Hoi Polloi

by Craig Sherborne

  Winks pushes me down into the pews beside the howling infants as the Minister approaches, his hands suddenly appearing out of hidden sleeves in his white poncho. He speaks, not with words but with a slow passing of his pale hands across the air, directing me to line up over there at the bubbler or is it a birdbath? He then slips his hands into the poncho sleeves and walks in slow motion as if in a trance to the place where we all must stand, the mothers and their babies, fathers, Aunty Dorothy, Heels, Winks, me.

  It’s as if he’s washing the baby’s hair. From the cup of his palm the Minister tips water from the birdbath over the first baby’s bald, blue-veined skull. The baby’s face squeezes into toothless screams as if in terrible pain, as if the water is too hot or too cold or not water at all but acid. Yet the Minister keeps cupping and tipping, expressionless, then makes a crisscross sign on the baby’s forehead. He mumbles something I can’t quite hear, repeating the crisscrossing motion with his thumb, down and across, down and across. Now for the second baby. It shudders and screams as if suffering greatly. The Minister’s actions are gentle, and the mother’s shshshing soft, yet how can they be so cruel as not even to flinch at the baby’s cries?

  Now for me. Step forward, the Minister signals with his dripping hand. Step forward. Come closer to the water, this water that has been purified in Christ’s name and therefore when it touches me I shall be purified in this act of baptism. Bend to the water, please. It is cool and tickling running through my hair from his fingers. In Christ’s name manfully fight under his banner against sin, the world and the devil. Continue as Christ’s faithful soldier and servant until your life’s end, for you are received into the congregation of Christ’s flock and are signed now with the sign of the cross upon which Christ suffered for our sins. Down and across, down and across. The Minister’s wet thumb slides down and across my forehead as if writing in code with the invisible ink of water. Christ died for our sins? He is like one of those hero soldiers, Victoria Cross winners who died to save their comrades.

  The water cross the Minister has made on my skin becomes chillier as it picks up the slightest draught. Goose-flesh creeps over my body. The water cross becomes so burning-cold I’m sure it must be a brand he has made with his thumb, as animals are branded with initials and numbers to mark ownership and year of birth. Water from the birdbath is trickling down my neck but the brand on my forehead is the water that matters. It’s the sign that Christ was here. A sign that I have been accepted and stamped ready for war as his soldier.

  The Minister passes me a white hand-towel to dry myself. He dries his own hands with his own towel then slips them into his sleeves all the way up to his elbows for slow walking towards the picture-window above the altar where Christ stands in ancient-style clothes, a robe and sandals, surrounded by orange and red panes, his palms open and held out to welcome me and all the rest of his soldiers including the two babies though they’d have to wait years to be of any use as soldiers. The gold cross on a pole below Christ’s window gleams like a sword hilt. “Let us pray,” the Minister says, bowing his head.

  There are miniature cushions on the floor under the seats. Slip off the bony pews onto your knees and put the cushion under your kneecaps so it’s more comfy, Aunty Dorothy whispers. Close your eyes and lower your head. No need to make a steeple with your fingers, that looks silly. I obey her and pass the instructions on to Heels and Winks, my left eye peeping open to make sure they’re doing what they’re told. They’re not. Heels leans on the pew in front of her to avoid kneeling, Winks has placed one knee on a cushion but refuses to kneel all the way or bow his head. Kneeling, bowing and scraping go against a man’s grain, he frowns. He’s not too keen on this bowing and scraping business.

  “Kneel down,” I plead with wide-opened eyes.

  “I’ll ladder my stocking,” Heels mouths.

  Winks relents but won’t close his eyes past a squint.

  “Kneel down,” I demand of Heels.

  She tugs the cushion away from Winks’ knees and stacks it on her own cushion for extra padding then lowers herself. She closes her eyes, not in prayer but because she’s expecting a great tearing.

  Christ’s blessing be upon you all, the Minister says in a sing-song way. Amen.

  Aunty Dorothy nudges me to repeat the Amen. My left eye checks Winks. Amen, he nods. Heels winces an Amen, pushing herself up and back to safety.

  The Minister: “Open your hymn books.”

  The hymn books lie on the backs of the pews in front of us. They are no ordinary books. They have brown leather importance and shiny pages more like ribbon than paper. The thee and thou lyrics are poems impossible to understand. God in three persons, blessed trinity. Holy, holy, holy, all the saints adore thee, casting down their golden crowns around the glassy seas.

  Winks sings with no sound, barely moving his lips. Heels and Aunty Dorothy sing in shaky, shrill girl voices. Aunty Dorothy is louder. She takes deep breaths between the lines for more singing power and is able to direct her singing towards the altar and Jesus-window because she knows some of the lines by heart and can look up from the book. I sing “Holy, holy, holy” in full voice then mime the rest while attempting to decode the meaning of the phrase “casting down their golden crowns”.

  More kneeling and bowing, more praying. This time the congregation joins in a chant, a low unified mutter of deep respectfulness. For this chant, which is like a hymn without music, no one uses a book. Everyone knows the words except me. Even for Heels and Winks the words come automatically. Them? Now me. Me? Somehow the phrases arrive in my mouth. Had they seeped their way from the world into my memory without my knowing? Or is it a miracle of baptism? “Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven. Give us this day our daily bread.”

  Bread. There is such a thing as bread that is not bread but the flesh of Christ. There is wine that is not really wine but the blood of Christ. The bread is eaten and the wine is drunk in a little meal called communion at the altar near the sword hilt and directly under the Jesus-window. This must truly be the moment when I become a soldier of Christ because it sounds to me like an initiation test, an obstacle course of sorts just as they have in the army. I will take the test alone. Winks mumbles that he’ll be fine sitting right where he is. “I’m not a wine drinker anyway,” he cracks to Heels who gives him the elbow and says to me, “You go up and do it by yourself like a big boy. I’ve got my stockings to think about.”

  Aunty Dorothy won’t go with me because it’s not appropriate, her being Catholic at a Church of England communion.

  “On the night he was betrayed,” the Minister says with his hands out of his sleeves and held away from his body as if feeling for rain. The bread-flesh and the wine-blood are a way of eating and drinking Christ because Christ himself said as much at a dinner when the betrayal happened. I don’t know exactly what betrayal that was but it makes sense that a great military leader had his enemies. That’s the whole point of a war. Just why we’re required to eat flesh and drink blood I can’t say. That’s cannibalism which the horis are supposed to have done to each other before the pakehas brought civilised order to New Zealand. This pakeha cannibalism has been kept a secret from me. This bread-flesh and wine-blood is surely my initiation into the war of souls. A war that has its fair share of bleeding and gore by the sounds of it—Christ hanging from the Cross from nails for a start. If I can swallow and gulp what I’m told is flesh and blood and not faint or throw up at the sight of it I will have passed the test. That must be the whole point of communion.

  But why will I, of all people, be given alcohol? Isn’t there something apart from wine that could be used? By calling wine blood am I expected to be turned off liquor for life? Is what is called wine here really real blood?

  “Body of Christ,” the Minister says, placing the crusty flesh on my tongue and moving down the line of six kneelers to the next opened mouth. When he reaches the end of the line he goes back to the first person and offer
s them a wine glass to sip from, grey metal not glass. After they’ve sipped he wipes the rim with a napkin. “Blood of Christ.”

  He puts the metal glass to my lips. I’ve not swallowed the bread-flesh and am not ready to drink. I don’t want to swallow the flesh. It’s rough on my tongue, flavourless, a disgusting thing to have in the mouth, Christ or no Christ. I want to spit it out. But this is a test. The Minister holds the grey glass till it touches my lips. “Blood of Christ,” he repeats firmly. I swallow the crust. I sip the wine. The wine tastes nothing like the sweet syrup of the phone box. It’s sour like a medicine meant to cure. Christ has turned his blood into this alcohol to cure me of ever wanting alcohol again.

  I have passed Christ’s test. I have pieces of him inside my stomach. I am carrying Christ inside my body. Christ was the son of God who created and rules everything, everyone. I am the part-son of God.

  RANDWICK ROADS TURN INTO a paddock-circle with a rim of green grass and centre of gravel and sand. It’s not part of a farm though the Members grandstand has pretty fringes as grand homesteads of another time do. The grandstand wears iron lace and fronts onto vast lawns with flower-bed borders. The horses don’t draw ploughshares. They’ve no thick, hairy draught-horse ankles and jaws but velvet coats that ripple when they walk. Their heads hang eight feet tall in the air yet for being such giants these horses are lean and very delicate, ballet-stepping on the spot. They have a mysterious mark on them as all horses do. God’s mark, I decide. I’m sure of it. A woody scab on the inside of their front legs that never goes away. It’s called a chestnut. I have no idea why. I’ve heard it told that a great artist once took a hammer to his David because the sculpture was so perfect he thought a bang on the knee would bring it to life. I expect God did that with horses and that’s their chestnut.

  In this part of Randwick there is no boiled cabbage smell. There is farm smell, a horse smell of the earth, the dung of a great beast. One of God’s smells. Others I consider God smells are cow-smell, sheep, cut grass, wood smoke. The not-God smells are rubber, especially burning rubber, petrol, perfume, hairspray and bleach. There’s no proof that one smell is godly and one isn’t, but what else am I to think when I, a fully baptised piece of God, should find it impossible not to stop and inhale horse-smell in the air. The oats and chaff, lucerne and bran composted in a horse’s insides, a fuming brown-green porridge on the ground. Purifying is the word. It probably has the power to purify concrete when smeared there by hooves and human shoes. Purify it and make it honorary grass.

  Those ungodly smells make my eyes water and sting, my nose run. I accept that my prayers may get God’s ear but not necessarily a response. Aunty Dorothy calls this “testing one’s faith”. Heels calls it “playing hard to get”. Perhaps my sensitivity to smells is the way God communicates with me.

  It’s Saturday. We’re getting ready for the races. I’m tall enough and old enough to wear Winks’ fawn and brown check jacket now that he’s put on a few pounds and can’t fit into it. I’ve reached a point where something must be said. I must tell Winks that his Brylcreem and aftershave are ungodly smells. I must tell Heels that the perfume she calls Duty Free and VO5 are disgusting to me. I will no longer be able to kiss her or be hugged by her unless she stops spraying her hair stiff and squirting Duty Free over herself. I am a piece of God and fighting his war, therefore causing my eyes and nostrils to burn and swell is to cause pain to God.

  “I’m not going to be told what to do by a twelve-year-old, thank you very much,” she says with a mocking puff of her cheeks. She laughs to Winks. “We’ve got a preacher on our hands. One who wants us to stink. Whoever heard of such nonsense. ‘Hairspray’. ‘Piece of God’.” She juts her jaw to me: “And don’t start with your ‘I don’t want to go to the races’ or look out. You’re coming and that’s that.”

  Winks parts his hair to the skin, laughs into the wardrobe mirror and jokes “I’ll have Yorkshire pudding with that beef, please,” watching her reflection twist this way and that until her dress clears her hips. She pokes her tongue out for extra strength for the final tug. She asks me to zip her tight as a drum across her shoulder blades. A tree-shape of creased skin forms above the zipper. There’s a similar tree at the front above her breasts. Winks pats aftershave on his shiny chin and steps away from the mirror to let Heels start on her face.

  She writes her top lip into an M with red lipstick and the bottom one into a U, then steps to one side for Winks. It’s their race-day system. He flicks his tie into a knot, buttons his tan waistcoat and yanks it down over his protruding belly. She leans right up to the glass and blackens her lashes into upturned hooks, plucks and pencils two ginger eyebrows into place on her forehead. He pulls his suit-coat lapel forward then bucks it off his shoulders and pulls it forward again until its weight is settled evenly across him. She paints her finger-tips red with a tiny brush and holds them clear of everything like a surgeon. He pushes a black porkpie hat very slowly onto his head, takes it off, strokes its green feather smooth, puts the hat on again. He does this three times. She pins either a white carnation or a red rose or sprig of lilac into his lapel. He takes a roll of cash from inside his coat and removes the rubber band that binds it. He counts the money into two piles: one hundred, three hundred, seven hundred, a thousand dollars in one pile. Fifty, seventy, eighty, one hundred in the other. He gives the one hundred to Heels. “That enough, love?” She calls it chicken-feed so he counts out some more and tells her to go easy on the firewater because it’s a hot day. She tells him to mind his own business and concentrate on backing a winner not on lecturing her. He says he’s got the good oil on two certainties that weren’t trying last start. He worries about pickpockets so his money is divided into three lots. One for tucking inside his coat. One for his back pocket. One in the side pocket beneath his handkerchief. In case he has a bad day on the punt he folds a twenty-dollar bill into his sock for cab fare home. Heels inspects that his hat is tilted at a nice angle. He makes sure her teeth are clear of lipstick. She cleans them with a rub of her pinkie and says, “OK God, let us play” for the benefit of me the preacher-man. Not even a man, but a half-man. A boy.

  The bible I’ve been reading, the white leather one with gold cross on the cover, was a baptism present from Aunty Dorothy. It says the best way to live is to be poor. The worst way is to be rich. In its pictures the people have long hair and beards like the demonstrators on TV, the bludgers, drug-takers and layabouts I’m not allowed to be when I grow up. Money changers are particularly frowned upon in the bible. The bible is designed to turn me against everything I know. Just as Heels and Winks turned me against horis and Heritage and Greeks, the bible is turning me against the rest. It would turn me against my new uncles. They aren’t related to me but are my uncles nonetheless because they’re friends of Winks and to a lesser extent Heels. Are they money changers? They certainly seem to be. They stand on boxes at the races at a place called The Rails between the public area and fenced-off Members. They twiddle a venetian blind of numbers and carry over their shoulders a big doctor’s bag full of money. Uncle Keith, Uncle Chicka, Uncle Jack. They yell “five thousand to two thousand, Gourmet Guest. Eight hundred to two hundred, Engine Room. Two to one the favourite, Beez Neez. In from sixes to fours, Sir Simeon” a minute before a race begins. Punters push forward waving cash. They bellow bets or mouth a horse’s name and signal with their fingers to add a one-thousand or two-thousand dollar wager to their tab. My uncles record the bets with a furious scribble on the top card of a deck of cards. Their pens are a blue or red crayon stick. Just what they scribble only they can understand.

  The bible has turned me against horseracing itself. I wish I could forget about God. I love the racing, the bugle calling horses to canter to the barriers. The earthquake of hooves. When cheerers in the grandstand stomp and scream home the winner their guttural madness thrills me. I scream and stomp with them until breathless and emptied out. I stand close to the horses as they jig-jog to be hosed down, their ribs hea
ving, skin foaming and covered in a net of fat veins. They shake their bodies like a wet dog and sweat-foam sprays onto me and smells like freshly turned soil. So does the snot from their snorting. I wish I could forget about God, but that can’t be. For these are God’s animal athletes and look at what is being done to them. Their tongues are black-purple and bleeding because a length of women’s pantyhose has been used to tie them to their jaws like a tourniquet. Why do they do that? I ask Winks. Because jockeys lose control of horses whose tongues work up over the bit, that’s why, he says. The cap-gun whipping infuriates me. Those wizen-faced child-men have no right to hit God’s athletes. Someone must stop them grinding their spurs along the horses’ flanks. Winks knows the jockeys, the trainers. He can do something. I’ll find him this minute and tell him to do something and do it now.

  The Members Bar. Race Five. Time of the day when men take women by the waist. Not to dance but to rub their hollows and see how long they’re allowed to keep their hand there. The women are much younger than the men. They teeter on heel-spikes and glance about for who is and isn’t looking at them. Their dresses are yellow, pink, powder-blue, and hang like singlets from their narrow, brown shoulders. Their brown backs are exposed. They’re not wearing bras though some have a white skin stripe where a bra would be. All but the tips of their breasts show. The shapes of their nipples point through.

  Drink must have made the men forget who they are. Surely in a minute they’ll remember they have hairs sprouting on their ears and noses. They have holes of old blackheads there too. Each hole contains a bubble of perspiration. How ugly they must seem to these beautiful women! Yet they’re allowed to keep their crinkly hands where they do, rubbing up and down, then resting, rubbing up and down, then resting. The men try to squeeze the women closer to them, and the women eventually give in with giggling and granny-steps. The men wear gold wedding rings but these are not their wives. Their wives are as old as Heels and don’t come to the races, or if they do they spend the day at the Ladies Lunch by invitation of the race club Chairman as Heels is doing now.