They turn around in their dashboard chairs to look at me, narrow moustaches like an eyebrow over their smiles.
But on this trip back to Sydney there is a difference. When they extend their hands for shaking I notice their arms are tanned from sitting so much in front of the sun. It is not work to sit in front of the sun. Their tan might as well be a beach browning. Their tan is not from stepping out of milking-shed shade to slap cows into the jaggings. It’s not from lifting new-made rectangles of hay from paddock to truck. The green twine that binds the hay blistering the fingers so that they bleed water.
Nor is there sweat showing through the doctor-pilot’s underarms and collar. Is it work to sit? Can these two things, work and sitting, be done together? And to wear a uniform. A uniform as schoolboys wear uniforms.
I’ve begun to think as an employer of men thinks. I would not employ these men on my Tudor Park, so neat and clean, thin-armed from no toiling. How could they touch the privates of cows? They are too educated for cow touching. They would always be thinking they could have done better in life. How could they be a Norman, Bill or Jim?
I’m certain they smell the cowness on me. They did not rise in their seats to greet me, formally, as an equal. Don’t pilots usually do that with me? Yes, I’m sure of it. I’m sure they used to.
A hostess brings them coffee. They sip and wince at the brown heat. Or is it a smirk they’re suppressing that makes them close one eye and blow? A pulled face of how I’m not one of them. I am from a place called Tudor Park, a toucher of cow parts, a mere man of the land for all my being an heir.
I must not become too educated or I might want to leave Tudor Park. I might learn too far beyond it. I would become like those pilots for whom the very air is not nature but maths on a screen. I would make my own way in the world, turn away from my legacy and break my father The Duke’s heart.
In Sydney a real doctor with stethoscope for a necktie. Cold hands and questions. “This wound,” he asks of my bandaged O shape. “It’s a stubborn little healer. How did you do it again?” He peels the gauze back to its antiseptic slime.
I proudly say a cow. The hoof of an angry cow.
And how long ago was that?
Over a month.
And does it hurt?
Only when he squeezes it and a yellow dot of pus pops out.
I ask him how many times a day he washes those hands of his to make them so unnaturally cleaned of all contact with the world. I mean the question as a sneer, an insult that a man should have such sterile-pink fingers.
He answers “plenty” with a long exhaling, wise and weary. He asks if I have taken the bandage off, against orders; if I have played sport with the O bared to the elements because how else could grains of dirt deposit in the O’s edges? He’s going to have to call Feet from the waiting room. He can’t have me ignoring explicit instructions not to remove the covering and thereby waste his professional time. “Don’t you want this to get better?” He asks this in a tone I don’t like. It’s an admonishment for one. But is it also clever prying? Whether by accident or science he has asked a question I answer yes to when I mean no.
But I don’t have much dirt left. I filled three jars from Tudor Park before we left—from the paddocks closest to the stables: two small Vegemite and a large one of Vicks. I scrubbed them out with iodophor for the black soil of my legacy, the moist earth of me with its lace of grass roots and brook that trickles underfoot when you walk it.
I rub it on me, press it under my nails like dry soap, an unwashing. I lick my tongue onto the soil for its metal-blood taste, and always keep a few pinches folded in my handkerchief for emergency unwashing if my hating the city becomes too much, its harbour seeming hideous, the useless slow-coach yachts like proud flags of leisure and laziness.
The beaches too, where people get out of their real beds only to go back to bed in sand. They buy ice-cream. Do they know where the cream came from? Do they know that someone was up at five in the morning to get it from cows? Do they know that tonight’s steak comes out of the ground, from grass that passes through the cows until the cows are then put down and cut into pieces? Do they know that cows are just deformed humans and so we are really eating ourselves?
Shakespeare said all the world’s a stage. He must have known that this is the cow’s revenge, this process, this great cycle of birth and death on a stage like Tudor Park. He must have known that the most important of all places is a farm. Not a church. Not a parliament, a court, an office or school or hospital. But the farm that puts food in your mouth. That milks a cow or kills it. And all the while, what is happening to you? Your hours are ticking away too. All the Tudor Parks of the world are feeding you up for slaughter by disease or accident or old age.
When the O started to heal I rubbed the soil in. The first rawness of the wound came back to me, red and lumpy.
I don’t bathe anymore. In the evening at shower time I don’t stand under the water. I birdbath between my legs and my underarms if Feet complains I give off smells. When I shave once a week I use The Duke’s electric razor not the candle-flame.
I keep soil smeared under my shirt, my socks. I squeeze a tennis ball to build the muscles of my hands, to swell them oversized like a mitt. I expect it will take years of this for them to be like Norman’s.
At The Mansions I keep my hands especially grimed. When The Citys remark on the state of them, I say it’s due to work, real work that you can’t wash out so easily as their fathers can with their doctor scrubbing, or the big-wig ink from their barrister fountain pens that soap and water rubs away.
The Scrubbers return from holidays with similar dirty nails and work wounds to me. But theirs fade. Why don’t mine? they ask. I reply that where I come from soil doesn’t fade. It is so strong and fertile a mix that it leaves a lasts-forever stain.
“Liar,” they call me. “You’re no farmer. You’re City. My old man says no 300 acres ever made a dollar as an enterprise.”
I calculated the soil would last three months, till next term’s holiday when I would return to Tudor Park.
But there is bad news. We will be staying here in Sydney next break, and the one after too. The new Tudor Park house is being built and Feet has no intention of inhabiting rooms without a roof. What civilised person would live with no toilet connected, no kitchen stove, no nothing! We are certainly not going to pitch a tent or hire a caravan. That would really get the binocular people looking down their noses: “There goes fancy pants tart. Reduced to living like a gypsy.”
We’ll remain in Sydney until the new house is livable and beautiful and it’s we who do the looking down our noses, and do it from a second storey which means they have to look up at us.
What’s more, it’s one worry off her mind to know I’m out of the clutches of the town’s available girls. “Oh wouldn’t they love to get their hands on you. You’d be a prized catch, mark my words,” she says, lowering her puckered mouth to kiss the wine glass’s lip for as long as it takes to sip. A prized catch indeed, she repeats, and she is not talking about whether I’m handsome or not, or wide-shouldered and tall and speak well. She is not talking about whether I have a brain between my ears. Those attributes I possess in spades, she says. I inherited well from her. Even though country life has coarsened me, compromised my hygiene and given me a rough, arms-out, monkey-male walk, it cannot kill off her genes in me. No, what she is talking about is the subject of money. “I can just see it,” she sneers. “They’ll start sniffing around. They’ll start throwing themselves at you with their big udder breasts. And suddenly there you are at sixteen with a little bastard baby. Oh yes, the little sluts would be set for life is what they’d be scheming.”
But no-one was sniffing around, I say. Feet kisses up a mouthful of wine and gulps it quickly in order to speak. “Not yet maybe. But one minute you start shaving regularly and the next you start having urges. And because all men are weak and all females conniving, there you would be at sixteen with a bastard baby. And there
I’d be with a daughter-in-law like those pram-pushers at the corner store. It would kill me.” She closes her eyes and shudders what she calls “the shudder of the dead” where someone has walked over her grave. “Me a grandmother, at my age. I have no intention of aging any further at present. I have no intention of wearing the grandmother label.”
She says she’s going to leave The Duke and me alone. She wants him to have a good man-to-man talk to me. “I’ll leave you two to it,” she says, leaving the room and closing the hallway door behind her. Just before the door clicks shut she says, “Men. Weak, weak, weak. Little sluts would tie you round their little fingers.”
The Duke wants me to sit on the sofa and listen to him. “She’s right, your mother,” he says. “You’ve got to be careful, a boy like you with his life ahead of him and a Tudor Park to think of, and girls who might want to trap you by using that thing between your legs. That thing between your legs can get you in trouble. Is that clear to you?”
Yes, I nod.
He slaps me on the knee and winks. He stands and takes a deep breath of satisfaction, of a matter having been settled and solved.
He stares through our balcony’s sliding glass doors. Our apartment is three levels up above the park called Rosa Gully in Vaucluse. We can see north to the Diamond Bay cliff face and the shabby brown flats perched on it that Feet says shouldn’t be allowed to claim the postcode. The Duke likes to stand as he is now and admire the ocean below that sends a spray to our faces. The way it turns from the deepest green to white bits and pieces in this weather! The wind may make the sliding doors rattle through the night and would keep the dead awake but when you have the sun on full beam and those bits and pieces flickering away it’s a thrilling sight to see.
He puts his fists on his hips to survey the sea before him as if the proud owner of it, the duke of the waters off Rosa Gully. And all the yachts that sail there only sail with his permission. All the fish must trespass out of sight below the surface. His sea, his non-land, no soil, no grass. There is no work to do with it but stand, fist-on-hips and watch water.
I stand beside him in the same pose. I breathe that it is quite a sight.
The Duke leans towards me. “That thing between your legs is how a girl says Gotcha. Understand?”
Yes, I understand.
“Think with this.” He points to his head. “Not with that,”
he winks and points down to my groin.
I will, I will, I say. A whine of embarrassment in my voice.
The hall door opens. Feet is clipping her earring to her left lobe because that lobe will have been pressed to the door for listening. “It’s all very well saying I will, I will as if you’re being put upon. You haven’t stood in that corner store buying sugar. You haven’t suffered mothers of those pram-pusher types asking bold as brass if my son has a beau. ‘He’s a good-looking boy that son of yours. Has he got a girlfriend? Is he spoken for?’ One hideous cretin with a bum like a sack of porridge wanted you to go to her daughter’s birthday. I told her ‘No thank you, he’s busy learning his father’s business.’ I told her you’ve got a lovely girlfriend in Sydney, just to throw all them off the scent. See how your mother looks after you? I’m prepared to lie through my teeth to protect you.”
If only arranged marriages were an accepted practice to this day. Her mind would be more at ease then, she says. “I’d soon weed out the gold-diggers. I should be the one who decides these matters. I should choose who succeeds me as the lady of Tudor Park. But no, it will be left to a boy and his urges. And then the little slut leaves him and claims half of what is ours, us, mine.”
THERE WAS ONE.
I have kept her as a secret until now. I must collect more secrets because secrets are mine, a thing I own.
But how could she, that skinny Bettina, think I would bother with her ilk? Her father’s holding is only a third the size of ours. It is close enough to Tudor Park for him to be classed a neighbour, and he was neighbourly in his offer to help make this year’s hay. But in return for what? For nothing? He could think of no favour The Duke and I might do in return?
“This is my daughter,” he said to us. “She brings good sandwiches. She can also drive a truck. She has plenty of grunt for lifting any bale size.”
The audacity to think she would ever catch my eye, her oily brown hair parted on the side like a man’s. Man-tall, surely six foot if an inch and her shoulders slumped forward to try and hide it, which made her chest mounds sag beneath her T-shirt.
She left school at fifteen—what had she done the year since? Cooking and cleaning around the house like another wife for her father.
She ran beside the truck, matching me lifted bale for lifted bale. She threw bales around without gloves or any hay-wad padding between the twine and her fingers. She barely spoke, just smiled.
When we broke for lunch at midday, she served me salad sandwiches, served them with a little speech: “I made them myself. Hope you like them.” The gap between her front teeth showed pink gum and grey fillings.
Next day she served biscuits she called Dutch Bakes. The lemonade was also hers—her aunty’s recipe, her mother’s lemons. I squeezed prickles from my knuckle skin. She offered to cycle home for tweezers to extract them properly.
Then in one shy sentence she said my shoulders were the widest she’d ever seen. She made a mixture—castor oil and vinegar—for rubbing to stop them sun-burning.
She asked to be my pen-pal. I almost gave her my Sydney address. “I’ve never written to Australia before,” she said.
To think I would want to read a sentence of hers! Fifteen and left school. She would hardly know five verbs. I would feel duty bound to correct her spelling; send her mail back with many red cross-outs. I could give her marks from one to ten and say, “Stick to making sandwiches. Write back when you get an education.”
I deliberately told her the wrong number for my street—it was the safe thing to do.
But then I told the correct one. Why? Because she flattered me, she complimented my singing. I am so weak I give way to one flattering remark.
Singing is easy. It is exaggerated talking. I try to do it under my breath which keeps the melody vibrating in my throat, around my teeth, cheek-bones, gums, rather than be emptied straight out of me by singing loudly. It used to be my secret, this singing, but the very act of singing lets the secret out. Someone overhears you. Feet overhears you and then you might as well shout.
Other people try a tune with nasally, off-key embarrassment. But I can sing to Elvis Presley and mimic his voice exactly. Same for Tony Bennett, and Louis Armstrong and his gravel-growl. The ones Feet called The Oldies, playing her 45s when drink dances in her.
I can croon, but I can also reach Robert Plant’s high, hard-rock screaming. I have the cockney “only” down perfect in David Bowie’s Sorrow. And Bettina had an ear for it if there was little more to like in her.
“How can you sing while lifting hay? You must be so fit,” she admired, and asked if it was Green Green Grass of Home I was singing. If so, it sounded just like Tom Jones. She said she’d never known someone who sings as I do, in tune, not amateur, but a real voice like the radio.
This kind of comparing I accept with a thank-you, a puffed chest of pride, a closed-mouth smile that acknowledges the compliment but expresses how well aware I am of this, my talent for songs.
Other comparing I despise. I would never allow a girl to compare me to other males, as males compare females to females. How one’s breath reeks like off meat. One’s cunt smells too fishy. One has too hairy a crack but her father runs Treasury. One is too intelligent, another is not intelligent at all. On and on it goes.
Boys are told not to hit women because men are stronger and gentlemen moral. But a girl who compared me to other boys—how do I get revenge? I would want to harm the other boy if he was compared to me more favourably. I would want his more handsome face made uglier. His carved muscles crippled in him. His sharper brain damaged to dullness. His r
icher family made to live hand to mouth.
Has Bettina compared me with another? Some catch she has had her eye on from the local batch of farmers, truck drivers, shop keepers, nobodies? What is she thinking to herself about me these two months on? Is she giggling to a friend that I can sing and am an heir at least, but my ears are pointy wings? I’m so weak that a girl like her can match my bale lifts? My legs are so thin, mere sticks when the wind blows my trouser-legs around them?
If so, then she should know this: I think of how her sister delivered fresh sandwiches one evening. Her younger sister by at least a year, and pregnant and sweating from her bulging belly. But with thicker, shinier hair than Bettina. It flicked around her face in a breeze, stuck in the corners of her lips so that she had to hook it free with her finger. So much prettier, with a white gapless smile and copper skin. Forearms without blemishes of moles and dark hairs. No wonder she was already taken. I should say as much in a letter to Bettina. I could make her bawl with jealousy—her own sister her rival. Her sister took my eye more than her even though she was claimed by another man’s seed. That would punish her for giggling about me or comparing me to others if that’s what she has done. And if she has done that, it is typical of the children they call girls.
She should know this: I am too old for her. Not old in years, but in the rest of me. It is my most savoured secret: I have kissed a woman. A full-grown woman not a child, but someone forty. Her name was Genevieve. At night, before sleep, I play with myself to her memory. Not just the memory of the kiss itself. Of having the breath of another in my mouth. The smoke-wine tang of being entered by her spit, her breath and tongue. Nor what followed on from kissing— the fingering into one another’s clothes to our most private skin. Her jerky sob-sighing that surely was bliss, though it could have been misery for the sameness of the sounds. No, not just that, but the transgression: my lust is no normal lust. It prefers a face lined with laughs and frowns of the years, webs of eye wrinkles and shoulders sun-freckled, cleavage cracked with aging. I learned this because of Genevieve. My lust prefers the powders and perfumes applied to cover these shortcomings which are not shortcomings for me, but safe-signs. Arms hanging off the bone, soft and with a rubbery feel to the touch, yet not under-swaying as fat people’s do.
Muck Page 8