“Now write. Go on. Write.”
“Write what?” I said.
“Don’t you talk back to me. Do as I say and write.”
“But I don’t know what to write.”
“If you don’t write something right this moment you’ll never write a damned thing again, so help me.”
Winks groans, a long groan of frustration, “Just write your bloody name: ‘Hello, my name is,’ just to make her happy.”
My hand looped and dragged the pen as best it could until a spindly, unreadable scrawl was completed.
“Exactly what I thought,” Heels said victoriously. “This miraculous bang on the head doesn’t extend to handwriting. What does extend to handwriting is telling him over and over again until it finally sinks into his thick skull that he must never write with the hand with the string on it. And practising over and over to write with his right hand will eventually work. Just like, as far as I’m concerned, and I won’t be contradicted, the elocution lessons have fixed his stutter. In fact I want it known throughout Heritage that I’ll be paying Mrs Daley a fifty-dollar bonus for her wonderful efforts.”
Now that I’m standing before the class, all those eyes watching, I wish I could stutter again. Mrs Quigley would never have got me to stand if I stuttered.
“What country are you headed for?” she persists.
“Aust-st-st-stralia.” Is this tempting fate? Will pretending to stutter bring the stuttering back forever? I quickly sit down. “Australia. Australia,” I say under my breath, testing each syllable in my mouth. “Australia. Australia.”
Mrs Quigley knows I was pretending. Look at her eyebrow cocked into an upside-down U. Those ripples of skin the same shape above it. My classmates snigger that they know I’m pretending.
“Up. Up. We haven’t finished with you yet, have we children? Tell us why you are headed for Australia.”
“Because he’s a drunk,” someone shouts—a girl, maybe Bronwyn. Maybe Sandra. The children, all of them, giggle and shout, “In a phone box. Drunk in a phone box.”
Mrs Quigley shushes them. “Alcohol and its harmful effects are no laughing matter. I will not have jokes of that nature in my classroom.”
“He was so drunk he fell and it fixed his stoppage, Mrs.”
“It was elocution lessons,” I counter, a feeble protest against the class’s glee.
“I said shsh,” Mrs Quigley says and claps her hands until the noise ceases. “I was hoping to have an intelligent few minutes but clearly that is beyond you. Our newspaper has deemed the sale of the Heritage Hotel worthy of inclusion in its pages.” She picks up a copy of the Chronicle from her desk and shakes it inside out to the relevant page. “I would have hoped that this article might prompt among us a discussion on what, if anything, the sale might mean for our town. I read here in the paper that the hotel will be pulled down and replaced by a department store. That will be a big change for Tui Street, I’m sure. Quite a boon perhaps. But such a discussion is of no interest to this class it seems.”
“He’s rich,” someone calls out: Peter, the accountant’s son.
Mrs Quigley claps her hands. “Enough. Enough. Money does not equal happiness, children.”
Arms go up, repeatedly bending and stiffening to be noticed. “Mrs Quigley, Mrs Quigley,” the class pleads. Mrs Quigley orders them to be quiet and to keep their hands in their laps, but they ignore her and blather three or four at a time desperate for a say about money, which they refer to as my money—“his $400,000”—as if it represents all the money in the world.
“My mother says what a lot of mouths that would feed.
She says what a lot of shoes for little feet.”
“Mine wants to know how such a lot of money could come out of Heritage.”
“My dad reckons it shouldn’t be allowed to leave town. It should be put back into the town because it comes from here.”
“My dad says if it’s grog money it’s dirty money.”
“Your dad’s a Salvo.”
Mrs Quigley stomps her feet. “I don’t think we’re old enough to discuss these matters properly. We shall do our times tables, please. I said we’ll do our times tables, please.” She gives an exaggerated nod of the head, a signal for me to resume my seat, which I do though immediately I regret it because the class’s laughing presses down on me. I should have stayed on my feet. I should say—Heels would say it— that they aren’t worth worrying about, these low-grade types with their sniggering. She would stand up and say right this minute that it was elocution lessons that cured my stuttering. She would say it over and over until they shut their mouths and either believed her or she was forced to tell them how disgraceful and insulting it is that they don’t believe her. If they don’t want to believe what she’s telling them, that’s their problem, even if what she’s telling them is a lie, because there’s no such thing as a lie if you believe the lie is truth the way Heels has the trick of doing. Elocution lessons cure stuttering if you believe it’s true and state it definitely enough like she does.
Them with their $400,000-talk—they’re just jealous. Their fathers aren’t worth a cent. They’re nobodies in a no-hoper town like Heritage. It’s not possible to feel shame among types like these. “Your name’s mud,” someone yells. But I forgive them because I couldn’t expect better from the likes of these. I smile at them, offer a snort of a laugh. I will never see these people again after this day. I want them to imagine that they and their opinions and ridicule mean nothing to me and never could do.
AUSTRALIA IS WHERE SYDNEY turns off into Randwick and Randwick turns off into Dutruc Street and the khaki brick flats where a concrete path turns into a stairwell through glass swing doors, up three flights of steps to a cramped lounge with a spongy fake leopard-skin table-like square called a pouf in the centre of the room.
Why is this flat being called a flat when it’s in Sydney? Flats are supposed to be called apartments here like in Paris and America because they’re so much nicer than flats which is a depressing and dowdy name for a place to live. Sydney is not what I expected at all. Surely $400,000 would buy a palace! Heels says the $400,000 is no longer worth $400,000. Even if it was, $400,000 would not buy a palace in Sydney. And what’s the point of a palace anyway if after buying it you don’t have anything left over to put food on the table? We are renting this flat to tide us over until a suitable business can be found to purchase and then we will buy an apartment, a proper apartment.
She’s cleaning the stove, rubber gloves streaming with the wet black grime she scours with steel wool. When that’s finished, the bathroom tiles get the same treatment till the bleach fumes cause her eyes to run.
“If we’re renting, aren’t we one of those who don’t care?
Can’t we relax?” I ask.
“You never know who was here before us,” she pants, then pats her hair-do in place with her wrist, then scrubs and pants.
Now she’s doing subtraction from the original $400,000 out loud, mumbling something about a mortgage on the Heritage Hotel, something else about bringing a dollar from New Zealand to here and only getting 80 cents. She gripes about this to the floor, shoving the steel wool along the bath as if digging now rather than scrubbing.
“What’s a mortgage?” I ask.
Heels gives an extra shove across the bath at the very mention of the word. “A mortgage is a debt that the bank has over you.”
“How can they do that?”
“Because we ask them to,” she says impatiently. “And please don’t start harping on with ‘Why? Why?’ There’s a million things like mortgages in life.”
“Like what?”
“Like tax. There’s tax to be paid when you sell a business.”
“Why?”
“The government wants to punish you for making something of yourself. You’ll find out when you grow up and have businesses of your own.”
“What else?”
“Millions of things.”
The good news is that the
government in Australia is a hopeless Labor government and because of that interest rates are going up, up, up on the money we’ve got in the bank. That’s what happens with Labor governments, she exhales heavily, giving another wrist-pat to her hair. Labor governments don’t like our sort of people; get up and go sort of people. An interest rate is like a thank-you that banks pay you for letting them use your money. They thank you more when there’s a bad government. “Think of a piece of paper where there’s a right-hand column and a left-hand column. The thank-you goes in the left-hand column because that’s where the good news goes. The bad news goes in the right-hand column.”
In the good news column we can put $10,000 for selling the Mercedes to Sir Thomas Goodes’ family. But we need to buy a new car now that we’re in Australia. Something that’s not too much of a comedown from a Mercedes. That will have to go in the bad news column. The bad news column is just a little too full for Heels’ liking. For that she blames Winks.
“Why?”
“Because he’s gone off and done a ridiculous thing.” She’s beginning to jut and scratch the air. She’s talking to me but intending the words for Winks because of the way she cranes her neck and raises her voice to aim it out the door.
“What has he done?” I ask.
“Before we left New Zealand he bought himself a yearling at the horse sales in Wellington. Not just any yearling, mind you. A $15,000 thing.”
“Why did he do that?”
“You go ask him. I’ve got my theories. It’s simply so he can big-note himself in Sydney with an expensive horse if you ask me.”
I do go and ask him. He has spread newspaper on the kitchen table for nuggeting his good shoes. His race-day shoes. “Why did you buy an expensive horse?”
He waves me away with a shoe on his hand like a boxing glove. “Don’t you start,” he says with complaining in his voice. “This colt’s by Pakistan out of a Star Kingdom mare. A champion in the making. I can feel it in my water.”
Heels yells from the bathroom, “Feel it in your water? Who ever heard of such hooey! Besides the bloody thing won’t be a colt much longer. I don’t hear you mentioning that he’s more interested in mounting fillies than racing in races. He’s got to be gelded. So there’s vet fees to go in the bad news column. Along with the plane fare to fly the thing to Sydney, and training fees.”
Winks is polishing his shoe so fiercely his hair that is usually Brylcreemed perfectly in place is falling loose over his forehead.
Heels keeps adding to the bad news column. “A business will cost $300,000 at least. One horse for God’s sake is over $100 a week to keep. It’s worse than a private school.” She says if you add up the bad news column at the moment, the $400,000 has almost halved since we came to Sydney. Almost halved in only a few months.
But Winks tells me not to listen to her. He’d still be working in a gravel pit and eating one potato for dinner if he didn’t have the savvy to turn one dollar into two. “You’ve got to spend money to make money,” he says. “You’ve got to move in the right circles and there’s no better way to do that than by owning a well-bred horse.” He holds the shining shoe away from himself for admiring. “If you want to get to know the right people you’ve got to look the part,” he winks. He says there’s no easier way in this world to make money than to spend a sum betting on a racehorse and having that racehorse win and return you two or three times the cash. “There’s an art to punting. That art is for you, the punter, to be in the know.” He taps his nose with his finger as he says this. “You’ve got to know where the clever money is going. You’ve got to move in the right circles and know what horse is carrying the clever dough.”
My bedroom has a double bed for my bed as if I were an adult, though not an adult like Heels and Winks who have never slept, as far as I’ve seen, in a double bed but in single beds pushed together to make a vast bed with a gap in the middle. The reason the beds are pushed together is not simply to create one vast bed. The reason, they tell me, is that it benefits Winks’ heart. Winks has a defective heart valve and always has had since a bout of something called rheumatic fever that he suffered as a boy. The pushed-together beds allow him to stretch out and sleep without being scrunched up in a way that would mean his heart would be scrunched up and not pump properly and kill him. I’m told a lot of things. If horis are not really animals and a fall from a ladder is not a cure for stuttering but elocution lessons are, if … if … I could go on and on, then why would Winks become a dead man if the single beds weren’t pushed together? Winks looks fine to me. He is yet to have more than fifty-seven grey hairs growing through his black hair. I’ve counted them secretly at dinner: fifty-seven exactly. A paltry number in among the black. His arms are solid with muscle and meshed with plump veins. When he walks I need to skip into a run to match his pace. Surely a sick man would never have been able to withstand those hotel beatings and deal out beatings of his own.
“That life would have killed me sooner or later,” he con-fides, shaking his head slowly. “It’ll be a better life here. Here’s the type of place to raise a boy. A clean slate.”
A clean slate. Those words, the mix of disappointment and hope in his tone, make my stomach sink and throb as if vomit is about to curdle towards my throat. I wish, oh how I wish, I could have the clean slate I was born with, not this shameful one at twelve years old.
“Even so,” he continues, “you never know. I might only live another five years, if that. So be a good boy. Be a good boy because we don’t know how much time we’ll have left together.” He says the last sentence while patting his chest like a patient.
Of course I will be a good boy. I will make the most of this clean slate moving to Australia has given me, I promise. Five years sounds like a long time but it’s not really. I would be sixteen and have no father. That’s a terrible thing to look forward to at the end of five years. Every day of that five years will be tainted by that knowledge. I don’t know whether to reach over to Winks and hug him, my temporary father. Should I begin to cry? Is that what he would want at this moment, to comfort him and him comfort me? No. He holds out his hand for me to shake. “Deal?” he winks, cheerily for a dying man. “You be a good boy and we’ll both be happy.”
“Deal,” I reply.
“That’s the way.” He slaps me playfully on the knee just as Heels opens the flat’s door letting in a farty smell of boiling vegetables from the rest of the building. She has been shopping and carries two packages. One very fat, its brown paper bound by blue stringy ribbon. She throws the packages onto the pouf and begins picking the fat one apart.
“I found the perfect thing,” she says almost singing the sentence in her excitement. “Perfect, perfect, perfect.”
Winks tells her that we’ve been having a man-to-man talk about being a good boy. He winks at her.
“I certainly hope you are going to be a good boy. In fact I’m positive he will be. Especially after this coming Sunday.”
Sunday? What’s happening on Sunday? Sunday is always lie-in day. It’s do-nothing day. Here in Sydney there is a beach at Coogee where last weekend we ate a cut lunch on the hot sand and got burnt watching the waves curl over onto the shore as if being sliced. I swam in the foam and swallowed salt water. Let’s do that again this Sunday. Please, please.
Inside the ripped-apart paper is a navy blue blazer, its sleeves folded neatly like arms. Shiny gold buttons stud the cuffs and front. A red and yellow bow-tie is pinned to the lapel. Heels tears open the other, smaller package—a white shirt in a plastic sheaf cover, a pair of white walk-socks.
“This is what’s happening on Sunday,” Heels says holding the blazer against my body to test the length. “On Sunday you are going to be christened.” She stops still a second, stares and frowns into space. “Or is it baptised? What’s the term we’re supposed to use?” She leans her chin on her fingers, wondering if there’s a difference between christened and baptised. Are they the same thing? She doesn’t know, nor does Winks. I certainly
have no idea. She will have to ask Aunty Dorothy.
Aunty Dorothy is my aunty in name but no relation. She’s been Heels’ Sydney friend from years before I was born. They met at the Randwick races in the Members near the Champagne Bar when Dorothy was with two forgettable friends who had horses with Tommy Smith that even he, the great trainer himself, couldn’t make win. Dorothy was wearing a gold and blue striped turban-style hat arrangement with the thinnest of gold chain banding fastened by a gold gauze brooch in the shape of a rose. “I just had to ask her where she got it,” Heels answers if people ask, “So how did you two meet?”
They have euchre nights and oyster mornays at Doyle’s where they spend whole afternoons saying, “Beautiful oysters. I can still taste those oysters they were so mouth-watering.”
Aunty Dorothy has never been married. She likes to be footloose and fancy-free and can’t be bothered with men, though she has been proposed to twice. She suspects they were after her money. She inherited a horse transport business from her father and would rather spend the money on herself and playing euchre with the ladies and going to Doyle’s than bother with men.
“She’s a ladies’ woman,” Winks winks.
“What’s a ladies’ woman?” I ask.
“Enough of that,” Heels reprimands him, but the winking continues.
“A ladies’ woman is …”
“Don’t you dare say such terrible things to the boy.”
Hoi Polloi Page 6
