The Boy in the Green Suit

by Robert Hillman

  For the time being, my father had accepted a job for me, offered in the pub by Bertie Fisher, the butcher in my home town. I was to become Bertie’s apprentice.

  ‘You’ve got to do something, y’ know,’ my father explained. ‘You’ve got to do something for a living.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Well, what’s the matter with it? It’s a good job. Make money as a butcher.’

  My sister Marion, now living in the city, had gone to work at the age of fourteen. My father had always spoken proudly of her initiative. It was important that I measured up to my sister, gave my father equal cause for pride.

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  My father had lived through the Great Depression. Employment to him, and to every other male Australian of his class and generation, was victory. He didn’t trust life or anything about it, but if you had a job, you’d had a win. It wasn’t possible for him to study me for a minute or two, with all his prejudices put aside, and ask himself if this slight and dozy boy with pink cheeks and a girl’s eyelashes could comfortably take his place behind a zinc counter in a striped apron. It was a good job. It was a victory.

  I was worried about Bertie, more than anything else. The island—well, I would still get to the island. But Bertie was a tough bastard, that was what everybody said, and he scared me. He was short and ugly with a powerful chest and over-developed forearms. His nose looked as if it had been chewed by something—human, animal, machine—then partly repaired. It tapered to an unnaturally flat tip. It was his hands that properly frightened me. He could lift things with just one of his huge, club-like fists that most people would struggle to hoist with two. He would take hold of a pig’s carcass and toss it along the butchering slab with a nonchalant flick, and once I watched him sink a spade into a pile of offal, lift it horizontal with a single hand (he had a Lucky Strike in the other), study the greyish-pink mass for a minute or more, then heave it into the copper.

  I worked in the backyard of the butcher shop most of the time. The furnace and copper were kept there. I would load offal and offcuts into the copper, rendering it all down to lard. The stink was awful. I could gaze up to the hills that circled the town, and set my soul on routes of escape. The near hills had been cleared root and stump by squatters in the old days, and in the spring glowed green in the sunlight. In summer they took on a tawny wheatfield colour. Beyond, the mountains climbed into the sky. I had roamed those hills, climbed the mountains. I knew of cool, shaded valleys bedded with moss and ferns.

  Staring up at the hills from the backyard of the butcher’s shop while the offal boiled, I dreamed of the special colony I hoped one day to found up there. The colony would accept women almost exclusively. And not just any women. I was thinking of maybe a dozen women, all like Jenny Macrae, a soft, blowsy girl from my fourth-form class with yellow hair and cushiony breasts and lips that always looked slightly bruised. Other pretty girls, teased by boys at school, would respond by dobbing to Mrs Spencer, who looked on all males as swamp life. Spence would push a boy against a wall and savage him until tears dampened his cheeks. ‘If you’ve got something to say to that lass, you say it like a gentleman. Do you understand what a gentleman is? Of course you don’t, it’s a mystery to you, you ugly little chap.’ But Jenny, taunted, would call musically over her shoulder, ‘Anus face!’, not with much malice, and go on her way.

  I never hoped for a dozen copies of Jenny in my colony. I hoped for mature women—older versions of her. I never asked myself just why twelve beautiful women, mature and experienced, would wish to live in a secluded valley with a fifteen-year-old butcher’s apprentice. In any case, I didn’t wish to spend a great deal of time with the colony women. I wanted to have sex with each of them a few times a day, then ride my bike into town and go fishing with my friends, or maybe kick a football around. During my recreation time—a large part of each day—the women would be free to please themselves. They might cook, or read magazines, for example.

  From the back of the shop, I could hear Bertie singing. He had a sweet tenor voice with a nice quaver. He sang Hank Williams’s songs: ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart’, ‘Jambalaya’, ‘Hey, Good Lookin’’. He was cheerful, as most butchers are, and kept up an effortless banter with the customers:

  ‘Six mid-loin mutton, no problem with that at all.’

  ‘Trim the fat, Bertie, but not too much.’

  ‘Be capable of that, Dulce.’

  ‘And some mince. Not too fine. Don’t like it too fine.’

  ‘Sounds reasonable, Dulce. Anything reasonable, I’m happy to do.’

  ‘Too fine, it falls to bits.’

  ‘Wouldn’t want that. Wouldn’t want your rissoles all over the place, Dulce.’

  Bertie employed a second butcher, Eric, an Aboriginal with a curious handicap for a man who’d chosen to cut up animals for a living: he sickened at the sight of blood. The pink and red of the meat didn’t trouble him, but blood on the move made his knees turn to jelly. He must have kept this weakness to himself when he was offered the job, because I was in the shop to hear Bernie complain of the extra work that Eric had loaded on him.

  ‘Got a cow out at Taggerty to pick up tomorra. Y’can do that, hey?’

  ‘Load it on the truck for yuh, bring it back here,’ Eric apologised.

  ‘What the fuck’s the good of a cow to me? I want it shot, I want it chopped!’

  ‘Can’t do that, mate.’

  ‘Why fuckin’ can’t yuh?’

  ‘Don’t like it. Never have.’

  Eric made up for his squeamishness by taking a conscientious role in my education as a butcher. He’d bring me in from the copper to demonstrate the skill of the sausage maker.

  ‘Y’ know what you call this, Bobby?’

  ‘Skin?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s skin orright, it’s skin when it’s on y’ sausage. But it’s called ‘casing’ when y’ take it outa the box. ‘Casing’, right?’

  ‘Casing,’ I repeated.

  ‘Right. Now, y’ slip y’ casing over this thing here, y’ tap. Y’ call it the ‘tap’. Right? Whadda we call it?’

  ‘The tap,’ I said.

  ‘Now, y’ mince’s inside here, y’ sausage mince. Put what y’ like in there, mince it up, out it comes from the tap into the casing. Y’ don’t let him run f’ too long. Don’t wanna snag a mile long, hey? Don’t want that, do we? So whadda we do with him?’

  ‘Make it into smaller sausages?’

  ‘Good! Good on yuh, Bobby! Make it into smaller snags. Twist it here, here, here, make a string of ’em. That’s how y’ make y’ sausages. Wanna have a go?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘’Course y’ do! Have a go!’

  My father had felt it his duty to tell Bertie that I was ‘a bit vague’. I was standing beside him when he gave out this information, and I remember that he lowered his voice, and seemed embarrassed. Anything about a person that reduced his value to an employer made my father uncomfortable. He went on to tell Bertie that I might need a boot up the arse occasionally. I was shocked to hear him say that, because he never laid much of a hand on me himself. Some of my friends fared much worse. I noticed that whenever I was chastised for daydreaming, for not paying attention to the here-and-now, there was always a further suggestion of shiftiness, as if my daydreams were subversive.

  ‘Full of secrets, aren’t we?’ my stepmother would say, one eyebrow raised. ‘You don’t fool me.’

  ‘I’m not trying to fool you.’

  ‘Yes you are. Yes you are. But it doesn’t work with me.’

  Gwen had developed a smug vigilance whenever she was alone with me, giving me sidelong looks and smiling quietly. It was as if she were saying, ‘Right, there’s no one here for you to work your way around, only canny old me—so don’t try anything.’ She had become suspicious of me since I’d revealed that the slightly supercilious Adam Cartwr
ight was my favourite character on Bonanza—a hugely popular television western.

  ‘Yes, well you would, wouldn’t you?’ Gwen jeered. ‘Moody, just like you. Hey, Frank! Who do you think Bobby likes best? Adam!’

  ‘Adam! Jesus!’

  My father had just come in from the kitchen. He’d been making the tea during the ad break.

  ‘Sneaky,’ said Gwen. ‘Just like Bobby.’

  ‘I’m not sneaky!’

  ‘Yes you are! You’re a sly little bugger, the way you get those blanks.’

  Gwen was referring to Scrabble. She was bitter. It meant a great deal to her, winning at Scrabble. Her entire recreational life was devoted to Scrabble, crosswords, detective stories and fishing. She required an adversary. When she read, she had to discover the killer before the author revealed the name. When she fished, she would gloat for days over landing a trout. She believed that trout were sly, too. The entire population of the town was divided between the disingenuous and the candid, so far as she was concerned.

  I don’t think Bertie believed that I was sly. I don’t think he believed that I had the brains for it. Certainly he took no pains to conceal his political feints and dodges from me. For the butcher’s shop was also the unofficial headquarters of the town’s conservatives. Jim Naylor, who owned almost all the land from the Goulburn River to the mountains, would call in a couple of times a week to nut out shire council strategy with Bertie. Neither Joe nor Bertie sat on the council, but they controlled it through stooges. They spoke of their puppets with contempt, despising them, so far as I could tell, even more than they did their Labor enemies. I was a communist. The politics of the council interested me.

  Whenever Joe lumbered into the shop, I’d find myself something to do not too far away. Bertie and Joe, each side of the counter, leaned toward each other over the spread sheets of newspaper used for wrapping. Joe made me think of an ancient turtle, his head drawn into his shoulders, his face blotched with dark melanoma in some places and bleached white in others. Wrinkled yellow crescents hung under his eyes. While he was talking with Bertie, his head would thrust forward as if spying out opportunities for malice, then draw back. I considered both Bertie and Joe my political enemies. My acts of subversion extended to writing ‘MARX’ in red crayon on the inside of the coarse, white butcher’s paper I used when wrapping orders of sausages.

  Eric, watching me as I stirred the offal in the boiler one morning, gave his head a worried shake. I glanced away, then looked back, and Eric still seemed worried.

  ‘Hey, Bobby, y’ wanna do this for a livin’? Y’ don’t, do yuh?’

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, but y’ oughta go to school. What y’ doin’ here, Bobby?’

  ‘I left school,’ I said, vaguely ashamed.

  ‘Y’ oughtn’a. Y’ oughtn’a left school. Fuckin’, y’ don’t wanna do this all y’ life, Bob.’

  ‘I’m going to an island,’ I said. ‘I’m saving up.’

  ‘Island? What island?’

  ‘The Seychelles,’ I said.

  ‘Seychelles? Where the fuck’s that, the Seychelles?’

  I knew where the Seychelles were. They basked in the Indian Ocean off Mombasa. I imagined the Seychelles to correspond in every feature to the green island of my daydreams. I saw myself stretched out on the yellow sands of the Seychelles beaches. My body would fill with warmth, like an apricot ripening on a bough. I would wear a sarong. My father had told me that both women and men wore sarongs on such islands. Mine would be blue and yellow, the colours of the sky and sand. The native woman who was my special love (I would call her Jenny, with her consent, though her native name would be quite different, something like Ooguma) would stroll down every so often to ask if I were ready to make love in our grass hut. I might lazily reply that I would be ready in another hour or so. I would say this gently, not carelessly, for the fact was that I loved Jenny/Ooguma and, even more importantly, she loved me. Jenny/Ooguma’s love for me was an innovation in my daydreams. Previously, I had only required her to desire me.

  I didn’t mention any of this to Eric. His worried look frayed the edges of my daydream. I realised that he was not simply worried about my future as a butcher; he was worried about my whole life. He had more to go on than the voyage to the Seychelles. Once when I was stirring the offal in the boiler he had overheard me calling, for an imaginary radio audience, the magnificent over that saw me bring up the twenty runs I needed for my century in a deciding Ashes test. The intensity of my call, and perhaps also the insistence on verisimilitude, would have troubled him a fair bit. (I had described the bowler as ‘swarthy in appearance’—unusual for a Englishman, but the word appealed to me.)

  I was not entirely insane, but a boy who relies too much on the imagination to decorate the bare halls of his life is in danger of seeming so. It requires steely handling, imagination, and I was just barely in control at fifteen. Eric had caught me in only a mild mood of escapism. What if he’d studied me playing ‘Two Goals Down and Ten Minutes to the Siren’—my favourite game of all? I played that game in the backyard of an empty house in Fourth Street. Thirty-six individual surfaces—chimney, fences, garage, walls, verandah—became the players of the two Australian Rules teams that took part in the game. My role was to bring all these inanimate surfaces to life by racing around and kicking a tennis ball to the players, then catching the ball when it rebounded. I also provided the commentary, preserving the immortal clichés of Saturday afternoon radio calls on 3UZ, 3DB, 3KZ. Gavin Hallet, a friend of my father’s, stopped to watch me one time. I was encouraged by the smile on his face to keep playing—he apparently didn’t see anything odd in the game. But he later asked my father if I was ‘all there’, and I could tell by the way my father reported this that he wanted reassurance.

  My great ally in my battle for freedom from the town and the life it could offer me was my incompetence. I did everything badly. My sausages came out of the machine too long or too short, lumpy or leaky. And without knowing how it happened, I always managed to coat myself in mince. ‘You’ve got ten bob to wash off that friggin’ apron,’ Bertie would tell me. My incompetence—as a butcher’s apprentice and in every other situation—grieved my father deeply. He was a legendary worker in my town and could turn his hand to anything manual or mechanical with complete success. He had a deft touch, too, so that his success never appeared laboured. I watched in wonder once as he calmly repaired the clutch of our Morris, coolly selecting each piece of the puzzle that lay spread around him until the whole apparatus was rebuilt and re-installed. It worked perfectly, though everything he’d done had been based on a few brief instructions from the garage mechanic, Arnie Wold. At such times my love for him developed a fine, well-oiled hum. He would glance across at me, smile, and with that smile forgive the whole catalogue of my failures.

  It was a pity that I disappointed my father so consistently, because I doubt anyone more admired him. And I admired him in the way he wanted to be admired. Pencil-thin as I was, and too pretty for a boy, I was thrilled by the sheer masculinity of my father. He had a graceful, laconic physicality. When he went to work with an axe on a pile of wood, fat chips of redgum flew through the air and the muscles of his forearms bulged and glistened. Every so often he stopped to catch his breath, and he’d grin at me and wink, light up a Temple Bar. It was best for me to remain silent, just express my awe with my wide-open eyes. I mucked it all up one day when I told him he looked ‘indomitable’. He grunted, just barely accepting the compliment.

  I was forever trying to impress my father in the only possible way that I could impress him—by giving him evidence of my willingness to work hard. Once I’d reached the age of ten, he took me with him on weekend jobs he’d pick up all over the district. The extra work was important. Like most working-class families in the early ’sixties, we were always short, always trying to sniff out the extra two or three pounds that stood between
worry and a clear run for a few weeks. The job might be anything—clearing bracken and ti-tree for the cockies; re-roofing a bungalow with iron; clearing drains down at the caravan park. A new source of work came along when people with money from Melbourne began building weekenders on land around the more remote inlets of the huge lake above the town. It was always cash-in-hand work, the price rapidly negotiated in mutters down in the shopping centre. Listening in, I’d hope for work arduous enough to let me show my mettle, but not so hard that it left me knackered.

  ‘Been told you’d be right for a day’s work, Frank.’

  ‘Yeah, could be. What’s the job?’

  ‘Laying concrete.’

  ‘Have to be cash in hand.’

  ‘Too right.’

  ‘What’s it paying?’

  ‘Dunno. Say fifteen bob an hour? Might take you five, six hours?’

  ‘Make it eighteen bob, won’t go over five hours.’

  And then, when the man had departed: ‘Get you to help me, Bobby.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Four-and-a-half quid. We’ll tell Gwen three, okay? Ten bob for you, an extra quid for me. You got that?’

  ‘Yep.’

  I think there must have been a network of deceit amongst working men all over Australia at that time. Because it was not just my father who kept a bit back from the money he made, but all of his mates. They backed each other up. If my father and two mates had taken on a job, an agreement was made about the amount they’d report to their wives. Without a bit held back, there’d be no beer at the end of the job, no bet with the SP bookie, no new oil filter for the car—no reward for the sweat and toil. My father and all the other fathers I knew feared or hated their wives and looked on them as wardens. The hostility was always there, with the wives’ eyes permanently narrowed, and a soft, spaniel-ish, wounded expression in the husbands’ eyes. The women were battling on their children’s behalf: shoes to replace a pair that wouldn’t see out another fortnight, trip to the dentist, football boots promised for a couple of years now. But if a little windfall came along—God knows from where—all the spite and suspicion evaporated. Husbands and wives smiled, goodwill returned, passably generous things were said by each about the other.