr Wallace close the door carefully behind him and walk off into the dense scrub of wattles and banksias, startling a pair of olive-backed orioles as he goes. Clement hurries through the door of Margaret’s playhouse. She backs away from him into the farthest corner as if she knows what he has come for. He stretches his hand towards the space between her thighs, but too cautiously. She picks up an old china soup-bowl full of black
cats and tries to tempt him with it as she edges towards the door. He dodges around her arm but upsets a baby’s pot full of chocolate balls and falls to his knees. As Margaret reaches the door she lifts her dress high over her head and does a few quick steps that she must have learned from watching a child tap-dancer in a film. Clement sees only a smooth white slope stretching down from her belly. By the time he is on his feet again she has run to the door of the aviary. She locks the door from the inside and prepares to do another little dance beneath the nest of a pair of cockatiels. But she hears her father coming and pretends to be studying the nest. When Clement arrives home he calls softly through the fence to the youngest Glasscock boy. He tries not to notice the crust of egg-yolk, which has probably been stuck on Nigel Glasscock’s top lip since breakfast that morning, as he leads the younger boy into one of the Killeatons’ fowl-sheds. Clement asks Nigel about his sisters. The boy admits that he sometimes hops into the bath with one of them on Sunday nights, but he cannot describe clearly what they look like naked. He soon grows tired of Clement’s questions and presses his moon face against the wire-netting at the front of the shed. Just when he is about to leave Clement gets him to take out his cock. Clement takes out his own at the same time. Clement gently twists Nigel’s into many different shapes and asks the boy each time whether it reminds him of what his sisters have between their legs. Nigel Glasscock grows tired of this too and tells Clement to let him put his Tommy away and he will tell him what Mr Glasscock’s looked like when he was lying naked in bed late one Saturday morning. Clement almost asks was Mrs Glasscock naked in bed too, but changes his mind when he remembers the two sack-shaped titties that flop around on the woman’s chest and belly under her greasy dress. He feels a burning pain in his legs and clutches his calves. The smooth greasy black tail of his father’s razor strop curls back from his skin. Before he can tuck his cock safely away he has to grab at his legs again as the black strap crashes around his thighs. Nigel Glasscock tucks his Tommy out of sight and runs towards the front gate. Clement’s mother lifts the razor strop again. The boy’s cock dangles helplessly as he skips and leaps to dodge the blow.
Tamarisk Row Page 4
