Muck

by Craig Sherborne

  Most girlies have no safe-signs at first glance. They have no obvious sagging. Their hair is still long. Their breast-line still above their ribs. Their backs have a goose-skin tan. You must get close up to see the masks they make with their makeup. The lip-corner crackings, and cracks around the eyes. Skin pores becoming too open. But even the oldest would be better than the youngest ones—eighteen, twenty—who would compare me, I’m sure of it, like girls of my own age. They’re too close to being children to do otherwise. Yet, no matter how big their noses and their ears, to the bulge-belly men they are beautiful, adorable. Just as to girlies at the safe-sign stage—the Genevieve stage—my revolting features will be handsome as a movie-perfect face.

  They, the safe-sign girlies, will have apartments to take me to; cars to get us there. If they are regular girlies for just one man, there are hotels with penthouse bedrooms instead of risking being caught in their homes.

  I will have to buy them dinner. Drinks, a show of flowers.

  It’s the third race now. I have twenty dollars from one winner and place.

  At The Mansions the English text has been Catcher in the Rye. In it Holden Caulfield hires an older woman, yet he didn’t want sex with her though she was a prostitute and wouldn’t have cared. A book about people being phony that’s fake itself, a lie! What boy-lust ever reasoned his penis down except in books? What boy-lust ever had a woman pull her dress over her head and is too depressed like Holden Caulfield for more than a bit of talk?

  The Duke has no time for drinks or girlies today. He has a horse running. He prefers to stand beside the stall for an hour and say “Good boy” in worried ownership. He’ll postpone his harmless flirting, his keeping his eye in, till after the race. Winning puts a gleam of smugness in his flirting eye; the swagger of riches in his step.

  He likes first-time girlies—they’re not wise as yet to his game.

  “You’ve not been to the races before?” he’ll smile. “There’s a first time for everything. Let me buy you a champers and bid you welcome.”

  He’ll introduce himself as proprietor of agricultural interests overseas. “There’s money in commodities. Yes, they’re doing all right by me.” Then, “I’m owner of Bazza—my little extravagance. Not that I can’t afford it. We should have the best in life if we have the means.” And when he’s had his pleasure of breathing them in, of placing his palm on their hip, then arm around their waist, then their arm threaded on his as if for chaperoning support, he will suddenly look at his watch. “Well, I best be getting home. My wife will wonder what’s become of me. She would throttle me to see me enjoy myself.”

  The girlie will unthread her arm, step away from him, a scowl-smile of embarrassment, of having wasted time on him. She will glance at his left hand where he never wears a ring and say, “That’s tricking not to warn a girl.”

  I light a cigarette and squint through the shield the smoke protects me with. I am not alone and shy with a cigarette and its smoke-shield. I have an action to perform, the action of smoking, sucking, sighing, locking my jaw to mouth a smoke of Os. I come with clouds between me and others. I am aloof but have companionship: I am the friend of a cigarette. I look older with him than with him not in hand.

  I buy a glass of beer. Beer looks a real drink to be holding. Whisky and soda could be ginger ale to a watcher.

  THE MEN-TIDE IS going out. I am to be left the only man with girlies and their safe-signs. I have twenty minutes. I must look their way and use my eyes to invite talk. I have learnt by noting The Duke that a man does not stand about, paralysed by fear. A man cannot stand about and be attractive to a woman. He cannot sip his beer and be manly. He must gulp it and sigh his satisfaction with each mouthful. He mustn’t fidget with his cigarette, concealed in smoke. His confidence must cause him to bound when in motion, to rub his hands together in excited expectation, cock his head to one side and take charge. This way the girlie has no chance to refuse. His “What can I get you?” will be answered with an impressed “Champagne.”

  I must pick one out. Attract her eye. There’s one—over there. Choose her. Dark haired. Of safe-sign age.

  My chest thuds. It beats the breathing from me. My legs falter, powerless at the knees. Far too weak for walking.

  Two there are laughing. Are they laughing at me? They are definitely laughing. It must be me. I am certain it’s me. They are not safe-sign girlies. No saggings, face-cracking anywhere. They are in their children-twenties. I have no doubt about those two—they aim their laughs at me.

  No, they haven’t even looked at me. I’m not the only fig-ure of fun in the world. Others have noses, ears. Those two laughers, cacklers, how would they like it if I laughed at them in front of other girlies? In front of the men-tide when it comes in: “You have noses too, hooked and bent, a revolting pair. You have ears big enough to wrap an anchor round!” I will spit in their faces. I will stab a cigarette in every part of me I hate. Starting with my head and stab downwards from there, arms, groin, thighs. Let them laugh then as my flesh hisses with pink holes.

  “Are you all right?” A woman, a woman-girlie. Hair black and flared to the shoulder. Skin tanned so deep dark her freckles seem to blend. Cleavage that bears the beginnings of a V-branch crack in the soft. “You look angry standing over here. Is something wrong?” Her teeth are dark too—white enough as teeth go, but with stain between them. Her voice has the smoker’s thin gurgle.

  “I was just thinking,” I reply, shocked to have company, this company, a safe-sign girlie. “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry for what? For thinking?”

  “For disturbing you.”

  “You weren’t. You looked scary, angry. Or not well, like a seizure.”

  She is laughing, but not in that way, the cacklers’ child-girl fashion. She is amused and intrigued. It is in her voice—a voice gentle as affection.

  Yes, I was thinking, I tell her. Thinking that I have a horse running today and it is a nerve-wracking business. But where I come from we don’t bother with nerves because we have so many responsibilities, my family and me. What with owning an agricultural enterprise overseas.

  “Tudor Park. You’ve probably heard of it.”

  No, she hasn’t, she says.

  I tell her she will do because I intend to be mayor of the district one day, its political chief. A word-gush that makes her stare at my mouth as if my talk has become visible. She is smiling. “That’s impressive.” She touches my forearm and says, “You’re a card.”

  I flick my cigarette into an ashtray. Take out another. Offer her one. She accepts. “Madeleine.” No prompting. She simply leans to my light and puffs “Madeleine.” And then, “You’re young to have so much on your plate.”

  “I’m not that young.” I puff a cloud to cover my too-boyish face. I gulp the beer followed by an “ahhhh” exhalation and belch into my closed mouth.

  The tide is coming in. Madeleine glances at it then back at me. She turns to go but stops and smiles a thank-you for the cigarette and says I am going to get very lonely standing here all day by myself. “You ought to mingle more.”

  I tell her I have just been speaking to the Prime Minister and the Premier. In fact I’m waiting for the Prime Minister to join me any moment.

  “Oh.” She arches her pencil eyebrows. “Goodness. I better leave you to it.” She drifts with the tide.

  And what will happen when no Prime Minister appears? Stupid. Better to have said I know no-one. She might have stayed sympathetically at my side.

  My beer glass is empty. My cigarette has burned down to near smokelessness, hardly any company to deflect being in this bar alone.

  Madeleine befriends no one belly-man for long. A group of the older tide, wrinkled and bald, vie for her attention by interrupting each other’s sentences in good cheer with “Oh don’t listen to him” and “He’s a notorious liar.” Child-girlies already have a toucher of their own. Their bare skin stroked where the dress leaves their back exposed. Those touchers are the younger-old. It
is Madeleine who does the touching in her arc of antique men: shirt cuff touching, shoulder; finger-tips pressed to the tongue of a tie.

  I order whisky and soda, leaning one elbow on the bar. I say the “whisky and soda” loud enough that Madeleine might hear me now that I stand close behind her. I don’t say please with the order because it has a weakening effect on a man’s bearing. Madeleine looks over her shoulder to me. I lift my finger to acknowledge her. I gulp the whisky, the fire taken out of it by the soda and ice. It allows for three gulps before my throat scorches. Another three gulps and it’s time to order again. Another cigarette for a cloud mask. Then at last the loudspeaker calls out the tide.

  It is so easy to be at ease. Whisky is the master of it. It says, “Follow me into the mist.” Not the mist for hiding in that smoke conjures, but the mist of all the world’s warmth and good intentions. I am the world’s centre in that mist. I am the world’s most perfect man.

  Madeleine is coming my way. “Now you’ve got a happy look. Not a care at all. Quite a turn-around,” she says.

  “Yes,” I laugh. I cannot stop the laugh. It’s as if my laughter is outside of me, independent and free-willed.

  “You’ve been on the happy juice.”

  It takes me two goes to pronounce, “Want some?” There is a need to talk loudly now because the loudspeaker is calling out a race from its perch in the sky.

  “Your Prime Minister friend doesn’t seem to have shown up. Just as well given the present state of you. You should sip not slurp if it’s whisky in that glass.” She takes the glass from me and sniffs it. She pulls a face and places the glass on the bar.

  In this mist there is no affliction of fear. I can lean back on the bar and say, “Buy you one?” Again taking two goes. I can hold up a money note and not look at what amount it is— amounts are all paltry to me. I can wave the note around and not care that I drop it.

  Madeleine picks it up. “Sweetie, you should pace yourself. Are you sure you’re old enough for drinking whisky anyway?”

  I stand stiffly at attention to display offence at the question. But my feet are too heavy for standing at attention. They stomp rather than stand. I tip to one side. My elbow tries for a purchase on the bar but slides. The whole of me slides onto my rear. I scramble back up with Madeleine helping. Behind her a girlie giggles, “Who’s he?”

  “Some political guy or heir or something,” Madeleine answers.

  The giggle continues. It is a safe-sign girlie—those sagging, deep smile cracklings. A safe-sign girlie is betraying me with the giggle of a child-girl. There is an intense prickling of heat around my eyes. I am in a trance of deadening tiredness, of entering sleep. I am being handled on to a stool and told “to sit there, Sweetie. Sit there.”

  The Duke demands that I walk. “Embarrassment. That’s what you are.”

  He insists I walk and not lean on him for balance. Walk all the way out of here, out of the Members bar. Off the course to the carpark. I’m to concentrate on what is directly in front of me. Pick out a point just up ahead and aim to reach it. Just shut up and walk alongside him and don’t be a laughing stock who embarrasses him in public ever again. “Girlies using you for laughing practice! Men use them, not the other way around.” This on the day Bazza wins of all days. The day we win the mile at Randwick and then this. “Don’t stagger,” he growls, or else I can expect a hiding.

  At the car I vomit. Vegetables, tomato skin, carrot and brown brine.

  “Don’t you dare do that in the car,” he warns.

  When emptied of vomit a chill of wellness enters me. I stand chilly and sweating. The Duke grabs my lapels and pulls me lower to get into the car. I push his hands away and tell him I can get in the car, this car or any car, by myself.

  “Don’t you push me,” he says with narrowed eyes. He holds me by the lapels against the car door. I grab his lapels and pull at him, pull him off balance. He forces his forearm under my chin and heaves. My head is wrenched back. I push at his jaw with my palm and slip to the side to escape his hurting hold. He falls to one knee and roars “Jesus bloody Christ.” His hat tips from him, drops upside-down on the gravel.

  I kneel to help The Duke stand, saying “Sorry, sorry.” But he repeats “Jesus bloody Christ” and crabs sideways to avoid kneeling in vomit.

  He grips my lapels in his fists and shoves me, a punch-shove into my neck. I punch the top of his arm. He punch-shoves again. I punch his arm. Punch it again. He lets go of me and staggers to his feet, heaving. Such a stare to his eyes. Bloodshot anger. A hating stare. He shakes his head to rid the stare from his face. He wipes his open hand down his forehead, across his nose, cheeks, jaw. “Get in the car before we’re thrown off the course.” He picks up his hat. Spits it clean, pokes out the dents and curses, “It’s stuffed.”

  I don’t clip up my seatbelt because I want to put my hand on his shoulder. I want to embrace his shoulders and say sorry. I reach over and begin to say it but he unpicks my arm from where it has landed across his chest. “Come on,” he says. “Enough of this. I said enough. Sit up. You want to play at being a man then play being a man who sits up and doesn’t embarrass himself or me. Now, sit up.” He pats my forearm. I am relieved to have that patting.

  He starts the car. “I go in to bat for you at school and this is how you reward me on the day we won the mile. I’m referring to lunches in lockers. That’s right. I took a call from your school. They were concerned about the episode. I promised them it’s just a passing fad type of behaviour.” He shakes his head, scoffing: “World in famine. Don’t want to be wasteful.” He points at me and places the end of his finger on my chest and taps it there in instruction. “You think about yourself. You think about you. You can’t help famine people. And what are they ever going to do for you? Nothing. But you can help you. You should concentrate on you.

  He puts the car in reverse and steers it on to the exit path. “You’ll end up being seen as having peculiarities. We all have peculiarities. Even your mother has peculiarities with her towels and funny moments. But we keep them to ourselves. We’re a small family, son. Just the three of us. Remember that. Remember who you are. You’re a man who shook the Prime Minister’s hand today. Your mother will be thrilled to think we know him.”

  A FIRST YEAR, a pleb, stands before me chin out in an authoritative pose. His brassy-haired head is tilted back, his hands are in his pockets. His knee is bent forward and to the side. He is only a pleb, used by teaching staff to relay messages to boys, and yet he stands there like that as if superior to me. I am wanted by a master. I am to wait outside the staff room.

  “Who exactly wants me?”

  “I don’t know exactly. A teacher whose name I don’t know. You’re to wait outside the staff room immediately.”

  I do not like that tone in his voice. Immediately. As if a pleb has the right to order immediately to me.

  “Were you told to say immediately? Or was it just you adding it now? Your Chinese Whispers duty is designed to make you more servile to masters, not impertinent to me.”

  “It was them.”

  “It better be. Do you know the punishment for getting Chinese Whispers wrong?”

  “No.” That question has straightened his head and stiffened his knee.

  “If the message is mis-told to the listener, you the Whisperer will receive the equivalent of a fine.”

  “What sort of fine?” His hands are out of his pockets.

  “A detention on a Saturday. Or several detentions, or the cane.”

  He is standing up straight when he talks to me now. Another lie and that brass head will sink lower, as good as be bowed. “So when the master wanting the pleasure of my company says to me, ‘What was the message you received? Word for word.’ And I say ‘Immediately’ and immediately was not in the original message—get my drift?” There goes his head. Sinking, bowing, sunk.

  “For good measure I might tell Sir that your message was so confused it sounded as if you said something about a bike beaten
blue, irradiantly.”

  I have no idea what trouble I’m in, what punishment awaits me at the staff room. That is powerlessness worse than physical suffering for a sin. The fear of not knowing your fate. But powerlessness can be passed on down the chain. Passing down can halve the sense of it. Passing it down as I am now to this boy who is half my size. Better they piss their pants, the plebs, than enter the toilets and disturb a more senior boy who is smoking as I have been this lunchtime. Let alone render that senior boy powerless with a message. This ignorant pleb who has not yet learnt that he can be flicked with a lit butt. His face can be flushed in the bowl where paper is scrunched, paper with fresh brown wipings. I would tell him as much, say he was lucky his message was for a gentleman like me. I would take pity on him if he was not so stubborn. He is frightened. He is silent. His eyes are beginning to pop with pleading but he has not begged me “Please don’t.” He has not turned to me water-faced with weeping. The powerlessness has not been passed down the chain.

  The twitch self is now in me. But I am not king of him yet. I am ashamed to want to be his king. And I am ashamed to have so far failed.

  “Are you a boarder or a day boy?” I can read the answer on him. He is a Scrubber. He is a boarder. Nose and cheeks flecked with the sun’s dots. Hands bigger than boy-hands, a bent bone in a finger, pale paddock scars. “Why did your parents send you away from home? For an education? What do farm boys like you want with an education! No, they sent you away because they didn’t want you. They didn’t love you. They, in effect, got rid of you. Out of sight, out of mind. You’ll probably never hear from them again.”

  He glares at me, grimacing. In pain, or hatred of me?

  My cigarette hisses in the bowl water. I flush and push away from the wall where I have been leaning.

  Out of the toilets we go. Along the wide porch-path towards the corridors and stairs up to the staff room. The boarder is a step behind me.