Common People

by Tony Birch

  Our mob was well known to the police, and I knew straightaway that as soon as her father got the story behind the family name, she wouldn’t be sitting under any tree offering me Vegemite sandwiches.

  My old man had been in and out of prison more times than he’d had work. And most of my uncles, on both sides of the family, were no better. My older brother, Jeff, was two years into a seven-year sentence for armed robbery after taking up with a sawn-off shotgun. He was about to hit his third service station for the weekend when a passing squad car spotted him driving down the highway wearing his balaclava. They ran him off the road into a ditch.

  Instead of wolfing the sandwich down like I would have done if I’d been on my own, I pretended I had a few manners, and took one bite at a time. After the sandwich I took a chomp of the apple. It tasted good. Sweet and juicy.

  The air was a little too quiet. I guessed I needed to say something to show my gratitude.

  ‘Do you have brothers and sisters?’ I asked her.

  ‘No. There’s just my mother and father. What about you?’

  ‘I have two older sisters, Dee and Jessie. They work in the butter factory, on the other side of town. And my brother, Jeff. He’s … away.’

  ‘Away where?’

  I took another bite from the apple and chewed on it awhile.

  ‘Just away.’

  ‘Do you have any friends at school?’

  ‘Nup. No friends no place. No one deals with us, ’cept the boys that come sniffing around for Dee and Jess. I don’t look it as much as some, but we’re Abos.’

  She frowned.

  ‘That’s a dirty word. You shouldn’t say that. My father was posted at an outstation in the desert before we moved here. People like you, we call them half-castes. It’s more proper.’

  ‘Well, round here it’s not,’ I laughed. ‘An Abo’s an Abo, no matter how black or white he is, my dad told us. Far as the whitefella is interested, shit smells just the same. My dad told us that, too.’

  Heather wriggled around, less than comfortable about what I’d said. I didn’t care too much. As pretty as she was, I was already thinking she was just another do-gooder. They came through town from time to time and then left when the place got too hard for them.

  ‘What about the other Aboriginal families?’ she asked. ‘Are there others here?’

  ‘We’re the only mob left. One time there was more of us here than whitefellas. But like most places, more and more of them moved in until there was no room for us. The last of the big families took off more than two years back. They were Sextons too. Cousins on my old man’s side. One of the boys, Stevie, was shot in the back when he got caught breaking into a farmer’s toolshed one night. He was fourteen and skinny as a rake. His father, my uncle Claude, didn’t have no money and had to bury him in a suitcase. Didn’t matter how he was killed either. The law said the farmer was defending his family and his property. That was the end of it.’

  ‘That’s not fair.’

  ‘Fair don’t come into it. They’re on top. Us on the bottom.’

  ‘That won’t happen with my dad. He’s always fair, to both sides.’

  I looked straight into Heather’s big brown eyes. She believed what she was saying. The girl had plenty to learn.

  ‘Where do you live, Noah?’

  ‘In an old farmhouse out of town. The owner give up on it last drought. My grandpa, Teddy, was a roustabout for him, years back. Said we could stay in the house for nothing as long as we kept the grass down and the troublemakers out. We been there since, the house falling down around us, waiting for the land to be sold off.’

  ‘It must be exciting, living on a farm. What animals do you have?’

  ‘We got a milking cow that don’t milk, hens too lazy to lay and a feral cat full of hate.’

  ‘You said it was a farm. All farms have working animals.’

  ‘Not this one. Fences’ve fallen down and the dam’s dried up. If you want working animals, we got plenty of rats. A nest of them under the back verandah. And crows waiting to swoop from the trees and poke an eye out if you stand still long enough.’

  Wrench walked out of the schoolroom and across the yard, which meant that it was time to head back to class. I stood up and dusted my pants off, for maybe the first time in my life. ‘We have to get back,’ I said. ‘He goes mental anytime you’re late in.’

  Heather sat with me most lunchtimes after that day with a lunchbox loaded with sandwiches and homemade cakes. She said that once her mother had heard about me, and that I had no lunch of my own, she made a point of providing for two. The other kids in the class had started looking at Heather like she was trash.

  Wrench called her aside after school one day and warned her off me.

  ‘What did you say to him?’

  ‘I told him that my mother was a Christian, I was a Christian, and that it was a sin to turn away from those in need.’

  I didn’t feel good being spoken of like a charity case. But I guess I was. And I was so in love with Heather by then I’d have put up with anything to sit close to her and share her food.

  I took to scrubbing myself of a night with a cleaning brush, hard enough for the sharp bristles to draw blood. I hung my clothes on a line on the verandah overnight, giving the air a chance to work through them. In the morning I stuck my head under the cold tap in the kitchen and combed it through with the hairbrush my mum had left behind when she shot through.

  Teddy, who’d be sitting at the table, concentrating on the steam coming out of the spout of the teapot, had worked out I was up to something.

  ‘As far as I’ve heard you haven’t been given a job on the carnivals, boy. It has to be a girl?’

  ‘Shut up, will ya Teddy. Keep your eyes on the tea or you’ll overbrew it and find yourself worked up with anger for the rest of the day.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m watching it. You got yourself a girl at school, Noah?’

  I said nothing but he picked up the flush in my cheeks.

  ‘They all white girls at that school. Don’t be getting cocky and above yourself. Unless you want your nuts taken for a fucken trophy. You stay away.’

  I wasn’t going to stay away from Heather. She was kind to me and we weren’t doing anything wrong.

  She stopped me at the school gate after school one day and said she wanted me to meet her mother.

  ‘You live behind the police station?’

  ‘Yes. In the cottage.’

  ‘Then it’s not a good idea that I come over. Your old man, I tell you now, he won’t be happy when he spots my head.’

  ‘You’ve never met him. How do you know that?’

  ‘Cause I do. He’s a copper and I’m Abo. I never met a copper who didn’t want to get hold of a blackfella and skin him.’

  ‘Don’t you say that, Noah.’ She was angry. ‘He’s not like that.’

  ‘And your mother? Bet you never said I’m a blackfella. She’ll faint when she sees me.’

  Heather smiled, but not like she’d done before. It was the same smile I got from other whitefellas. All superior.

  ‘We want to help you. My mother more than anybody. She has been called.’

  ‘Called? What’s that mean?’

  ‘To God. My mother has been called to serve God.’

  I wasn’t interested in God or being saved, but suspected there could be a decent feed involved and reckoned I had nothing to lose.

  We stopped at the picket fence outside the cottage. The old police van was parked out front of the station. I prayed we wouldn’t run into her father. I followed her to the front door but stopped when she opened it and walked inside. All of a sudden I felt it was a bad idea to come home with her, but it was too late.

  Heather waved at me to follow her inside. ‘Come on, silly.’

  I walked into the front room. It had
carpet on the floor with flowers in the pattern, photographs and paintings on the wall and big couches and seats around the room. I could smell something cooking in the kitchen and was sure it was roast meat. Heather called out to her mother. I heard footsteps in the kitchen.

  Heather’s mother came to the doorway. She had the same hair as her daughter and also wore it in plaits, which made her look like a schoolgirl herself. She was pretty too, just like Heather.

  ‘Hello!’ She ran across the room, threw her arms around me and held me tight. ‘Noah, Noah. I have heard so much about you.’

  She finally gave up hugging me and took hold of my hand.

  ‘Please, sit down.’ She led me to the couch, squeezing my hand all the while. ‘It’s lovely to have you here.’

  I’d never met anyone so happy to see me, including relations I hadn’t seen in years. Or my old man whenever he came home from gaol.

  ‘Are you a Christian, Noah?’ she asked. ‘You do have such a rich Christian name.’

  Half my family were the craziest Christians on Earth, speaking in tongues when the spirit took them and taking to the Bible day and night. The other half were outlaws or drunks. That was the half I belonged to.

  ‘Are you?’ she asked again, looking anxious all of a sudden.

  ‘Yep, I am,’ I lied. ‘Grandpa reads me the Bible. Sometimes.’

  To be truthful, I’d never seen Teddy do as much as read the side of a soup can, and the only time he mentioned religion was when he screamed Jesus fucken Christ, which was a lot of the time.

  Mrs Moran insisted I eat dinner with the family. It weren’t a good idea. I didn’t want to sit across the table from a police sergeant.

  ‘That’s nice of you, but I gotta get home before dark.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ she insisted. ‘My husband has to be up at four in the morning. We eat early so that he can sleep and Heather and I have time to ourselves.’

  Heather took my arm.

  ‘Please stay, Noah.’

  I was sure I could hear the meat sizzling in the oven. My tummy heard it, too, and rumbled.

  ‘Ta, then.’

  Mrs Moran looked me up and down, inspecting me close like she’d finally worked out I was a blackfella. She tugged at my shirt hanging out the back of my shorts.

  ‘Do you have hot water at your own house, Noah? And a bathtub.’

  ‘No. We got running water, but it’s cold. Teddy, my grandpa, he treats us on a Sunday night. Boils up the copper and we all get a share. My sisters and me wash our hair and all.’

  ‘Well, you must have a bath. There’s time before we eat. I’ll find you some fresh clothes. We have a clean supply that my husband hands out to drifters.’

  I didn’t want to be having a bath in a strange house.

  ‘Ta, but a feed is plenty enough.’

  ‘I insist,’ she said. ‘My husband likes us to be presentable at the dinner table, including guests.’

  She put a hand on my shoulder and pulled me towards her.

  I looked at Heather for help. She raised her eyebrows, like there was nothing she could do.

  The water in the bath had some sort of perfume in it. I lay in the hot water looking up at the ceiling. Although I wasn’t a Christian at all, I thought maybe I was in heaven. My new best friend was a white girl with teeth like pearls and her mother seemed to love me like blood. It was weird her making me take a bath, but now that I was in it, I was happy. If something was going to go wrong – if Teddy were here he’d say it’s too good to be fucken true – it could only be on account of Heather’s father, the cop.

  I pulled the plug, stood up and climbed out of the bath. I had my back to the door when it opened. It was Mrs Moran. I covered myself with my hands. She took a towel from the rail and held it open.

  ‘Let me dry you, Noah.’

  ‘Nah. I don’t reckon. I can do that myself.’

  ‘I’m sure you can,’ she said. ‘I still dry my Heather. She tells me you have no mother. That must have been such a terrible loss for you. Please, let me.’

  I wanted to tell her no. To scream it at her. But I’d never screamed at a white person before. Never even said no to one. She walked over to me. I wanted to back away but couldn’t move. She wrapped me in the towel, sniffed my neck and stroked the top of my head with her fingertips.

  ‘There you are, darling. A poor, poor boy. You are all such poor, poor boys.’

  I looked up at her. She was crying.

  PARTY LIGHTS

  Pete had often pondered the range of possibilities contributing to his memory loss. Each of them was fanciful, and a long way from the truth. Any reputable doctor or friend, even the man in the street knew enough about the limits of the human body to conclude that a decade-long habit of hammering a cocktail of drugs had left holes in Pete’s brain. He’d shot, snorted and smoked every substance on the market. As a result, he sometimes had trouble remembering his birthdate and telephone number. On one occasion, after a week of binging underground at an abandoned opal mine, he not only forgot his name but the face he saw in the mirror. On a bad day nobody was more alien to Pete than Pete.

  He had no real friends, having been abandoned on account of repeated transgressions. He did have an acquaintance of sorts, a horse-trainer, small-time dealer and fellow drug user, Hester Nixon, who’d injected more ketamine into his body than the gelding he’d trained, Good Luck Grant, to a first place at the midweek meeting in Bourke a year back. The horse had overjuiced on Special K and continued running over the finish line, despite all attempts to pull him up. Good Luck Grant didn’t stop until he’d thrown the jockey and run into a nearby swamp. The racetrack steward was no doubt suspicious. The horse was tested, the drug detected and Hester lost his trainer’s licence.

  ‘What are you going to do about it?’ Pete asked, when Hester told him the story.

  ‘Do? Nothing I can do, except maybe change the name of the pony to No Luck Fucking Grant. That’s what I’ll do.’

  ‘It might work,’ Pete laughed, ‘unless they twig that it’s the same horse?’

  Hester’s drug business was no more successful than his horse-racing venture. He downed or gave away more drugs than he sold. While Pete was no admirer of Hester’s business sense, he was in awe of the man’s constitution. Hester had the ability to load his body with chemicals all night and surface the next day sharp as a tack. Hester also had a remarkable capacity for storing information. In high school he’d earned the nickname Rain Man after displaying the unique ability to speed-read the telephone book and subsequently recall every name, address and number. He’d made decent pocket money with the act, fleecing tourists passing briefly through town to visit its single attraction, The Giant Spanner. Banjanna – a bullet-riddled sign on the edge of town read – Home of The Giant Spanner.

  Pete purchased his daily dose from Hester, who bought his own supply of drugs from a rig driver who went by the uninventive name of Convoy. He pulled in regularly at the truck-stop cafe on the edge of town for ‘fuel, a feed and a fuck’ before beginning the long-haul desert crossing. Convoy’s risk was minimal. He had one customer in each town, while those he did business with, dealers such as Hester, had a clientele of misfits, souped-up FIFOs and scab-faced teenagers to deal with.

  Pete, not quite the entrepreneur himself, had once attempted to break into the trade, setting up a deal with Convoy without Hester’s knowledge. His plan was to introduce drugs to the blackfella outstations and sell direct to the Vietnam veterans scattered across old mining leases in the nearby hills. The vets tended to surface in town once a month to stock up on food, drugs and dynamite, and they bought their gear from Hester. Pete would cut Hester out by taking the product on the road, delivering to the customers’ doorsteps.

  This entry into venture capitalism quickly fell apart. In a small town like Banjanna there were no secrets. The news quickly got to one of the
blackfella head-men, Frederick Moss. Sadly, for Pete, Frederick was a man who knew the law of the street just as well as he did the lore of the community he took care of. Frederick came hunting Pete and found him dozing under the old blue gum out front of the weighbridge one Sunday morning. He leaned over Pete, shook him gently by the shoulder and whispered a word in his ear. Before Pete could rouse himself Frederick was laying into him with a lump of wood. Afterwards, bloodied, bruised and unable to breathe on account of several broken ribs, Pete lay on his back, sucking for air and moaning in pain. Frederick, his skin as black as coal, spoke in a deep voice. The words were eerily transmitted across the sky from one end of town to the other. ‘Bring ya poison near my young ones,’ he cautioned, ‘and I will strip ya of skin, smoke ya head and eat ya fucken kidney fat – just for beginnings.’

  Pete dropped the idea for his drug business that same morning and decided to stick to what he knew best, getting as stoned as Uluru anytime he got the chance.

  Pete was sitting at a table under an umbrella out front of the truck-stop one afternoon studying a glass of water when Hester asked if he would like to invest in a croquet lawn for the town.

  ‘I’m giving you an early option Pete. This could bring big dollars into town. We’ve got nothing here.’

  ‘Course we do. What about The Spanner?’

  ‘The Spanner can go fuck itself. It’s an embarrassment.’

  ‘It’s no such thing. Just now, on my way here, I saw a busload of Chinese people. Or Japanese people. They were heading out to see The Spanner. Taking photographs. They love it. You know, pineapples, koalas. All that big stuff.’

  ‘Maybe they do. But it brings fuck-all money to town. They spend five minutes taking photographs on them selfish sticks and then they piss off. They don’t buy nothing. What the fuck was the Council thinking when they had The Spanner put in on the edge of town? The worst decision we ever made. They should have stuck it smack in the centre. We could’ve parked an ice-cream van across from it and made a killing.’

  ‘Why do you care, Hes? You’ve got your own business.’