Muck

by Craig Sherborne

  When Genevieve walked, her breasts quivered at the seam—a safe-sign. The child-girl Bettina’s breasts were male-hard as muscle when she stood up straight.

  Genevieve’s voice was not a screech-girl’s, but a cigarette rasp. Genevieve would never giggle about me or compare me to others. I was her secret too. I was her taboo. She was a friend of Feet’s transgressing with her son, a lad, a mere fifteen.

  What would farm girl Bettina say about that? People like me live by different rules. We take the day off school to go to parties at Melbourne Cup time. Proper parties with adults and gin, society people, Sydney faces from TV. We flirt with a Genevieve while our parents are in the other room. Never mind that her own son is at the same school as me. Never mind that her breasts are breasts he would have suckled, the bastard son of a judge and Genevieve the judge’s mistress. Genevieve called me handsome and swept my face and arm with her long, sharp fingers. Stared straight into my eyes and held the look like a dare.

  Dear Bettina,

  People like me use our father’s cologne and shave for the benefit of a Genevieve not a plain, farm female like you. No unsightly hair must repel her. No whisker-prickle when she sweeps her fingers.People like me write poems for her. People like me return her lingering looks and stares. When the Melbourne Cup is playing in the lounge we two close the door into the laundry and kiss proper kisses, feel to those places only lovers can see bared.

  Of course I will never send this letter. I protect my secrets. And what would Bettina write back if I did? That people like me are disgusting? How dirty to be mixing with a woman like that, a female almost three times my age? How dreadful to be taken advantage of in that way?

  Dear Bettina,

  You are so innocent, naïve. What was dreadful is that it only happened once. I thought my sweet Genevieve had felt pleasure, but suddenly there were tears. She pushed away from me seconds after our first kiss and feel. No more linger-looks ever followed. No more hand-sweeps or skin-touch. No “We must do this later,” no “Skip a class at school and come here.”

  I rang her but she wouldn’t speak to me. I knocked, but only head-shakes from her. She held her hand up and said, “Please. It’s crazy. Please go.” Said “Goodbye” very curtly and closed the door.

  “Can’t we have Genevieve to dinner?”

  “She’s gone. Greener pastures I suppose,” said Feet. “Gone to Surfers, and not so much as a courtesy cheerio.”

  Bettina has not written to me as she said she wanted. I will never waste my time pretending to write to her again. Even one letter from her—was that too much bother? She must have compared me with someone and judged that they were the better.

  A gold-digger, that’s all she was. I must live more by my wits. Types like her and people like me must never mix our genes.

  I CAN SING.

  They can’t, The Citys and Scrubbers at The Mansions. I laugh to hear them try. And why do they try? Because I goad them, the rowers and rugby players with their weightlifter thighs, a plump y of muscle parting over their knees—strut-ters and jostlers in their teasing play-fights of camaraderie. Or strumming their sides in a guitar memory of the latest Double J record.

  But watch their cockiness turn to shy when I say, “Go on. Sing it.” Usually they cause jealousy in others, but now it’s them who feel it; and feel it for me. “If you like music so much, then sing it,” I say. “If you think Bowie is a star above stars. If you think Robert Plant is God’s voice and Alice Cooper’s a demon, and Springsteen is nature’s blast of avenging horns, then don’t you wish you could make the sounds yourselves? Go on, try it. Sing. I can. Listen to me.”

  Friday assembly-singing. All boys must stand for a half-hour’s session to “oxygen” our brains and learn the discipline of chorus, the art of voices joining. We must respect these songs we sing, the war songs of our forefathers, men who fell so we could live in peace and freedom. Songs that saw them through the hell of battle, death by Nazis, invasion from the north by cruel, fanatical Japanese. Songs that cheered men and so should cheer their descendants, dressed as we are each Friday in boy-soldier uniforms for parade. The blue cadet airforce and white navy. Kilt and brown army shirt for diggers— a belt whose brass must shine like silver. Red flashings for our sock elastics, trimmed to a frayless upside-down V.

  Sing the legacy of sacrifice of saving us from evil.

  Bless them all, the long and the short and the tall. Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, smile, smile. Keep the home fires burning. On the road to Mandalay where the flying fishes play.

  Sing God Save the Queen, no longer our national anthem but our racial one. The inheritance of a Crown that figure-heads our history—the parliament we go by; the law that governs our liberty. Our manners; our deferring to the royal rank that rules us, a rank decreed by none other than God.

  But why bother, I want to know? Why bother with a God who would give such a high rank as royal to someone other than me? History and the Commonwealth are the Queen’s Tudor Park. And to her I am a second-class citizen like any other citizen, condemned to live out my days resentful and respectful that I do not myself hold that God-granted rank. What reason is there for striving, for living at all, if not to believe I was selected by God for special deeds? Not a slave to this world. If not an equal of God then at least his favourite among the lesser.

  Let the Queen come to my Tudor Park when I inherit it. There I would be her King. There she can sing God Save me.

  There is no God, they say.

  But if there is, if “No God” is wrong, he is responsible for my voice and at Thursday morning chapel I am prepared to sing to his name for that small favour that singles me out among others. Sing not to praise him like a supplicant grovelling for some titbit of good fortune, but to flaunt my vocal jewellery, flash it against the stained glass for his attention.

  The jealous strutters mumble-sing the hymns, but I blare. Oh, God our help in ages past, our hope in years to come. Our shelter from the stormy blast and our eternal home.

  The Reverend looks up from his hymn book. Why such disapproval on his face? In me he has a singer. It is hardly a shame to have a voice that outshines the rest. Let boys in the pews snigger that my effort and talent are being treated as misbehaviour. They’re too embarrassed to sing these songs that are not rock songs but the thees and thines of poetry they despise.

  It wouldn’t take much to turn their sniggers to laughter-howls. God’s attention is not a rapt attention. He has no need of singing, hymns or prayers. His is a silent watching if anything, nothing more. If God exists, he is someplace far off like a distant parent, not close like Feet and The Duke, but distant with too many children to ever keep track of them and no longer any care to. But the boy-eyes around me stare white-wide in anticipation of my next loud, trilling hymn.

  I want something new to impress them. They won’t expect Blake’s dark satanic mills, his arrow of desire, in the manner of Dean Martin: I swallow the words into my throat to be trapped there at the back of my tongue for lazy vibrato. A drunk-like slurring and dying fall to the last long word of the first verse.

  They would not expect Tom Jones for the second verse. His animal gasp and growl. An aggressive emphasis on every U-vowel, a hoarse I-vowel, a pleading E. Easy from there to slip into Engelbert Humperdinck’s nasally drawl with lips almost shut to affect a complaining strain in the melody.

  The Reverend looks up, mouthing the hymn in his distraction. He doesn’t need to scan the chapel for the offending singer. He must know it’s me. Who else can sing so beautifully, so cleverly in another singer’s shell! I hold the hymn book way out in front of my stomach as if short-sighted, an elegant theatrical pose. I switch from one mimicked voice to another without submitting to grin-laughing as those around me are.

  I end the hymn as Louis Armstrong.

  Whenever IOUs appear in the passed-around plate there is an interruption to the service. We are interrogated by the Reverend’s pointed finger—“Was it you? Who was it
? You? Or You?” When a boy confesses, he is made to stand and be noticed, singled out for mass shaming. He must walk down the aisle and be seen for what he is—a debaser of God’s house.

  I’ve considered confessing even though I have never put an IOU in the plate. I have no great wish to insult the poor. But to be marched down that aisle to the pulpit, one boy out of one hundred, standing, walking, all eyes upon me, famous for that moment to the hundred in that chapel. Fearless to approach the Reverend, his fingers twitching from rage. The twitching spreading through the tips of his robe. His black hair coming loose across his forehead. Me walking with jauntiness in my step. My teeth clenched to square my jaw. I draw my top lip down in a pouting grin as if to say, “Come on then, get it over with. I’m bored having to wait for you to grab my suit-coat sleeve and lead me like a horse across the garden, onto the quadrangle where more boy-eyes can witness my fame.”

  I will be held in awe, whispered about: “What’s he done? What’s happened?” One brave applauder will say, “He must have IOU’d the plate.”

  Still jaunty when we reach the staff room, I’ll be instructed to wait outside in the corridor with its notice-board announcing the First XI for Saturday. A row of trophy cabinets. Honour boards—captains of rugby teams, tennis, school captain, duxes. My name will never appear there.

  Now the Reverend with his cane. He will have selected a thin one. He will flick it through the air: “This should drive out your disgracefulness and let in some shame.”

  I have been caned many times at The Mansions. For smoking, for what they call an “insolent air.” But a maximum of four cuts, not six. Six is the punishment for chapel IOUs. Even so, I would still bend to touch my toes as ordered with the nonchalance of doing exercise. I am no Poached Eye. I won’t shake and shiver, frightened. Not me. “Where I come from we work around them, not through them,” I would say to the Reverend, and take the six strikes with barely a grimace— my O shape caused me more pain; lifting hay bales without gloves and padding.

  And when the caning is over I would walk, no, I would stroll, smirking, saying, “Thanks to you, Sir,” meant as a mocking. Stroll without giving in to touching my behind to soothe-rub it. There will be no tears from me. I have proven many times over I can be composed after four strikes. Six is only two more.

  What awaits me in the quadrangle will be worth the extra aching, the searing burn reaching deep into my groin, my anus. In the quadrangle they will be there to welcome me as a hero: boy-eyes, hundreds of them. Hands slapping my shoulder because I have lasted six cuts of the cane and look at me— no hint of suffering.

  I will have broken the ultimate rule at The Mansions: always yield. Always. Always. Be subordinate to the ones with master titles who, after they punish you, look for it in you— that you’ve been buckled by them and now have a broken will.

  By the time I sit in class there will be blisters weeping sticky fluid into my trousers. The doctors’ sons among us will say, “Come on home with me this arvo after school. Let my dad attend to you.”

  The lawyers’ sons will insist their fathers take my case and have me sue. And I will believe they mean every word of it. “Thank you,” I will say. “I’ll do as you advise.” My new friends and admirers who want me, this famous boy, as theirs, though I am not usually one to like, so aloof, so angry-proud. Not from professional lines—just a no-name family, but accepted as one of them now.

  Of course, by the time the bell rings to go home, their fathers, as it happens, will not be able see me: “I forgot my dad’s busy with surgery all week.” “My father’s doing a murder trial. He won’t get home from court till late.” I will take what they say as truth, at least to their faces, though I know it is really friendship cooling. Friendship that never got warm.

  Let my singing earn me six cuts, ten, or even more. Call me up the front and punish me, Reverend. Make me the famous among my not-friends.

  Instead, he takes the lectern. No punishment. He speaks of Jesus being inside us like a green seed that is growing to choke out the dark weeds called sinning.

  I will sing louder next time. He will have to act against me. My not-friends are expecting it.

  FEET CAN PLAY TWO tunes on the piano—Remembrance and Robin’s Return. The three Rs she calls them. She spreads her fingers above the keys, pushes down, closing her eyes to recall the gist of the opening bars. The opening bars of each song are all she has ever been able to play, taught to her as a girl by her mother. “My mother could play those songs right through—such talent.” And given that it’s forty years on, what talent she herself must have to be playing a tune’s gist from memory.

  The brown upright piano in the corner was bought for my benefit, it disappoints her to say. An attempt to make me the life of any do and have the air of a little bit arty. But what did I do? Wasted it. What a hit I would be with my clever way of singing if I tickle the ivories as well.

  Now salt-spray has glued the internals so the ivories stick. There it stands, its only friend is Mr Sheen. A constant reminder to her that young people want everything too easy these days. If they can’t play a tune automatically, they whine that it will take years to practise. “That’s an attitude you never inherited from me. It must be your father’s side. But that voice of yours, your way with a song—my musical gifts have obviously been passed on.”

  The Duke reminds her that his father could belt out a tune on the piano. Jazz of all things. But he was too drunk ever to take it further. “I’ve always hated the sound of a piano because of his bang, bang, banging, playing drunk after pub-time,” he says, pointing to our piano as if levelling an accusation. “He should have provided for his family instead of all his bang, banging. He had whisky. We had mouldy bread.”

  “Well we have fresh bread now,” Feet says impatiently. “Frankly I resent the notion that a drunken barber would have contributed to our son’s talent, if that’s what you’re suggesting.”

  “What’s wrong with barbers? Your family were butchers. Is that better than barbers?” he says sarcastically, raising his voice.

  Feet refuses to have a depressing conversation involving butchers and barbers. “Butchers and barbers—why don’t you yell it out louder! Why don’t you tell half of Vaucluse our every secret!”

  She curses that he has such a typical man’s fog-horn voice, but at least she has an antidote to it in mine. “Sing He’ll Have to Go as Jim Reeves. Please do. It sends me,” she swoons and says Please again. Please let her have one pleasure in life. She can’t bear to go out anymore. Out means there’ll be people, and people equal snide. If cow people spy and laugh at her and name-call, what are real people out there in Sydney doing? “I can’t face them. Wouldn’t waste my time with them. Shit bastards, all of them. Bastard bloody rude.”

  She leans back into cushions, her right leg stretched straight along the suede tan sofa. Her white sandal dangling from her toes. A cool breath has risen from the ocean and puffed the balcony drapes open. Feet pulls the hem of her orange house-coat up over her ankles, her shins, over her knees. It lets out a static crackle. She lifts the house-coat higher so the air can blow breeze between her legs. She scratches at a hot spot on her calf where a blue worm of vein has buckled into a varicose sore.

  Put your sweet lips a little closer to the phone.

  Let’s pretend that we’re together all alone.

  She lights a cigarette and takes a long kiss of her wine, her head swaying as she swallows. Her foot follows the rhythm of my singing. Her sandal drops to the carpet.

  I’ll tell the man to turn the jukebox way down low, and you can tell your friend there with you he’ll have to go.

  Why does it send her so, this song of men competing for a woman? Or,

  Please release me let me go, for I don’t love you anymore, To waste our lives would be a sin. Release me and let me love again.

  Does she want that for herself, The Duke gone, a new man for suitors, lovers?

  “Sing it holding my hand,” she asks. “Sing into my
eyes. Kneel down. Sing it like you mean it from your heart.”

  I tell her I’m doing my best. But the very act of saying that breaks the spell for her. “You’re quite hopeless. You’d think it wouldn’t be much to ask, a little song that makes me feel womany again and the kind who can still turn heads, who could walk down the street and attract ‘Oooos.’”

  Sometimes I deliberately sing off key for a few notes and it frees me for days from her wanting to risk another broken swooning.

  Just a Closer Walk with Thee, sung with the Ray Charles negro rasp. That sends her too, though Jesus is there in the verses. Does she imagine Jesus loves more than just her spirit, or would do given the chance? She sway-sighs as if he is the ultimate catch to have.

  I only need to hear them once and my body moulds me to the song. My tongue and throat match the singer’s sound to my own, narrowing the airways for correct pitch and drone. An automatic process I hone by listening to the 45s on the lounge-room gramophone. I copy their manner too once I’ve seen them on TV.

  With Nat King Cole the smile is so splayed my lip-corners ache, but the effect of such relentless happiness is to strain the voice so it rises into my nose. From there it is trapped, released and swallowed back down into myself with Cole’s tender vibrato fade.

  Jim Reeves is a deep moan, soft, sweet to the ear but if I toss my head whimsically with every word I lengthen the phrasing, stretch each note more darkly.

  These are not songs for someone my age. What more proof do I need that I am old, not in years, not fully in body, but in those other ways: the way I accept my duties as heir to Tudor Park so good-naturedly, enthusiastic. I’m responsible before my time.