Hoi Polloi

by Craig Sherborne

  “Don’t be rude to Mr Galea. Take it,” frowns Winks.

  “A kid’s too fucking spoilt who refuses five dollars. When I was a kid I’d of fucking killed for five dollars. Kids these days don’t fucking know what it’s like to be fucking poor.” He appears to be reprimanding Winks but he’s smiling and patting the side of my face kindly.

  Winks follows his lead with a smile and a pat of his own on my back. “He’s gone all religious at the moment, sorry Perce.”

  “Is that right? That’s a fucking good thing.” Mr Galea keeps patting me. “There’s not enough of us religious in this fucking world.” He says he never trusts any cunt who doesn’t have a strong belief in God. He’s been recommended for an honour from the Catholic Church, a Catholic knighthood approved by the Pope himself no less. Why? Because he dedicates every spare fucking moment to the Church. They want a new roof, they get a new fucking roof. They want damp coursing at the Cathedral, they get fucking damp coursing at the Cathedral. A man should go to church every chance he gets. Go to Mass. “You Catholic?” he pats.

  “Church of England,” I say proudly and so does Winks.

  Mr Galea says it doesn’t matter if I’m Catholic or not a Catholic, just as long as I go to church and pray. Because then if I die tomorrow, I’m fucking covered. OK? Yes? Good boy. He says to call him Uncle Perce from now on because I’m a good boy.

  What does Winks do for a living apart from pointing his stomach with the sportsjacket men, peeling his roll to back a winner or loser? No hotel has been bought, no business, no apartment. The cabbage-smelling, wine-cask-smelling flat is now referred to as home where once Heels would call it the stopover. Is Winks unemployed? Is he gambling away the family savings? Stephen Papadopoulos’s father is a grocer. “My dad’s a grocer with his own shop,” he boasts. Jonathan Jonathan’s father is a taxi driver: “He works fourteen hours a day.” Winks tells me he’s looking for a business to buy, but no business is bought.

  “That’s what they all say,” Stephen insists. “That’s code for unemployed—‘Waiting for the right business.’ You must really be poor. Your father must be on the dole.”

  So demeaning to be thought of as really poor, with a father on the dole. I tell them my family is worth $200,000, and that it used to be $400,000. It’s an admission that I’d lied to them, that I never did immigrate to Australia with nothing as Greeks and Arabs do, but I don’t care now about being a liar. I prefer to have my pride than their friendship. They guffaw that they don’t believe me and that it’s no shame to be poor with a father on the dole.

  “It’s true, $400,000.”

  What are they sniggering at now, out of your earshot? Are they saying their fathers with their can’t-speak-English English and wrong colour skin have done so well in life compared to mine?

  “What are you talking about?” I plead them to tell. “What are you saying? I know you’re saying something about me. Don’t walk away from me. Come back.”

  They call to me that I should go be with Glenn Shiving-ton. He’s Anglo like me, they say. He’s been following me around for weeks and trying to sit next to me in the classroom. Go be with Glenn Shivington even though he’s a Sniff.

  Is Glenn Shivington really a Sniff? He has to be a Sniff with his small girl-face and fleece-hair of yellow curls, his gold-wire spectacles, his gangly flinging arms and wrists when he walks or runs. He’s smart too, the smartest boy in school. The playground girls, the girls who go shoeless at lunch to paint their toe ends, are certain of it—he’s a Sniff, they complain, tucking their skirt hems into their underwear and splaying on the scorching concrete for the sun. They can smell it on him, they sneer. Girls know a Sniff when they see one. Sniffs are like them but are not one of them and that’s enough somehow to make the girls angry.

  I won’t allow a Sniff to sit beside me in class. But he has to sit somewhere and eventually comes the day Mr Surridge points him to sit beside me because the seats, all of which are two-seaters, are taken except mine.

  “What was the date of Australian Federation?” Mr Sur-ridge nods for me to answer. I have no idea. Glenn Shivington whispers through spidery fingers, “1901.”

  “1901,” I answer. Mr Surridge says that I am indeed correct. He strides slowly between the desks for another child to question. I reprimand Glenn that I didn’t need his help and was going to answer 1901 anyway.

  “No you weren’t,” Glenn pipes up. All this time, these weeks of him lingering and staring shyly at me, he’s never said a word. Now he’s not only speaking to me he’s contradicting me in a rapid, excited whisper. “You couldn’t answer it by yourself. If you can answer by yourself then answer this: Who is the Prime Minister of Australia?”

  “Leave me alone.” I don’t know who the Prime Minister of Australia is. “I haven’t lived here that long,” is the excuse I give.

  “In what year did Captain Cook discover Australia?”

  If we weren’t in class, if we were out in the concrete paddock with its jungle bars and cricket nets I’d shove him hard to shut him up. But because I’m trapped into listening to him like this, silence is my only defence. Yet he prods his way through it with “Don’t you want to do well in the exams?”

  “I’ve been reading the bible a lot. I’ll start studying tonight.”

  “You only have a month. I don’t think you’re smart enough to learn everything in a month.”

  “Who cares.”

  “You won’t get into Sydney High.”

  “Who cares. I’ll go to a private school.”

  “No you won’t. Your father doesn’t even have a job. You can’t afford a private school.”

  “We can.”

  Glenn Shivington sits quietly a moment then says he believes me. If I say we can afford it then he has no evidence, no reason not to believe me, it’s the obvious scientific deduction he must draw. Being able to afford a private school would certainly explain my being lazy and not studying or caring, he goes on.

  But he cares, he says. He cares that I won’t be going to Sydney High because he’ll be going there he’s sure and he wishes I were too, that we could both be going there together.

  “Why?”

  “I’d just like it. Why don’t you let me help you study?” He reels off that the Prime Minister of Australia is Gough Whitlam, James Cook discovered Australia in 1770. Then there’s Lachlan Macquarie, a very important name for exams. He was Governor of New South Wales from 1810 till 1821 and is sometimes referred to as the father of the nation.

  Glenn Shivington can recite geography facts from capital cities to weather patterns and rain catchment figures. He can multiply fractions and solve long division in his head. He stares at me when he speaks. I can sense him examining my face. “What are you staring at,” I challenge him. He blushes and says “Nothing” and begins staring again. I sit at the very end of my seat as far away from him as I can to demonstrate my aversion to Sniffs to the rest of the class in case they’re looking.

  Later in the day, just as we’re about to enter class for the maths session, he touches my elbow then quickly holds up his hands in defence as if expecting me to strike him. I pull my elbow away from him and turn my back. “Can I sit beside you?” he asks meekly. I don’t answer but once we’re in the classroom I do something inexplicable—I catch his eye and put my hand on the seat beside me to signal he can sit there if he wants. Surely it’s because I realise he can be useful to me with his facts and fractions. It can’t be because I enjoy his whispering and staring.

  When he leans across to provide the answer for 6820 divided by 43, taking the opportunity to explain how 68. 2 can be expressed as a percentage of 6820, and the whole confounding logic of decimals is actually very easy, his breath grazes my cheek, my neck. When his shoulder presses against my shoulder I allow the pressing to go on for a few seconds before I nudge him away to put some distance between us. I refuse to say thanks for his scribbled explanations and diagrams to make the distance even greater, yet that only makes him breathe
even closer next time, press more determinedly. On one occasion he attempts his pressing without any school reason, no maths to solve, no spelling of a tricky word like entrepreneur. I bump him up to sit straight and insist he keep to his side of the desk unless I give him permission, the signal for which is my asking him for help. He apologises in a faint, hurt mutter then summons enough courage to tell me he predicts I’ll fail the exams.

  “Then what’s the point of me sitting next to you?” I say.

  “What use are you?”

  He’s muttering again, faintly, head in hands. “I don’t want to go to Sydney High by myself. I don’t want to go without you.”

  I tell him that it will be his fault if I don’t go to Sydney High. If he were any kind of friend at all he would make sure he helped me answer the questions in the exams. That’s the time I really need the answers—in the actual exam, not now. He should organise himself to help me answer the questions during the exam. If the exam desks are two-seaters he should sit beside me and show me his answers. If the desks are one-seaters he should sit in front of me and pretend to lean back and stretch regularly, letting me glimpse his answer sheet in the process.

  Glenn makes no reply. It’s as if he hasn’t been listening. When, after a minute or so, he leans across to speak it’s only to point out that the latest entry in my exercise book is wrong: if a ceiling is 283 centimetres above a floor and a table is 77 centimetres and the bookcase on top of the table is 197 centimetres high then a 9 centimetre space is left, not 19 as I’ve written. I poke at him to sit up straight and stop pressing on me. When he tries to lurch closer to me I jab him. For the next few days I jab and poke him to mind his own business. Finally he lurches across and says “I want to tell you something” and begs me not to keep forcing him to stay away. “I’ll show you the answers during the exam.” He presses against my shoulder as if helping with my schoolwork though there is no schoolwork to do. I let him press and breathe. It’s not entirely unpleasant the warm feel of our shoulders touching. His breath doesn’t smell—there’s no Stephen garlic smell. No sign of fear at what we are planning, no guilt or shame. He must believe in God. He, the brightest boy in school, will have realised long ago that there’s no such thing as punishment if you believe in God.

  BETTING TICKETS COVER RANDWICK like paper snow. It must be kicked aside just to walk to the bookmakers’ rails or the mesh gate where whitecoats demand to see your Members badge before letting you through.

  “What are the chances of one of those tickets still being alive,” rasps Uncle Chicka placing his arm around my shoulder to share some information. “What’s the chance some poor bugger accidentally threw away a live ticket and you picked it up?”

  I shrug that one in a million might be a close figure. Uncle Chicka pokes the air in front of my chest with his middle finger and grins at Winks who is finding Chicka’s line of questioning intriguing. Winks has clasped his hands behind his back, playing at standing to attention before a teacher. Uncle Chicka estimates the chances would be far better than a million to one. “I’d agree with you,” Winks interrupts, causing Uncle Chicka to hold up a hand, close his eyes and hush Winks like a father would.

  Uncle Chicka asks me to put a number on how many people do I think would be here at the races today. When I shake my head against venturing a guess he makes me take a stab at a figure. I offhandedly suggest ten thousand and he agrees that that would be about right or close enough to it. He poses this question: if there are ten thousand people here today and each person has a single bet in each race and one or other mug out of that ten thousand accidentally discards a winning ticket, and this happens every race and we’re up to Race Four now, and I got out there in the crowd, down on my hands and knees and checked, say, four tickets a minute, how many tickets would I have to sort through before I found a winning ticket?

  Glenn Shivington would answer this in a flash but I can merely chew my lip ignorantly. Uncle Chicka has to relieve me of having to provide an answer. “What I’m saying is,” he says, “you should take this result sheet (he hands me a list of the day’s place-getting horses) and update it with the first three horses of each race and get out there and start scouring through tickets. Because I tell you this my boy, there could be a bloody fortune waiting for you under all those feet. And that should keep you occupied and let your father enjoy himself at the races in peace.”

  So what if there’s a fortune waiting for me, what would I do with it? I’m twelve going on thirteen in two, three, four months. Heels and Winks would take the money off me. They’d take it for themselves and say they have every right to do so because look at what it costs to keep me in shoes with my big feet always growing and clothes that can only be let down so many times. And food—steaks don’t grow on trees in case I haven’t noticed. Now private schools, that will put one hell of a dent in the budget. Yes, I should be a bit more grateful and put my new-found fortune into the family kitty instead of being so selfish. If I’m like this at twelve what on earth will I be like at thirty!

  What if I don’t tell them about it, where would I hide the money? The stopover flat has no crannies behind brick for a hiding place, no floorboards or panels easily budged. The thing to do would be this: go to one of the wizened child-men, or all of them—it depends on the size of the fortune. Say, “Here’s X amount of dollars to stop whipping and spurring God’s athletes.” There’s no likelihood of stopping them otherwise. Winks says I’m being silly about the child-men. Face up to it, he tells me: these people are making a living and have to hit the horses or else they get into trouble by the authorities for not trying to win the race. That’s the rules. Besides, horses don’t feel it, he says. They’re just horses, they’re stupid and don’t feel pain. “When did you ever hear a horse cry out in pain? Never.”

  Not cry out but squeal, I’m about to say. Squeal and snort when he himself and Charlie Carmichael thrashed them with the clipper cord. But Winks talks over the top of me. “I want you to stop following me around and asking me to go bother jockeys with your ridiculous notions. There are things in this world you can’t prevent and the whipping and spurring of racehorses is one of them.”

  Money. That’s what the child-men understand and that’s what I’ll give them. Out through the first snow-covering of tickets I go, out among the trouser cuffs of the Members with their perfectly straight blade-creases. Tan slip-on shoes with tassels, and black shiny lace-ups. For an hour I crouch and search and fail. I move on, out through the next much thicker covering of tickets—long brown bookie cards and totalisator stubs. Here the slip-ons are blue canvas or rubber thongs with yellow toenails. Scuffed brown brogues that have odd-coloured laces. The heaped tickets are slippery as moss where I step, and when I plunge my hands into them they run through my fingers like paper water.

  Tote ticket: Race Three, number seven, ten dollars each way; a loser—a deadie. Race Three, number four, five dollars the win; dead. Race Three, bookie’s ticket, number four, twenty dollars a win is what I think the bookie squiggle reads; dead. Race Two, number one, Masquraider, a squiggled twenty dollars to win; dead. All dead. The more futile the task seems the more certain I am the next ticket will be live. I pray, Please God provide justice in the next ticket, for your animal athletes whose chestnuts you made with your hammer.

  “No joy there, Periscope?” Tennis shoes, tracksuit pants with Adidas three-stripe. “We call you Periscope with your up-down, up-down looking for tickets.”

  This man who is speaking to me has the faded blue handwriting of hori tattoos on his knuckles and wrists—Rita, Legman, mum, hate. But this man is no hori, though he’s frightening all the same. His pakeha forearms are orange with freckles and decorated in the snake and nude women of a pakeha. A front tooth is missing. His long oily hair falls in Cs and Ss onto his shoulders. His mouth has a ginger horseshoe round it for a beard.

  “Listen Periscope,” he says crouching and crawling forward to be closer to me. I flinch away. “I’m not going to hurt you, Periscope.
I need a favour. Do a fella a favour? For ten dollars? That’s more than you’ll get scrounging about on the ground.”

  He tells me to answer Yes or No immediately. Yes or No, quick, there’s not time to fuck about, he says. Yes or no? But even before I can ask what sort of favour he wants me to do he says he’s had an eye on me all day and I’m the kind of clean-cut boy a man can trust, decked out nicely in my sports-jacket like a little gentleman. No other cunt around here’s worth pissing on but I’ve got honesty written all over my face. He bets I’ve been brought up proper.

  All he wants me to do is take his Crops—he draws from his tracksuit pockets a black wallet, conceals it in his fist and slips it into my inside coat pocket; then another black wallet; then a brown one and a gold money clip with money folded into it like an ironed handkerchief. And take his Tin—two silver-coloured watches, a gold bracelet which he drops into my coat’s side pockets. Take them and get up and walk out of the betting ring, right out through the gates and off the racecourse altogether, then up Alison Road until I get to Cowper Street, and keep going up Cowper Street until I reach Avoca Street. From there cross into Avoca Street and keep going until I see an old green Zephyr. That’s his car. When I get to that car I’m to wait till he comes and meets me—a half-hour, an hour at the most—and collects his Crops and Tin and puts ten dollars in my kick. “OK Periscope? Don’t let me down. You’ll notice I’m trusting you. Not threatening you. Shake. Shake.” He shakes my hand. I shake in return. He has a wide, limp, clammy hand-squeeze. “I’ve picked the right man. See you, Periscope.” He glances this way, that way, all over the place. Then he’s gone through the slalom of the crowd.