by Stephen Orr
I sat forward. ‘And your mum believed him?’
‘Yes. Pair of pliers, thirty minutes later it was all over.’
Jen didn’t look convinced. ‘Then what?’
‘Then he said, Here, pop these in.’ He took them out again.
‘Pop!’
‘Dad, put them in!’
He did as he was asked. ‘Same pair … fifty years. Not bad, eh?’
I returned to my room, my uniform, my bag full of lovingly covered books. As I got ready I heard Pop say, ‘… she was a fuckin’ Catholic too.’
Mum: ‘Who?’
‘That Ellman woman. And he did her for the same price.’
‘That’s horrible,’ Jen said.
‘Way it was done back then. She couldn’t have afforded to keep a kiddy.’
It seemed strange, that he’d lost track of me, but remembered some girl from fifty years before.
‘Eileen Ellman. And she coulda died, too, the way he did it.’
‘How?’ Jen said.
‘He had a concoction.’
I sat looking out my window. Another year: more of the same. There was a machine that I’d be fed into and processed, filled with information and a shred, perhaps, of understanding. For this to happen I’d need a clean uniform and polished shoes and a diary to record my daily output as a function of daily input. I’d need to be on time, and have the right attitude, whatever that was, so I could absorb the same stuff another ten thousand kids were absorbing. And this little machine would chug, all year, until it ran out of petrol. Then it’d stop, and someone would say, Ah, yes, slight effort, and give me a card that said ‘63’ and tell me what university courses 63 could lead to.
I saw Les Champness walking down his drive in his pyjamas and slippers. He leaned over, picked up his paper and headed back. I wondered if Mr Fantastic might fix him. Stretch out of his window, take him by the singlet and say, You watch yourself, mister.
No, Mr Fantastic wouldn’t fit into the drabness of Lanark Avenue, 30 January 1984. It was too hot for him already. The colours bleached from his costume, in the same way we’d all been bleached, into a light blue school shirt, grey pants and white socks. Lennon, too, still on the wall, still praying for peace.
Les went in. Assuming the machine kept working, you could fix people’s pipes, or make seat covers, and then they’d give you an asbestos box on stilts. You could carpet it, put an aspidistra in the lounge room, and make more people to feed into the machine.
I heard Pop say, ‘The mafia runs the church … never been a Pope to stand up to them.’
In a way, it didn’t matter what he said, as long as kept talking, as long as the machine kept working. Even if he forgot bits, or made some up. The sound of his voice; that’s all that mattered. Honey-flavoured, beer-smelling. As long as he kept talking. Imagine that? Pop silent, sitting in a corner, looking at us like we were strangers. So, every little bit of it, every whisper, every scratched nostril and clunked falsie, every rustle of the paper and race call, every fart—excellent! All of it, excellent. Enough to make you happy, even if you were looking down the barrel of another year at school.
Curtis jumped the fence from 29. Same school bag, I noticed. Old shirt and pants, shoes with a bita polish, perhaps. He approached the window. ‘Can I geta lift?’
‘Come in.’
He was gone, around the garden, across the path that led nowhere, towards our front door. I went out to greet him, and Pop was on his feet, holding his head in his hands. ‘He had a horse called Skeffington,’ he said.
‘That’s it, Skeffington,’ Jen said, trying to calm him.
He turned on her. ‘But you wouldn’t know. It wasn’t Skeffington, was it?’
‘It was.’
‘It wasn’t!’
She was scared. She clung to her handbag, full of product.
‘Yes, it was, Dad,’ Mum said. ‘Skeffington. Bill Brown had him, remember?’
Curtis knocked, and entered. ‘G’day, Mrs Whelan, Doug.’ Smiling. ‘Jen.’
Pop said to him, ‘What do you want?’
‘I was gonna get a lift to school, if that’s okay?’
‘Skeffington?’
Curtis took it in his stride. ‘That’s it, Doug. He was a good horse, wasn’t he?’
Pop was unsure. ‘Over long distances. You know him, Skeffington?’
‘Yeah … you were talking about him the other day.’
‘I was?’
Curtis pulled out a chair and motioned for Pop to sit. Then he sat opposite him. ‘My dad prefers the trots, but he knows a good horse. He’s got a part-share in one, but it’s come last in three races.’
‘Well, Skeffington never came last.’
Again, I turned to Mum, and she was lost in Pop’s eyes.
Curtis said, ‘Mum reckons horses are like flushing your money down the dunny, but Dad says she doesn’t get it. I see what he means, though. There’s nothin’ better than a nice horse, is there, Doug?’
‘No, there’s not.’
Jen said, ‘We’re gonna be late.’
Mum asked if I’d cleaned my teeth.
‘Yes.’
‘You have not,’ Jen said. ‘You’re disgusting.’
Pop seemed to have rallied. Skeffington. It was definitely Skeffington. ‘I’ll drive yers.’
‘No, you won’t,’ Mum said. ‘You stay and read the paper.’ And she opened it for him.
‘I’m not useless.’
‘Didn’t say you were. How’s about you do the dishes?’
‘I haven’t got time for that. I’ve got six cars waiting.’
‘Six?’
‘Couple, anyway.’
We kissed him, and left him with his cold cup of tea. As we got in the car, Mum said, ‘Thanks for your help, Curtis.’
‘No worries, Mrs Whelan. I tell you what we should do …’
Mum tried to start the car. It groaned, then shook.
‘We should take him to the races. That’d be good, eh?’
Yes, I thought. The races. Perfect. Curtis was always the good ideas man. And it came to him so easily (120—140: very superior intelligence).
‘Good idea,’ Mum said, fiddling with the choke. ‘We’ll ask him.’ She tried again. An automatic sigh, like a pair of old, diseased lungs emptying for the last time. ‘Shit.’
‘Battery,’ Curtis said.
‘I can’t be late,’ Jen added. ‘Feres blows his top.’
Mum turned to her. ‘Well, it’s not my bloody fault.’
We watched as Pop emerged from the house. He waved at us. ‘Hold on.’ He went to the shed, opened the door and switched on the light.
‘But it’s in pieces,’ Mum said.
But then, the sound of a purring Datsun, the gunning of an accelerator, and the Fairlady backed down the drive.
‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘Yesterday it was …’
Pop pulled up beside. ‘Come on then, get in.’
Day three. A timber art room with a clunking fan, half-hanging from a ceiling, transmitting light from an iron-roofed day. I completed an outline of Mr Fantastic. ‘They’ll let us?’ I asked.
‘Of course.’
Mr Andrews, our new art teacher: jeans, sandals, a decent week’s growth, a couple of earrings in each lobe, red eyes from booze and drugs, or so we imagined. Nick Andrews, the first teacher who’d let anyone near his first name.
‘They’ll let you,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about them.’
Them. The administration: Miss White, the deputy; Meadows, the principal. Nick didn’t seem to be one of them: the people who said we’ve decided to reschedule exams, or we’ve considered both positions. Maybe he was one of us, although what about the degree, teacher training, job interview, fear of disciplinary action (we’d heard stories)? ‘This place is so depressing,’ he said, having just described his last contract in the bush, and an art building he’d left covered in soup cans. ‘Every building’s beige, like someone got a good deal on it. It’s enough to churn the bow
el.’
We all smiled. It was going to be a good year.
‘Curtis, isn’t it?’ he said.
Curtis looked up from his sketch: a bloated dragon with some sort of perm, an exploding head straight out of Feres Trabilsie’s Head Start to Beauty (Wednesday evenings: 7.30—7.35). ‘Yes, Mr Andrews … Nick?’
‘Tell me about White.’
Curtis smiled. ‘Well, every Friday morning she lines the girls up …’
One of the girls said, ‘She’s a bitch.’
We waited for Nick’s response, but he was busy with his own sketch.
‘… and inspects their fingernails. Says they gotta be short.’
‘Why?’
‘Typing.’
‘Cos she’s a moll,’ another girl said.
We waited again, watched our experimental teacher, but he said nothing.
Curtis was just getting started. ‘Inspects their dresses, doesn’t she, Kristen?’
‘Too right. She’s got a ruler, and measures from your dress to yer knee, and if it’s too long she sends you home.’
We saw it! Nick smiled. The only teacher, ever, who’d sided with us against Miss White. Then he noticed me and said, ‘Clem?’
I felt like a little kid.
‘Nice old name.’
‘You reckon?’
‘Let’s see.’
I held up my sketch: Mr Fantastic wrapped around a telegraph pole, hands around some villain’s neck, his string-o’-pearl teeth glowing in the night.
‘Nice work. Next thing, trace it onto an overhead.’
This was his plan: to turn his art room into some sort of multicoloured Taj Mahal in the asphalt waste of pebblecrete change rooms and glass-sided boxes, transportables, a few terminal gum trees and various sheds for the gardeners to sleep in and the dope heads to smoke behind. The designs were free choice. It was to be our first project for the year. Ten linear metres of baby-beige-shit walls. We’d be responsible for design, colour scheme, painting and sealing. And this mural (he claimed) would be a lasting testament to our creativity, still admired in decades to come by fresh-faced Year Eights in search of inspiration. ‘You asked Miss White?’ I said.
‘Don’t worry about Miss White.’
‘Or Mr Meadows?’
‘He seems reasonable.’
We laughed; he looked up. ‘Why’s that?’
‘School is a tide,’ I half-sang. ‘We ride it into shore, harness its energy, and it delivers us to the sands of fortune.’
Nick Andrews seemed amused. ‘They all have some crap like that.’
They. More evidence. This man was the John Lennon of teachers. But how had he survived? Didn’t they all gather in the staff room and laugh at us, suck smokes, drink diesel coffee and call us arse-jockeys and little crims?
‘Trust me, it’ll be okay. Long as it’s quality work. You into comics, Clem?’
‘Na.’
‘He’s got a big pile in his bedroom,’ Curtis said.
I glared at him.
‘And he still reads them.’
‘Fuck off.’
Nick watched me, but didn’t respond.
‘Keeps them next to his telescope,’ Curtis said.
‘Telescope?’ Nick seemed interested.
‘Spies on the neighbours.’
And all the girls turned up their noses. ‘That’s disgusting.’
‘For astronomy,’ I said.
Nick was grinning. Later, I’d understand his technique: start an argument, watch the fireworks, quote a few philosophers. That was the only way, he’d claim, you could become an artist: get dirty, wrestle in the mud and pig shit, fight for every view, have it criticised and dismantled. Then, perhaps, you could worry about drawing and painting things.
As for Curtis, this was one of his worst habits: turning on his friends to widen his own circle of admirers. ‘Curtis, as you’ll find, is full of shit,’ I said. ‘I like astronomy.’
Curtis sat up. ‘He showed me, he can see into people’s backyards. Like Mrs Glasson, in her knickers and bra and …’
The cries almost drowned him out. Nick had rolled a smoke, and was looking for matches.
‘He called me over to have a look.’
I punched him.
‘You did!’
Well, I had, but I hadn’t been looking. She’d just come out, all flubber and wrinkle, pulling a few dresses off the line, and I’d been watching Les Champness at the time, but there she was.
One of the girls said, ‘You can get arrested for that.’
‘I didn’t!’
Nick said, ‘That’s your idea, Clem.’
‘What?’
‘Forget Mr Fantastic, paint what you know.’
‘Mrs Glasson?’
‘Exactly. Point of view of the telescope, with your neighbour, maybe all of them … a montage.’
‘You reckon I could paint them on the art room?’
‘Why not?’
‘Mr Meadows—’
‘Bugger Mr Meadows. This is art, that’s what we do.’
I grinned at his grin. It was like I’d been waiting forever to meet a Nick Andrews. Like he’d taken off his guitar, climbed down from my wall and started sketching.
The day unravelled. Lunch: Twisties inside an excavated roll. Sarah Scarr and her anaemic offsider collecting bottles for refunds. All lunch, every lunch, since primary school. A commendable work ethic, especially since everyone threw old fruit at them and called them scabs. The meatheads on the oval kicking out-of-season footballs, stopping to lie down, smoke, and off again. That was Gleneagles High—no blazers or First XV rugby; no Head of the River or polished shoes. Not much of anything, really. As though someone had said, I suppose we should make a school, and someone else had replied, Well, money’s a bit tight, but I suppose you’re right. A paddock was found, paths laid, boxes brought in on the back of flat top trucks, craned into position, wired, filled with what passed for teachers, and everyone was happy. Except the kids.
Lunch. What was a thinking man to do? Four-square with the Year Nines? Or just sit and talk, again? Same conversations, same laughs. Like when Lars Westermann let Wendy Vaughan hold his thing in the AV room while we were watching a film about metals. Mr McGarry: You disgusting little shit! The lights coming on, Lars zipping up, laughter and applause (although this mightn’t have happened).
I walked home alone. Same roads, same unmowed lawns; same Toranas on stumps. I waited, crossed North East Road, past Don stocking his freezer with Paddle Pops. Around the block, down Lanark Avenue, again.
I knew it would all be waiting. The world never changed: Pop in his shed, Mum in her kitchen, Jen home already, because Feres (70—80: borderline deficiency) only gave her four hours a day. It’s magic, you know. All was quiet in the Sharpes’ front yard. It was too early for Ernie to head to the Windsor, Fi-Fi in tow. But Peter Donnellan was out, dressed in Ghandi-white, on his knees pulling gorse from his garden of almost every weed in the world. He looked up and said, ‘How was school?’
‘Shit.’
‘Really?’ He wiped his forehead, and squinted to see me against the sun. ‘Why’s that?’
‘Another year of it.’
He returned to work. I wanted to ask him why he was bothering. He had a small pile, but they’d already seeded. I liked Peter. Like Dave, he’d worked out who he was, and settled on the disappointment. He’d taught me the pointlessness of qualifications, ambition, the need to get ahead. To him, the pulling of a weed, the netting of a fruit tree, the placing of his brother in his spot in the yard, were what mattered. I could see, even then, how you could be happy. Like everyone in Lanark Avenue, I guessed. All failures, in their own way. Then he said, ‘You’ve always said that.’
‘What?’
‘School. Even when you were a little tacker. Remember? You’d walk past, I’d say, How’s school? You’d grumble.’
‘I didn’t.’
‘You did.’
I couldn’t really argue with this. Peter
had been there since the beginning. Since Mum and Dad had brought me home from hospital, and laid me in my cradle, and Mrs Donnellan had brought her sons in to see the new baby. The stuff I’d been told about. They’d probably congratulated Mum and Dad and asked about a name and said, Clem, that’s a nice old name, and even (probably) heard me crying at night.
‘Been watching you walk past all these years,’ Peter said.
‘Yeah.’ What could you say?
‘And you’ve always been in a rush to get home.’
‘Just glad to get away from school.’
‘Perhaps.’
Maybe, I thought, home was the place to be. Because it would be the same at four as it had been at eight. ‘Got a good art teacher,’ I said. ‘Lets us call him Nick.’
He just worked.
‘Well, keep at it.’
I was in shorts and sandals, of course, with my Clem Whelan satchel, cowlick and stick legs. And he was gardening, and I was telling him about my teachers, and art, and Mr Fantastic, and I felt bad that I’d changed, but he hadn’t. I always felt bad; like these people had ossified so I could grow up.
‘What do you reckon I should do next year?’ I asked.
He shrugged. ‘Keep studying. It teaches you how to think.’
‘I know how to think.’
He smiled. ‘Yeah, guess you do. You used to say you wanted to be a pilot.’
‘Na.’
‘Then a mechanic.’
‘For Pop.’
‘Then once you said, I’m gonna be a writer. A novelist, like Dickens. And you had this book planned. You told me, remember?’
I waited.
‘It sounded a bit like David Copperfield, but I didn’t say anything.’
I thought about it. It made sense. It was like he was saying it for a reason. ‘What do you reckon?’
‘Gleneagles needs a famous writer. You could fit the bill.’
I almost laughed. ‘Any ideas?’
But he didn’t reply. And I didn’t need a reply. I could still hear Nick Andrews telling me to do what I knew. ‘You’re gettin’ sunburnt,’ I said.
But again, he didn’t reply. He’d done a square metre of weeds. That was a good day’s work.