I’d forgotten to check the bell before service. There were two other altar boys in my parish who served Mass, and naturally they were named Thomas and John, and between us we played a series of pranks on each other as a way of staving off boredom. One prank was to unscrew the miniature bells until they were extremely loose but still clinging onto the metal handle, so it looked like nothing was wrong. When you shook the bell vigorously during the blessing of the Eucharist, however … well. John, the motherfucker, had finally gotten me. All year I’d been messing with him, smearing Deep Heat inside his gown and onto the candlestick he would hold through the reading of the gospel and the sermon that followed. Thomas, encouraged by our antics, would do really stupid shit like overload the thurible with incense. The thurible was a large censer suspended from chains, and his goal was to spark a coughing epidemic amongst the congregation. As he moved around the church, blessing various holy items and parishioners, he would swing the thurible in exaggerated movements, spewing forth massive plumes of smoke. Soon, Father Vito would be choking and some of the oldies would be coughing, which got a big grin out of me.
It was only me serving the morning after the Party Bus, however, and I kind of made a mess of things. Afterwards, Father left me alone in the sacristy to pack up while he socialised with the congregation. I put out the candles and put away the chalice, saucers, leftover communion, and books. Then I screwed back on the fallen bells, but only enough so they looked like they were fastened. And then I hung my robe.
One of the perks of the job was being left in the sacristy while Father was outside talking to parishioners. He’d swear he’d say a prayer for whichever niece was sitting her high school exams or for the uncle diagnosed with cancer, but I doubted he followed up on all those prayers. If that were true, I couldn’t blame him. Despite his nostril hairs, I liked Father Vito a hell of a lot. He always treated me really well and he never lost his temper with me the way he did with almost everyone else. We chatted mostly about footy whenever he had a spare minute. He barracked for the Hawks and I was a Blues supporter, so he’d hang shit on me about how bad we were doing compared to his ascending club. He’d tell me how he wished he could make a game but couldn’t because on weekends he would deliver communion to the sick in their homes.
I felt bad for the guy. Of all the parishes around the northern suburbs, ours sucked the most – barely anyone attended, and those who did were eternally ungrateful and unhappy.
Despite liking him, whenever I was left alone in the sacristy I’d nick a bottle or two of the holy vino so Dougie and I could get smashed on the blood of Christ the following weekend. It might not have been the Christian thing to do, but to me it seemed like a Catholic thing to do. If you asked me, the founding principle of Catholicism was a fundamental understanding of how to bend the rules. We all knew that ‘God’, this mythical being in the sky, didn’t exist, but you had to believe in something. Anyway, you could always have your sins absolved at your next confession.
After Mass, Pop and I drove over to Pascoe Vale to visit Nan, Noonie’s mum.
The home had called because Nan had dragged a lawn chair into her room from the courtyard against the wishes of several residents and at least one nurse, and my grandmother was livid. They’d gone through hundreds of dollars over the years trying to get Nan a chair she liked only to find that every time they moved a new one into her room, she would be struck by back aches and neck pains, accompanied by bouts of complaining. This would lead ultimately to the chair being removed, and the search for a new one would start over. Mostly, though, Noonie was livid because too often her mother embarrassed her. She was behaving like some uncivilised country bumpkin, still acting as though she were the youngest of ten children living hand to mouth.
When I was little, I hadn’t liked Nan very much. I had to visit her at the old folk’s home with Mum, and the time we spent together would drag. She was a grump and she didn’t have any teeth and she rarely put her dentures in, so her lips were flappy and wrinkled and rested strangely against her gums, making her mouth like something you might find on the underside of a sea monster. Even worse was her feral habit of picking off her fingernails. The tips of her fingers were always red and bare and sore-looking, and the sight would make me shudder.
But at a certain age, I’d started to appreciate Nan. She’d grown up in abject poverty in the country within a huge Irish family, without any formal education. She was illiterate and had spent most of her life working as a vegetable farmer with her husband Hamish, turning a flat block of land into a thriving enterprise outside Swan Hill. Noonie had spent her first years in a tent on that flat block, her parents waiting for the income and resources to build a house. My grandmother hadn’t had much fun as a kid. She started her schooling in that tent, where her mother would dress her immaculately for her morning classes. Later, after the business had taken off and the home was built, Noonie was left mostly to herself. Before she woke each morning, her parents would head to neighbouring towns where they spent long days selling their produce at markets; they returned home after she’d made herself dinner and gone to bed.
Like those of many mothers and daughters, Noonie and Nan’s relationship was founded on a hidden mutual admiration for one another and a hell of a lot of squabbling over petty shit.
‘It’s just shameful, the way she acts,’ Noonie would say of her mother.
‘Shameful?’ Pop would respond. ‘Woman, you were born in a tent. We were all poor once, don’t forget.’
‘It was a nice tent,’ Noonie would insist, embarrassed each and every time this fact of her childhood was raised. ‘It was hardly a tent at all. There were rooms in it and everything.’
Pop knocked on Nan’s door. There was no answer. It wasn’t mealtime, which ruled out the dining hall, and she hadn’t been in the courtyard when we’d walked past. Besides, we knew she was inside because the woman at reception had told us so.
Pop knocked again. When he reached his arm up, the collar of his shirt moved, and the clump of blue varicose veins on his neck was exposed. After so many years I rarely noticed them, but on occasion I was drawn to their size and colour, as fascinated as I’d been as a baby when I’d often reached for them with tiny hands. Those veins, like a large, textured ink blot, always put me at ease.
Again, Nan didn’t answer her door. So again, Pop knocked. This wait-out was all part of the ritual. Dealing with Nan wasn’t so different from Church; eventually the elderly become like deities, and we find ourselves bending to their will. When she realised it wasn’t someone she could avoid by keeping quiet, we heard water running through pipes in the wall accompanied by her irascible, rasping voice. ‘I’m coming! I’m coming!’ A moment later, Nan was opening her door wearing one of her small selection of earth-toned skivvies, corduroy pants and rose-tinted glasses, a wispy halo of permed hair circling her scalp. ‘Keith, I had no idea you were coming round today.’
‘Helen called yesterday. You spoke on the phone,’ Pop said, filing into the room behind Nan.
‘Must’ve slipped my mind,’ she said. ‘Hello, Ford.’
‘Hey, Nan. How are ya?’
‘Urgh,’ she groaned.
As I walked past the small ensuite, I could smell the smoke. The short passageway into her room was heavy with tobacco.
Pop said, ‘You realise there’s a No Smoking policy here, Ellen?’
‘Hmm?’
My grandfather just chuckled, rolling his eyes at me as he took two packets of Winfields from his sports jacket, one from each pocket. He flung the smokes onto the bed, right next to where Nan had taken a seat at the end, about to strap her emphysema mask to her face.
‘What’s all this?’ she asked, putting the respirator back down on the edge of the bed.
‘Just promise me you’ll smoke ’em outside. You keep flushing the ends down the sink, they’ll kick you out.’
Nan took the packs of smokes and turned them over, examining them like foreign artefacts. ‘I don’t smoke,’ she s
aid, expressionless.
Growing up so poor as a kid, she’d developed sticky fingers; she’d pinch things around the retirement home, pawning off bric-a-brac for money to buy smokes. In an effort to stop her from nicking people’s shit, my grandfather had taken to buying her Winfields. He and Noonie argued over this a lot, but Nan was in her nineties and showed few signs of slowing down, so he considered it the best solution.
‘Just smoke the fucken things outside, Ellen. Jesus. You’ve got Helen right up my arse ’cause of this.’
Nan took the packs from the bed. She got up and shuffled to the bedside table, where she placed them inside the top drawer. ‘I don’t know what you’re carrying on about, Keith. But I’ll hang onto these for safe keeping if that’s what you want.’
Nan was a gangster. She never copped to nothing. To me, a teenager interested in doing the wrong thing, Nan was a constant fascination.
‘Now,’ Pop said, ‘what are we gunna do about this chair business?’
‘What business? What business is it of anybody’s where I park my arse?’
‘Jesus Christ,’ Pop muttered. The visit was pointless, and he knew that. It wasn’t the chair she wanted, it was a fight, some conflict, some action. ‘We’ll get you another chair, Ellen. Whatever ya like. Hang the expense.’
Taking in the meagre frame of the lawn chair, she patted the railing. ‘This is the one for me, Keith. It’s good for my back. It’s not going anywhere. They can come and take it from me if they want – I’d like to see ’em try.’
I understood that perhaps how Nan had survived so long was through this ritualistic succession of transgressions. If she wasn’t constantly pissing somebody off, she probably wouldn’t have made it so far.
*
A couple months later, Nan was dead. She died in that same chair she’d dragged in from the garden, and we buried her on a Saturday. The funeral service was held in a little chapel inside the Le Pine on Sydney Road. Only the four of us were in attendance: Mum, Noonie, Pop and me.
We followed the hearse out to the giant cemetery in Fawkner – a large parkland along Sydney Road, just before that road becomes lined with warehouses and car yards – and we laid her to rest beside her husband, Hamish Stanley.
After the coffin had been lowered into the ground, my grandmother told me that the four burial plots beside Nan and Hamish were for the four of us.
That night, I headed over to the Turk’s and picked up a small bottle of Beam – one of those 300-millilitre jobs shaped like a flask. I wanted to drink in quiet, alone. Then I went a few minutes up the road to the Safeway and bought a store-brand bottle of cola to mix the spirits with, before heading down to the Merri Creek.
I poured out half the cola and dumped the bourbon in on top, then sat back in the reeds along the embankment, staring into the murky, polluted water as the sun went down. Dusk was always marked by the colonies of bats from Yarra Bend that streamed overhead, travelling east to west in search of food. As I slurped back my black concoction, I wondered why it was so many people in my neighbourhood littered the waterway. The creek must’ve been nicer a long time ago, before all the people. I thought about Nan. And about Moose, and Dougie, and about that Party Bus circling the far northern burbs with a load of drunk teens, like an illicit Trojan horse. And I thought of Ellie, her arse and toes and dress and breasts and heels.
By the time I’d finished the bottle, it’d gotten very dark. I could hardly make out the footholds I’d used to get closer to the creek, and with my mind slow and body heavy I struggled to scramble back up out of my favourite spot, hidden from the bike track. It wasn’t far from the underpass where I’d smoked a Winnie with Moose and his mates.
It took me three attempts to get up the embankment. On my second try, I fell hard and rolled down closer to the water, dirtying my jeans, caking my knees in mud. I lay there a second, willing myself to my final attempt.
At the top of the embankment, I realised I had nothing to do, nowhere to go. And when it was really dark, hanging about the creek was frightening. You never knew if someone was coming along the track or if some druggie lurked beneath the footbridge.
I looked at the creek a long time, really looked at it, stared into the water. Another black pool, like the dam out back on Queenie McCullen’s property that I’d played near as a child. There was something in that black water, something terrible, I could feel it.
But then, just as I felt most frightened, a silvery object flashed in the water, breaking the surface with a tiny
pblumbp
It was a platypus, I realised. Its weird beaver-like tail flicked up a couple more times
pblumbp
pblumbp
before disappearing from view.
TWO
Pomp and Circumstance
Mr Tracksuit
It was a warm day towards the end of the school year – the racing season, drawing nearer to Christmas, and always the most painful time of year for me because I would soon have to endure days in the country, in Shepparton, with Dad.
Before school, I took off early from The Compound to smoke rollies in the lane behind the church. It felt like the only time I got by myself during the week, so I smoked two, slowly, bracing myself for what I’d need to deal with that day. The results of a maths test I’d cheated on the previous week were being distributed, and I was nervous about being caught.
I couldn’t do maths to save my life and had cheated my way through it since early primary school. For years I’d sat beside stronger students, looking onto their books during tests. As I’d gotten older my methods had become more sophisticated. I’d fake sickies until after exams had been graded, then cajole or purchase the answers from peers. Recently I’d struck up a deal with a boy in the year below me; I knew him through orchestra, and he was taking an advanced maths subject a year early so got the results a week ahead of my class.
I was clever enough at other subjects, but when it came to maths I felt retarded. The numbers and equations glared at me, refusing to merge like Tetris pieces in the way words did. St Anthony’s wasn’t exactly the best fit for someone like me. My new school was mostly a hotbed for the financially and economically inclined, breeding a generation of future Collins Street execs. Their options were limitless: Business Management 1, Business Management 2, Economics 1, Economics 2, Accounting 1, Accounting 2, Maths and Specialist Maths, and Commerce 1 and Commerce 2.
I consoled myself with a third fag, then packed my mouth with mint chewie and marched down to my tram stop on Bell Street to head into Flinders. The early trams were best and worst of all – best, because you never had to give up your seat to anyone the closer you got to the city, and worst, because you never knew what you were in for. A few chromers got about on those early trips, this one lady in particular whose mouth was always covered in the silver paint she huffed out of plastic shopping bags.
To my surprise, Ellie was standing at my stop. I hardly ever ran into her despite the fact we lived so close, and I hadn’t seen her in months, not since the Party Bus.
‘Hey,’ I said. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I’ve gotta go into the city before school. Mum ordered something at David Jones for Dad, but she’s too crook to go pick it up.’
‘She awright?’
‘Yeah. I think it’s just a flu or something. Don’t worry, though, I’m not contagious.’
Ellie looked great in her school uniform; the colours suited her. There was a scab on her left knee below the hem of her skirt, and I wondered how she’d got it. It occurred to me, in my candy-striped blazer, that she was likely taking me in as I was her.
‘Like my blazer?’ I asked.
‘It’s something else, that’s for sure.’
The tram arrived, and we hopped on. There were no chromers about. I walked us down to my usual seat in back, by the rear door on the right side of the tram, facing sideways. I liked this seat most, because, had Ellie not been there, I could put my backpack up beside me and rest my head a
gainst the glass partition to my left.
The only other passengers were two women – in the front, a young girl, and in the back, a middle-aged lady in a business suit – and a fat old guy in a cheap tracksuit sitting perpendicular to the businesswoman. The guy seemed engrossed by a newspaper spread across his lap, and the businesswoman just kept staring out into traffic as we rattled along. It took me a minute to catch on, but it soon became apparent that Mr Tracksuit was engrossed in more than his paper, that a considerable amount of rustling was going on, and that the businesslady wasn’t daydreaming but rather forcing herself to look away.
‘Oh, no,’ I whispered. ‘You’re not gunna believe this.’
‘What?’ Ellie had leaned in close to whisper, and strands of her hair caught my forehead. She had a funny little grin on her face, and I was glad I’d decided on the mint chewie.
‘That guy down there,’ I said. ‘Check him out.’
She turned her head less-than-subtly and took in the scene. ‘Oh, gross. What a freak.’
This wasn’t the first public masturbator I’d stumbled upon; there was an old man who hung around the abandoned cars behind the demolished high school on Bell Street. And, technically, my own acts of self-love in the church laneway counted as well. Still, this was a shock to me nonetheless, more so when the rustling started to crescendo – it was too early for this kind of shit.
Mr Tracksuit was really eyeing the businesswoman, trying to get her attention. He began licking his lips and emitting a shallow whistle that made an alarming melody – lookatmelookatme, the whistle said. When the woman couldn’t strain her neck any longer, she turned to face him. Mr Tracksuit, glad to have her attention at last, flipped the newspaper closed to show her the goods.
Everything in its right place Page 4
