It’s almost lunchtime before I give up. I take an exercise book from my schoolbag, tear out a page and write.
To the man in this alley last night,
I was a member of a group of boys who harassed and assaulted you here. It was a shameful thing to do. I feel terrible about it and would like you to accept this money—sixty-five dollars’ worth of money I’ve saved—as a sign that I wish to make it up to you somehow. I hope this money comes in useful.
Once again I want to let you know how bad I feel about last night. I intend never to be involved in something like that again.
All the best for the future,
A friend.
I drop the chicken-feed into an empty beer bottle that’s near the cardboard. I roll my note inside the sixty dollars’ cash and stuff that into the bottle’s neck. I make sure the money is poking out just enough to be noticeable and attract Duncan’s attention. That is, if it’s daylight when he gets to it. If it’s night-time he might not see it. And there’s no guarantee that he’ll be the one to discover it. It could be another dero. Duncan may not be the king of this alley at all. There may be a different king every night. Even so, it’s all I can think to do. I feel better for doing it. I’m sure I shouldn’t feel better so easily. I wrote the letter with my right hand.
WE’RE BACK ON THE LIST. Heels presses her hands to gether in a prayer-steeple: thank you, thank you, she prays to the ceiling. Thank you, thank you, she blows kisses to the ceiling light, her “little sun” as she calls it since the curtains have been permanently closed. It’s been a month in the wilderness but she has just this minute got off the phone to Genevieve and we’re back on the list for Melbourne Cup Day. “Wouldn’t you know it, without the slightest bit of prompting Genevieve apologised for the debacle of her last party.” Normally Heels would have said it’s a bit rich taking a month for an apology but under the circumstances she’s decided not to press the point. She merely told Genevieve she’d wondered if she, Heels, had put her foot in it in some way. But she wasn’t going to press the point, except to say she was a tiny bit hurt, but she wasn’t going to go on about it, except to say she’d wondered if she’d eaten with her mouth open or something. But under the circumstances she decided to let the matter rest.
By circumstances she’s referring to the news Genevieve imparted to her, how things are not as they should be between her and Mr Hush Hush. In fact Mr Hush Hush and Genevieve’s arrangement has cooled considerably and is all but kaput. Genevieve suspects he has wandering eyes. If it wasn’t for the little matter of Brett, Genevieve and Mr Hush Hush would be an item no more. But that’s their business not ours, Heels says. The main thing is we’re back on the list and on Melbourne Cup Day she’ll be at Genevieve’s bash. And I will be too if I wish because the invitation extends to me: “Genevieve’s very own words, because you’re so helpful in the kitchen,” reports Heels. “It’s a school day and you have my permission to call in sick because, after all, it’s that one day of the year.”
I have no intention of going to Genevieve’s. How could I face her! The mention of her name slumps me forward as if punctured. The memory of touching her face. Her shock, her recoil. If anything I should write her a note as I did Duncan, post it, put it in her letterbox.
I sit at my desk and begin.
Dear Genevieve,
I’m sorry for my actions. I’m sorry I touched your face in that way.
The apology warps into a defence.
Mind you, you have acted in a similar way in the past, which is what gave me the idea in the first place.
I’m angry now. At her. At myself.
It was just my John Thomas talking.
I rip up the note and flush it down the toilet. An hour later I attempt another. I begin it Dear Genevieve, scrub it out for To Genevieve. The note is not a note at all. It has become a poem for me to keep in my drawer with my other poems, or folded and zipped away privately in my wallet behind my bus pass like special money for looking at.
Where bouquet of pines so rich with scent,
Where lonely eyes of life have spent,
Where syrup drifts the dozy creek,
Alone again awake to seek.
Unveiled among reflections bright,
Descending hair against moonlight.
When all the stars are knitted above,
The jewels upon the planet’s glove.
The last line is my second choice. My first choice is,
I touch your face and say I love.
But as last lines go it’s much too corny, and too close to the bone.
I’ve done no homework for weeks. A composition is due for English, but I can think of no topic. I hand in my Genevieve poem, name changed from To Genevieve to A Poem for Someone.
I’m marked seven out of ten. I’m happy with that though Mr Collins is sure I can do better. He says next time try writing from real life.
No, I will not go to Genevieve’s party. I lie awake and repeat that I will not go to Genevieve’s. I imagine Genevieve phoning us and I happen to answer. “I’ll get my mother,” I say, determined not to converse.
“No need,” she says. “I just wanted to make sure you all were coming to my party. That includes you. Do, please do. It would be so good to see you. I apologise for carrying on like a pork chop, getting all flustered that day in the kitchen.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Oh I think you know very well what I mean. You will come to my Melbourne Cup bash, won’t you?”
I will not go to Genevieve’s. I will not. I will not. My gentle, beautiful, rejecter Genevieve.
I will.
WHAT A RELIEF, SAYS HEELS, the sniffling woman isn’t here—she’s back with her husband. Things didn’t work out with aeroplane girl. It’s a reasonable gathering in her opinion. Reasonable without being sparkling. Heels can pick out a few faces. A few clothing designers she’s seen in magazines, including that what’s-her-name who’s in that ad on TV. “I hope we haven’t been invited simply to make up the numbers,” she mutters, and then notices a face whose name she forgets but who’s a fill-in newsreader on the ABC. And there’s that fellow who looks like Mike Willesee, who isn’t Mike Willesee but who was in Number 96 with that blond thing, Abigail. There was a time when someone like Abigail would be here. When Heels doesn’t see someone here she thought would be here, she wonders if they’ve moved up a rung or down a rung. Yes, a reasonable gathering though it’s plain to see Mr Hush Hush has tightened the purse strings because that’s the third time this year Genevieve has been seen in that calf-skin lace-up blouse number. And go into the kitchen and take a peep for yourself: Genevieve has been spotted secretly filling white wine glasses from a wine cask instead of from bottles. It’s beside the refrigerator and covered by a tea-towel. And doesn’t she look drawn!
Heels kisses close to Genevieve’s face but at a comfortable distance from her makeup and tells her she looks terrific and that there’s such a wonderful crowd here, so many Sydney faces. She asks after Brett. Brett’s fine and spending the day with Mr Hush Hush on his yacht, Treading Water.
Eventually Genevieve leans forward and kisses close to my face then wipes me with her thumb below my ear though I’m sure I felt no graze of lips and lipstick. She doesn’t speak to me. She turns and introduces Heels and Winks to a urologist who fixed her father’s prostate and his clinical psychologist wife who should really fix all our heads. Heels greets them with the plum in her mouth that she always uses for doctors: “How do you do?”
Winks excuses himself to take up position with a race guide and glass of beer in front of the radio where the big race will come live from Melbourne. He predicts Van Der Hum is a certainty now that it’s pouring rain in Melbourne.
It’s half an hour before Genevieve says a word to me, and then it’s only to ask me to pass sandwiches around the room. “There’s a dear.” She does however ask me to do this with her fingers curling around over my wrist. She hasn’t as yet looked me in the eye. I pass the
tray around then place it on a sideboard. I stand beside Winks who is trying to improve the radio reception by turning the antennae more west, north, west, south. I watch for Genevieve, wait for her to speak, to curl her fingers around my wrist again. Is she avoiding me, spending so much time at the other end of the lounge room?
“I’m thinking about heading home,” I say to Winks. “Can I have the house keys?”
The keys drop into my hands at the same moment Genevieve places her hand on the small of my back and rubs the hollow there, once, twice, up, down, up.
“You’re not going are you, sunshine? I was hoping you’d be a helper in the kitchen. Help me for a second?”
I nod that I’ll be pleased to help her.
I stand at the sink, arms folded as if about to be lectured.
“What would you like me to do?” Now it’s me who can’t look in eyes.
“I need to say something,” she whispers, tenderly scratching the hair on my arm. “I’m sorry if I bewildered you, or whatever the word is.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I whisper back, staring at the floor.
“Oh come on. Yes you do. We’re talking about last month. I was … I don’t know what I was doing. I led you on and that was very bad of me.” She lights a cigarette and empties the last of the gin bottle into her wine glass. She offers me a drag on her cigarette. I take it. A sip of her gin. I take it, wincing from the iodine fire.
She whispers some more, “I’ve been unable to get it out of my mind. And yet I wanted to get it out of my mind because I’m very flattered but … but …” She drags and sips. “Do you think I’m attractive?”
I lock my folded arms tighter and nod Yes.
“Everything with Mr Hush Hush is falling down around me but I’ve been distracted when I think of you. I don’t know whether I mean distracted or heartened or …” She drags and sips some more. We stand there, not looking at each other, but with her passing me the lipsticked end of her cigarette.
Out in the living room Winks calls out that the horses are going to the barrier. The radio is turned louder.
Kissing Genevieve isn’t how I thought it would be. For one, it isn’t taking place in the kitchen. It’s taking place in the laundry behind the kitchen with the white squares of washer and wall-dryer to squeeze past. I don’t even know who kissed who first. The door slid shut on its rollers and now she stands so close to me she’s under my chin. She holds my hands, her fingers pushing between my fingers so that they splay and she can grip and ungrip them deep into the webbing. She looks up and I look down at her, her eyes globed wide. They begin to water and shine. Her breath smells stale of cigarettes and many drinks, her body of soap perfumes. Her lipstick is cracked around her mouth and smeared on her front teeth. She suddenly stops gripping my webbing and flattens her palm against my back’s hollow, rubbing it low, down further and over my buttocks, down lower still, across my legs and up. Then she hugs me as if I’m about to leave and she’s trying to prevent me, or she’s in grief and needs to be held and comforted. She lifts her head so it nuzzles my throat. She whispers, “Please never let Brett know. Never tell.” I whisper back that I won’t tell anyone. I won’t tell at school.
She lifts her bra and I creep my fingers through the frill and soft wire to spongy skin, nipples like wrinkle-raisins. She flattens her hand against my back’s hollow and rubs up and down, lower, lower, over my bum and around the top of my thighs to the front where my cock’s stiff and hurting to push out of my jeans. She holds it through the material, squeezes and wiggles her fingers into the top of the jeans and onto its head and rim. I’m paralysed by the tingle and icy-burn of her doing it. She groans, butts my neck gently as if beginning to cry a small cry. She grips my hands again and pulls them down to be at my sides and keeps pulling as if she’s using me for balance or in pain and pulling on my hands will help. As she does this she parts her legs over my left leg and sits and pushes down on my knee and rocks on it as if riding. She cries again, a half-cry, not real crying but jerky breath-sobs.
She rests her head on my chest. She makes a fist and thumps it limply on my shoulder. Then she pulls away from me suddenly. She shimmies her clothing into place, tightens the laces of her top and surely now is crying for real.
She slides the laundry door open. She walks out, into the kitchen, head bowed. She’s coming back to me, isn’t she? I’m to wait here, she’s coming back?
She leans against the kitchen sink, silent, empties crackers onto a platter, chops squares of cheddar onto the platter, forcing the knife harder onto the board each time—even if I spoke she wouldn’t hear me over that. That’s the chopping of someone for whom something has happened that must never be referred to again.
Barracking blasts from the living room. A yeah-yeah shouting and cheering. Genevieve shakes her hair from her face and springs on her toes to serve her tray out there quick smart.
“Who won? Who won?” I hear her.
Winks shouts the shouting down. “Van Der Hum won it.
I was right. Didn’t I say he was a certainty!”
Heels congratulates him as the cleverest husband in Australia. When she gets home she’s going to fling those curtains open.
CRAIG SHERBORNE’s books include The Amateur Science of Love, Bullion and Necessary Evil. His memoir Hoi Polloi was shortlisted for two literary awards, and its sequel, Muck, won the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction. Sherborne’s journalism and poetry have appeared in most of Australia’s leading literary journals and anthologies.
Hoi Polloi Page 17
