Homebush Boy

by Thomas Keneally

  We said a rosary for him in class, and then the waters of our remembrance very nearly closed over his head.

  The European tradition that women brought dowries to their marriage had gone out of usage in places like Australia, although one occasionally heard the term used in connection with Greek or Italian families. It had not gone out of use to the same extent in the case of girls who went into the convent. By now it had been established that since Rose Frawley was going into the convent she would need a modest dowry to take with her.

  Daughters of doctors and lawyers brought superb dowries of thousands of pounds to the convent, and sometimes remembered the Order in their wills. But the Dominican nuns knew – despite the Frawleys’ more modest means – the quality of the family and the nature of girl they would have in Rose.

  In the Frawley lounge-room, Rose had a highly varnished glory chest placed, just like a girl already engaged to be married, and into it went the specially designed under and outer wear of a novice. Whenever any of us saw it, one or other or us would say, ‘You’re not really going are you, Rose?’

  We stereotypically expected the quieter sister to ‘go’ if anyone went. For the Dominicans were a tough order. They put their novices through a strenuous and penitential course at their novitiate amongst the gum trees at Wahroongah, one of Sydney’s quietest northern suburbs. It was hard to imagine companionable Rose tolerating the year’s silence the novitiate imposed, and certainly not tolerating unlimited and unquestioning obedience. Chastity, of course, for all of us, seemed the least of problems.

  ‘Fair go,’ Rose would say, the idiom of Australia rolling in a mouth which would devote itself to the liturgy and hours of the Office as sung in the thirteenth century. ‘Do you think I’d want to stick around just on the off-chance of marrying some joker like you or Mangan?’

  Or once she said with unconscious cruelty, ‘If Matt was available, I might stick around in the world.’

  Matt’s snow-white face flushed and we all laughed all the harder to cover her gaffe, her condemnation of Mattie to bachelorhood. And Rose laughed too, the sort of laughter designed to slide discourse along, or to clear its table. She had spoken her most unconscious thought, she had uttered one of the reasons girls from Santa Sabina wouldn’t dance with Matt. Without knowing it explicitly, and without any logical reason, they saw Matt as a eunuch for blindness’s sake. He could neither be consoled by a beloved nor could he serve the Lord. God had already stricken him. He was exempt both from carnal desire and the need to answer any higher call. Canon Law did not permit the already blind to be ordained. It was possible for men who grew blind after being ordained priests to continue exercising a limited form of priesthood. But if you were blind from birth, neither the dancing girls of Strathfield nor the New South Wales public service nor the departments of the Commonwealth government nor the Holy, Roman and Apostolic Church had a place for you.

  Matt took our conversations and all our lapses – Rose’s was not unique – with a handsome crooked smile. One wonders if now in middle life the memory of them does not rankle him awake in the middle of the night. For it may not be the primitive slurs of the unknowing and nameless which he most remembers, but our accidental ones, emerging in the midst of friendly talk.

  The minimum gear of St Patrick’s athletic team members, beside the St Pat’s black singlet with its facings of blue and gold, was a black pair of running shorts – in my case sewn up by my mother on her Singer sewing machine – a pair of ‘spikes’, that is, cutaway black shoes whose soles were arrayed with cruel metal points, and for the very finest athletes, a white sloppy joe. We were not burdened with track suits or starting blocks. I wore my sloppy joe, which my mother could barely afford to buy me, with artistic negligence, the way I wore my school uniform. If it had had a pocket in it, I would have carried therein some damned book or other.

  And our paladin was Peter McInnes. If we went into races doubtful, he was such a certain winner that we could turn up to run on any track in the certainty that he would fill the low points of our performance with his own super-abounding victories. We felt enlarged as runners if he discussed the track surface or spike-length or starting methods with us. We all yearned for that casual stylishness in victory, something which Australian sportsmen from Don Bradman to Ray Lindwall to Clive Churchill possessed. It seemed a mystery to me that you could tell how good a runner was by his manner at the start and the finish. Those of us who were middling tended to force our gestures. Our pre-race warm-ups seemed self-conscious in a way Peter’s never were.

  The wonderful expectancy, the tension that begs for release, as you shake your limbs out under starter’s orders before a race! It is this athletic expectancy which pressed up against the sky, with the chance of anything happening – champions falling, lesser athletes suddenly finding a crucial ounce or two of extra thrust. That throat-swelling, intoxicating stress of the seconds before the start. The casual buzz of the crowd, half-interested in the race but discussing personal things too, the latest Holden car, or some tussle between Dr Evatt and Mr Menzies, all that only spiking up the sense of possibility which the runner feels as the starter, with the right casualness, checks his pistol.

  I was aware one late winter Sunday as I stood in a starting lane for an inter-school 440 yards that by the tennis courts, along the back straight, Curran and her two younger sisters sat, having strolled down idly a quarter of a mile from home to watch the meeting.

  I knew from the Frawley girls that Curran was a runner also, of greater eminence at the Dominican convent than I was at St Pat’s. She won the 100 yards, the 220 yards by streets. Running barefooted in a school uniform, as all the other girls did. Olive legs flashing underneath the Dominican brown. Convents and even the girls’ grammar schools laid down brown serge cloth against the thighs of Australia’s better women athletes. Only at the club level, or at the Australian championships, were skimpy, unimpeding shorts permitted.

  Curran could have run at that level, if she had had the time for it.

  On starter’s orders, we walked up to our graduated marks. Ahead of me, in lane four, I could see Gaffney of St Joseph’s College in his pink and lavender, dancing on the spot and waving and jiggling his hands. I always wondered why runners jiggled their hands. It implied that the race brought with it the chance of wrist injuries. Whatever its purpose, I made sure I did it too.

  Down on the mark. We all knew how to take the posture, few of us knew how to use it to drive away with the fore and aft leg once the gun went. Peter McInnes knew. But you couldn’t prove your seriousness as an athlete to people like the Currans unless you could manage a crouching start. Different matter for the mile, of course. You could begin the mile with a standing start. Explosion was not necessary – or even the gesture toward explosion I was making as I crouched.

  I got a good start, at least a fair imitation of an explosive one. A runner can tell at once, going into the first bend, whether he is running above himself, in time with himself, below his best. That day, owing to some amalgam of physical and psychic causes including the presence of Curran, I was above myself. I gained two yards on Gaffney in his outer lane. I knew I had Rankin beaten, the other St Pat’s kid who ate sugary food even in Lent. Not an ascetic like me. A Celestial. A breeze from the south-west of the great continent of Australia, from the interior, swept up and nudged my shoulder as we entered the back straight where Curran and her sister sat. Give it a go! it implied. I was Curran’s dream athlete envisioned. For her sake I took Gaffney on now with so little effort, shoulder to shoulder. Then out into open air, that lonely space in laned races, that ice-cold, blazing eminence, that kingship under threat. Running in first place, representing Curran, St Pat’s and GMH: Keneally.

  I could see a little ahead of me the limed lines which marked the start of the 220 yards, and I pounded across my 220 yard line, sensing but as yet ignoring the first aches of breathlessness and muscular failure.

  They speak of the wall in the marathon, but the 440 yards or
400 metres has a wall as well, about the 320-yard mark. Those who have been foolish enough by too much flamboyance in the back straight to invite the wall can all at once hear the thunder of their enemies from behind. To the observer it is as if the failing lead runner is being held back by the shoulders. The head goes up or down, a confession of distress, the shoulders begin to waver. In the final bend I could see Gaffney’s lavender shirt from the corner of my eye. It went past me like a man-sized spinnaker onto a wind I could not even get a whisper of.

  At the turn into the straight, he was five yards ahead and of course uncatchable. This was a good time to perish, to cease upon the hour. Of course, Joey’s boys like him were generally boys from the bush. One of our standard primary school essays: Is it better to live in the Bush or in the City? Gaffney, the child of some country chemist or solicitor or farmer, was demonstrating the natural superiority of bush cunning and lung capacity.

  Cripes, Rankin on my shoulder! Sugar-eater. Girl-fondler. The infrequent visitor to the confessional. The slapdash votary. The fellow who liked Mathematics II better than he liked novels and had never heard of GMH. He came up in the last half-yard and nudged me by inches.

  Dinny McGahan came up and put a hand on my heaving shoulder. ‘Young Keneally,’ he said, ‘ah … you had virtually won that race. Just remember next time to save the energy you put out in the back straight, and … ah … bring it into play at the 320-yard mark.’

  Looking at me with one wry eye, he might have understood what led to the back-straight folly. I was in any case humbled by his patience. He must have been certain that anyone who understood sprung rhythm could certainly understand the percentage plan for survival in the 440 yards.

  Later in the day, I won the second division 100 yards. Temporary exhilaration. I held myself back in the 220 yards and came second catching up. All this to polite applause. My father, smoking his roll-your-owns in the stand, red-faced from the sun he caught growing tomatoes and Brussels sprouts in the yard, and wearing today his Akubra hat, accepted casual congratulations. This stranger who had come back from wars and to whom I felt responsible. I delayed going to pay filial homage to my parents, since they would remark whimsically on the way I had almost wilfully lost the 440 yards. The results would be inscribed in the Daily Mirror as well, which my father bought. Third-placed for eternity in small print under the Port Kembla Race Meeting, the Wentworth Park dogs. The St Joseph–St Patrick’s athletics meeting! Could literary critics memorialize a fellow who’d so culpably run third?

  I could take only one or two flinching looks to the place where the Currans sat by the tennis courts. They seemed to be talking pretty merrily, as if the world hadn’t changed.

  I found myself deliberately sampling the despair of that late afternoon to see if it were large enough to explain what the boy from Flemington had done to himself. No, I decided. Not even to take poison like Chatterton, let alone to organize a chair and rope and to decide that the earth had really and eternally lost its elasticity.

  Elasticity was the point. I could sense I was too hectically resilient anyhow. And almost at once another chance for a version of excellence came to me like a thrown rope from a kind hand. It required some routine adolescent deceit, but I had already shown at least the normal amount of that. Say I went now and told Brother McGahan or Brother Markwell that my asthma had improved, had behaved better during the winter than anyone expected! I could put myself forward for the nine-stone St Pat’s Rugby League team, the team which would be specially put together in August for the State Championships and composed of boys who at the carnival at the Sydney Cricket Ground did not weigh more than 126 pounds. I knew that the team would include a winger called Terry Gale, who was nearly as huge a sprinting prodigy as Peter McInnes. Des McGlynn would captain it, and he had been my captain in the Eight-Stones the year before. He was a very fine half-back. Good man to follow – fresh-complexioned, wiry, brushy-haired, gently tough, and that Catholic sanctifying-grace look in his eyes. His strength is like the strength of two because his heart is pure …

  This rearrangement of my sporting year would take some good acting on my part. Dinny McGahan had frequently asked me if I was sure the 440 yards was a wise choice, given that I hadn’t been able to play Rugby League because of my asthmatic condition. I had quick-wittedly told him that the doctor considered short bursts of energy less dangerous than the continuous, thirty-minutes-each-way effort which Rugby League required. Now this same mythical doctor – it was in imagination Dr Joe Buckley of Homebush, though he’d never actually said these things to me – cleared his grateful patient to play Rugby League again, and anxious to join St Pat’s blue, black and gold colours late in the season, I would rush to inform the Brothers.

  And as always when we won the State Championship, the Frawley girls would tell Curran, and a small pulse of admiration would emanate from the hill in Strathfield where the Currans dwelt. Democracy would not be offended, I wouldn’t be usurping anyone’s place, since the nine-stone team was put together for this one series of games spread over two days in the August school holidays. He who was up to scratch got in. On top of that I believed my running training would give me some handy condition.

  Before school holidays began, Father Byrne returned to Edgar Street to talk to those boys who had shown an interest in the seminary. He seemed pale with winter paleness and tired with an unrelievable tiredness now. I could imagine some of the worldlier curates saying he ought to play more tennis or golf, and go surfing in the summer. But the world was too much with him already, and was not the cure for him.

  I went to the parlour in the Brothers’ house to meet him and he told me, ‘The Cardinal and the rectors of the two seminaries intend to interview boys interested in studying for the priesthood. The interviews are to be held at the Presbytery of St Mary’s Cathedral on the first Saturday of the August holidays.’

  That would be the day after the Nine-Stoners won the State Championship. For who could oppose us?

  ‘Six other boys from the Leaving Certificate class intend to go for the interviews,’ said Father Byrne. ‘This does not necessarily commit the boy who is interviewed to becoming a seminarian. Indeed, many fail the interview due either to lack of intelligence or obvious lack of virtue. I would be happy to arrange for you to attend the interviews if you wish. I believe you have the right qualities.’

  Even though the thought of it filled me with an electric and not utterly pleasant sense of expectation and unreality, and on top of that made me sweat, I agreed to enrol myself for such an interview for fear of disappointing him further, of deepening the dark night he was obviously experiencing. But how do you talk to a Cardinal, or more specifically to Cardinal Gilroy? And to the rectors? Poor Father Byrne would have to be disappointed in the end, but there was time for that.

  But even now I wondered what device I could use to extricate myself in the end. I had already earmarked for other purposes the stratagem of fictional advice from a doctor. I could hardly make up fictional advice from an invented father-confessor who would tell me I was unfit in his opinion to be a seminarian and so would get me off the hook.

  Some ruse which didn’t actually offend the heavens would present itself though, I was sure. In the meantime, there was the glimmer of vanity Father Byrne in his innocence held out: to prove yourself intellectually and morally fit. You would come out knowing you were up to scratch for the seminary and that a Cardinal knew it too.

  ‘I’m not utterly certain, father,’ I told the priest under a photograph of priests who’d done their schooling at St Pat’s. ‘But I think I’m close enough to justify going for the interview.’

  ‘So do I,’ said Father Byrne. He had believed the miraculously cured renegade, who now appeared on Campbell’s platforms to denounce Papist perfidy. Why shouldn’t he believe a sly little bugger like me?

  I left in fear. The sweet, glamorous state of quandary with which I indulged myself would end. This was late July. Uncertainty, the glimmering surface of a tho
usand opportunities, was a winter delight, and I saw now however vaguely that the axe of exams and definite choice would fall in the late spring and early summer. Then all dilettantes and pretenders would be shown up. I was not of constant stuff like Mangan, who was directed with gleaming certainty towards that little slice of the thirteenth century which lay in the hills outside Melbourne.

  Brother Markwell held the trials for the nine-stone team about ten days before the August holidays began. Many of us had played together in earlier teams though. We knew each others’ moves. I felt again that miraculous primeval sense of the inflated bladder landing squarely in my arms. Markwell was a great driller of Rugby League players. We never looked at the tackler however menacing he might be. We looked only at the chest of the man we were throwing the ball to. If defending, we watched the attacker’s hips and applied our shoulders to the hams while our arms grasped across the knees, pushing with our shoulder, creating an irresistible system of fulcrumage which brought them all tumbling down – Marist Brothers Kogarah, James Cook High School, Cleveland Street, Marist Brothers Darlinghurst, Fort Street, Christian Brothers Lewisham, Parramatta High, Patrician Brothers Ryde.

  I had done such a perfect tackle on Brother Markwell himself the year before, when he decided to take part in a limited game with us. As he fell I’d freakishly broken my nose against his hipbone, but the reward was he knew what I was capable of.

  Just the same, I did find I was short of a run now. As footballers said, jogging was no substitute for match fitness, the sort of fitness that came from tackling and being tackled, from finding your place in the back line or the forwards after each passage of play.