Old too in the way I know that safe-signs are found in women, not in girls.
Women listen to the old songs. I should have sung for Genevieve.
I fall to pieces, each time I see you again.
I fall to pieces. How could I just be your friend?
My Jim Reeves would have prised opened her door. Would have swooned her inside to her lounge, her body holding my body, her bed taking me in.
Where will I find a replacement?
At the races with The Duke. Putting my arm around the waist of the girlies in the Members Bar. Girlies, not girls. Girlies of the flirting men, string dresses low-slung so their skin is more obviously seen and offered. They look children alongside the ugly men who rub hands in their back’s hollow, grandfather-old with leers white as dentures and shirt ends bulging loose over their belly belts. But they are safe-sign women to me—over thirty, armpits beginning to wrinkle and dimple at the sides; the first cheek-veins appearing, powder holes of open pores. Freckled shoulders from so much tanning, but not yet sagged to a crack between their shoulder blades.
I have watched The Duke do it himself, whispering, smiling close to their hair. Closer still when that hair is hooked behind the ear like a forefinger invitation. Taking care to place his hand only lightly against their hip when ordering a drink. Removing the hand when the drink is ordered. A polite moment of keeping his hand away, then placing it back and leaving it there if the girlie approves by moving more his way.
How disgusted I’ve been to see him like that. Him thinking with that thing between his legs, as he tells me not to. I felt ashamed, betrayed, brooding for Feet’s sake that his hands touch hollows other than hers.
But there has been no “Gotcha” from a girlie to take him away from us. Feet has her song-swoons of other men. I’ve had my safe-sign Genevieve and no blame for the lechery.
If the girlies let those old men touch them, then a younger man, a me, would meet much more welcomed surrender. The Duke’s copper-brown suit fits me, the one that goes shiny in sunshine and is made of such cloth that to sit down leaves no creases. The legs are a half-inch shorter on me than him, but I have brown socks to bridge the distance. My black school shoes, nugget-scrubbed are fine. Cream shirt, blue-dotted tie from The Duke’s tie drawer. Not his hair oil for my side-part, but a dry, natural flick-away style.
While he is leaning over the birdcage rail. While he is matching race-book names to parading horses, I will light a cigarette. I will order a drink, a whisky and soda or a seven-ounce beer. The barmen are like bookmakers: they know to serve me without questioning my age. A near-man in a good suit is a full man at the races.
I rehearse my next day at the races. “Excuse me Love,” I say. The love said roughly and manly in the manner you speak to girlies, so they know their place as a girlie. “Buy you something? Champagne? Something queer, a cocktail?”
I will then put money on the bar before she has had time to answer. I do not look in her eyes until I have glanced the length of her—toenails, legs, hips. Never breasts until last. I then say, “That dress, it’s very fetching.”
But I have no money. Ten dollars only from the last Don-caster meeting. The Duke knows the winners. He has contacts. He knows the losers. He knows the favourite which someone somewhere says must “bomb.” By Race Three ten dollars can make fifty. That’s more drinks than I need for twenty girlies.
“What do you do?” she will ask.
Student. No—some prize I would seem. “I am heir to Tudor Park, my family’s rural interests. Hence these old scars of mine.”
She will feel my hands. She’ll say, “Hard hands, a soft heart.”
Feet has towels to fade and so has no time for races. Even though The Duke has his new horse, Bazza, racing. Even though the big fellow should run the Randwick mile out well today. She no longer can be bothered with friends. “When you’re young, you don’t see it,” she says. “But when you get a bit of age on you see your glamour’s gone out the door. No-one wants people to feast their eyes on that and risk comments.”
Instead she must follow the sun around the balcony for hours, keeping the clothes-horse of towels in front of shadows. When the towels’ blues and pinks have paled from three weeks’ washes and sunshine—wash, sun, wash and more sun—she returns them to the department store to complain they’ve lost their colour. “It says in the guarantee, if they fade within the first three months of use then the company will replace them,” she tells the assistant, and points to what she calls “the literature.” She says she has only used them a handful of times and barely washed them and yet all the colour has bled out. It’s disappointing to spend good money on products that simply fade.
The assistant presents her with a new set and apologises for the bad batch and bother.
Another shop, another set of towels. And sheets sometimes, their pretty, bright flowers mere ghosts of when she first bought them.
On arriving home she toasts her triumph. She clinks glasses with The Duke and jigs, “I’m very proud of my little system.”
What system? I ask. Why do towels need a system?
Feet sip-kisses her glass and wonders why, if I’m at all smart I haven’t worked it out for myself. Or indeed, didn’t come up with the system my smart self. “Nice towels are, let’s say, $10 each. If we buy them, get two months’ use. Then three weeks of intensive fading on the balcony. Voila! We get fresh, brand-new ones, free of charge.”
But why do that, I want to know. “Do we need to—are we poor?”
We’re certainly not poor, Feet laughs. But of course she’d deny it. “Protect the boy,” The Duke would say. “Financial strife would worry him sick and make his father a failure in his eyes. Not only have I failed him with oil in Western Australia, I have failed him in a worse way now. We are poor and his legacy is gone.”
My lunches make sense suddenly. Cheese and jam sandwiches, though I can’t bear to taste them. No lunch money for me like The Mansions boys have money. Cheese and jam. That way I’ll learn the value of a dollar, and not slip into spendthrift ways. Because where we come from the world’s not a restaurant. You eat what you’re given. I too must inherit that age-old code.
But I’d rather starve than eat them, cheese and jam. And I do starve—I don’t need food. How can I have an appetite when The Mansions awaits me each day!
Mornings are spent in sickness. I dry-retch at the thought of eating breakfast. On the mornings I shave, I wish I could shave away the parts of me I despise. As whiskers glide clean, if only the ugly blood-blue mole on my cheek would glide clean too. I dig the blade in to make it bleed, but still that mark of a mole remains. My nose, that bulbous thing the strutters call “pus-bag.” My huge ears they pull as “aeroplanes.” Did Genevieve suddenly realise she couldn’t bear the sight of me, I was too repulsive and hideous a thing?
If I could rip the ears from my head with the razor, there would be one flaw less to tease, though my skinniness will stay, worse each week now the hunger pains don’t matter. I could feed myself up but that would require eating, and I would want to vomit the food up until I was empty again.
I spend my days on guard against the strutters. My best chance is my swagger—hands behind back, the Tudor Park pose, as if I am too good for them. This nose is no pus-bag, it is a proud, hawk nose. These ears are wonders of Magi-made construction.
I must not play kick-and-run—I am not feared enough to repel beatings. Like Churchill I would fail to show who’s boss among us. So, swagger. Swagger. Even when the deputy principal finds my lunches rotted in my locker: “We’ve had complaints— the smell. Please open up your locker and let us explore.” Even then, my hawk nose is lifted proud-high. Every sandwich bag glued together, months of them, furred black with mould.
I pinch them between my forefinger and thumb. I drop them in the rubbish, one hand behind my back. Drop them daintily as sugar lumps into tea. My lips bitten together in a fake smile that I hope gives me a nonchalant air.
“Why store them
if you had no intention of eating them? You’re a strange one,” the deputy principal sniffs and steps away from the bin’s reek.
Strutters gather behind the deputy. They make the loony sign at me—a finger circling their temples.
I don’t know why I have let this rotting happen in my locker. Feet made them, these sandwiches. I could not throw away the food of my mother. But I could never confess such weakness, such regard for the handiwork of a mother. Better to lie, and do so hawk-proud, judgmental. A lie that has claws, that is wise and constant as the moon. “I did not want to be wasteful, Sir. To throw out food when half the world is in famine would disgust me. I know the value of a dollar.”
“You’re a strange one.”
“Thank you, Sir.”
Yes, it makes sense now. We are poor. I can stand it no longer. It’s time to hold The Duke accountable. “How could you let this happen?” I stamp at him.
“I’ve done no such thing,” he retaliates with a frowning, offended stare.
I will not be protected like a child from the truth. “Then why are we fading towels? Why shift the clothes-horse so it follows the sun?”
“Because,” The Duke sighs, “it’s your mother’s little thing. She has notions. And there’s no way you’ll ever get them out.”
“What little thing? What notions?” It’s low of him to use her for his lies.
“She gets notions in her head.”
“What notions?” I go into the lounge and insist on being told by Feet herself to expose him. “What notions?”
Feet flares, launching herself from her cushions to jab out her cigarette. “I’ve got no notions in my head.” She pokes the air with telling off The Duke. With the other hand she grinds the cigarette into the ashtray, her new ashtray from the knickknack shop in Coogee, green opals she regrets are wasted on ash when you could hang it on your wall for its colour tones. “You should be saying ‘Good on you. Well done for thinking up the scheme.’ Someone else is welcome to if they have the brains. If a company is so stupid as to leave a loophole in the guarantee, then it serves them right to have me use it.” She pokes again at The Duke. “You want your son to grow up and not use the world to his advantage? Notions in my head. That’s the thanks I get for having initiative.”
She bites on a fresh cigarette and lights it with an angry scratching of a match. She keeps the cigarette bitten in her teeth behind smoke-swirl while she mutters, “Towels. Damn bastard bloody towels. Shit bastard things. Things we bloody well dry our privates with. Bloody cheek to ask money for the bastard things, for something we dirty with our bodies and then just hang there on a rail for everyone to see. Makes me sick. I wouldn’t waste my time with you both. You make me sick the lot of you. Sick.”
She spits smoke with every word as if the second self has come this time burning language.
THE DUKE SMILES that his suit fits me better than it does him.
He puts his arm over my shoulder as we walk. He steps in front of me to inspect my presentation one more time before we reach the Members enclosure. He whistles a tune of his own random making, straightens and tightens my tie so it more gaplessly meets the throat. He draws the lapels together across my front and tells me, “Only do up the middle button because the middle button is the fashionable approach.” He calls me a chip off the old block and pinches the prow of his blue pork-pie so the hat is as off-centre as is dashing. He pinches the brim downward to firm the fit on his head. Before he lets his hands fall to his sides he slides his thumb along the brim. Not to wipe something away but with a finishing flick as if saluting me.
He tugs his pocket handkerchief up into yellow dog-ears pricked upon his chest. He tugs mine too and reminds me to take out the handkerchief regularly through the day and fold two ends of it inward and one end down so I have two handkerchief ears showing not a crowded three. Two stay pricked longer if you remember to perform the re-folds. “Maroon was an excellent choice,” he says of my handkerchief selected from his drawer. “My congratulations. You’re a chip off the old block with this style lark. Maroon goes with copper as does yellow with my blue.”
He compliments me on my polished shoes which he calls mirrors, and can’t believe I was a squirt in short pants just yesterday, or so it seems, and today I’m as tall as him or taller. If Bazza wins today, he’ll appoint me his official lucky charm because what a day it will be—just we two together. Two men. Father and son as one.
He moves his binoculars down to his bare wrist from where it has been slung on his forearm. That way their weight won’t leave an impression on his sleeve. Time to get going, according to his watch. First race will almost be closed for betting.
Ten paces and he shakes a hand. Twelve paces, another hand. Eight, another. Fifteen. Ten. Like a welcome dance where men exchange partners with each other, those they call Bob and Mate and Bluey. Passing on to the next hand in the crosscurrent of the crowd, saying, “Good to see you. Good luck to you today.”
They stand tie to tie, hush-voiced after the initial cheerfulness. They lean close as if about to kiss, and whisper “The word is” and the name of a horse marked for “just going round” or “jumping out of its skin” or “probably needs the run.”
“This is my son,” The Duke introduces. Now it’s my turn to dance, to take hands in mine, hands with gold and tiny gems on their little fingers. If the shaker is too weak a squeezer, I’m free to say so to The Duke when I’ve fared that shaker cheerio because he never trusts such people who have the grip of a boneless fish: “A spineless grip means they’re spineless in reality, and liars.”
Bart Cummings’ hand passes as a shaker of firm hold. “You’ve met my son, Bart,” The Duke says, touching my elbow to raise my hand and grip the grip of his horse trainer. “Training Bazza for me is as good as training for this boy,” he says and winks at me.
Now The Duke nods “Neville” to the Premier and insists I nod hello to him as well though I see the Premier blink bewildered at The Duke who continues with “Good to see you again” as if they are acquaintances, more so, friends.
The Duke nudges me to look over there: “That Malcolm Fraser’s a tall fellow, isn’t he? Good thing too. You want a Prime Minister taller than everyone else I always think. It’s commanding.” He nudges me again with his elbow. “Would you like to meet him?”
I shake my head, No.
“Don’t you want to meet the Prime Minister of Australia?”
“Do you know him?”
“I might,” The Duke says, winking.
“Do you really?” I am awed that he knows the Prime Minister of Australia. And I am ashamed of myself for being awed. As if The Duke, my father, would not as a matter of course know the Prime Minister.
The Duke puts his hands in his pockets and shrugs. “I wouldn’t say I know him.” Then he grins. “But maybe he should know me. Ay?” He waves for me to follow him.
He skips into a brisk walk to catch up to the Prime Minister. He calls his name, “Mal,” and reaches out to shake hands. The Prime Minister shakes but doesn’t look at The Duke. He keeps walking on, a brown-suited tower-man—The Duke’s hat barely comes level with his shoulder.
The Duke doesn’t release his hand grip. The Prime Minister is forced to slow, to stop, to listen. “This is my son, Prime Minister.” He clasps the Prime Minister’s wrist for him to join his hand to mine.
Why would I want to meet someone who makes The Duke lower in rank, lesser in my eye? I cannot bear to look at this brown tower. I do not look at him as I shake, therefore he is disqualified from my life, he isn’t even here with his hand around my hand.
But The Duke will not be quiet. He steps close to the tower as if to speak confidentially. He places a hand on the high brown shoulder. “I’ll tell you this, Mal. Wouldn’t surprise me one bit if this boy of mine is Prime Minister himself some day. What with his education and his leadership qualities. Mark my words, I’ve seen it for myself, he’s a born leader this one.”
The tower mumbles “Is that so
?” and tries to walk off but The Duke has reached out his hand again for a parting shake and wink and nodded Goodbye. We watch the tower walk off through other be-suited winkers and nodders whose hand the Prime Minister takes without stilling from his stride.
“There you go,” The Duke nudges. “When you get home you can tell your mother your old man introduced you to the Prime Minister.” He puts one hand in his pocket and rocks heel to toe while gripping his lapel with his binocular hand as if in weighty contemplation.
The Members bar has a tide that goes out and comes in. A men-tide dictated by the loud-speaker din: “Horses are parading for the next race on the card. Riding changes—K. Moses for R. Quinton on number six.”
When the tide is out men lean on the white birdcage rail, cheeks red from sun and drink. Race books hang open like a little wing span. They study the loping machinery of horses. Peering for flaws, for an imperfect setting to the pink breathing, the legs’ cog rhythm. Skin must be tight scrim that shows compression of the ribs heaving, veins visibly threaded like electrical wiring. When jockeys mount, the settings must start speeding, the cogs bounce and spring as if combusting.
The tide-men crane and cup an ear for a trainer’s confi-dent whisper. They bet their fancy across the way with the bookmakers. They climb to the stands and watch with binocular eyes. They barrack throwing their hands forward as if themselves attached to reins. The process takes twenty minutes, then the tide returns casting ticket litter before it.
Meanwhile, the women remain on the islands of stools and beer-sticky tables. Some are wives, others girlies. Wives wear more jewellery than the girlies, their fingers are racks for rings, wrists for gold bracelets, bangles. Their hair is shorter and stiffened in circles and swirls. Many are attractive with my safe-signs. But many are too ugly in their saggings for me to offer them a wine. Their husbands—would they harm me if I tried?
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