Feet screams “Language!” and presses her hands to her ears. “How dare he say language in my presence. Language in front of me.”
The Duke leaps over the coffee table, fists clenched, a fury-face. “Take that language back or so help me!”
Feet pants and spits, “Language. The bastard uses language in front of me.” She sweeps up the manor house plans from the table and crushes them against herself. She rips them, flings a handful to the floor.
The Duke heel-spins from me to hurry to her. He grabs her ripping hands and prises out shreds of plans, rescues paper balls of them and pushes them into his pockets. He demands she “Stop this” but his bellowing only makes her scream for me to get my bastard, filthy mouth out of her hearing. “Shitting bastard using language in front of me.”
IF BLOOD IS RED, why are veins blue?
Water is clear but the grass it falls to green. Feet and The Duke—how is it they made me? A natural order exists that turns such ordinary people into my new breed.
Nor is silence a way of finding a way out of silence. It is a language all its own. The language of distance between The Duke and Feet and me. If I must speak, I would demand they provide me with what money I need. Clothes, food, and submit to the new breed that supersedes them in me.
However, if I am to find the me voice, I must not let sound die in me from unuse in silence. Die even before it is born.
They have won. Those two ordinaries. I am here on this farm. I must give up my determined silence. I put it in place because the twitch self insisted I punish them.
This blank mask of resentment, I cannot keep it up. It is the blank mask of a fraud. For the manor house thrills me too much. Its front door like the vast slab entrance of churches. Staircase rising eighteen steps to a little landing. It bends there for seven steps more. On the left my bedroom, vast enough for a dozen Queen beds. Bathroom with gold taps called Pharaoh’s Fingers. Main bedroom beside it with a wall made of window. Window too at the end of a wardrobe you walk through. The patchwork of paddocks spreads below. Window in the ceiling to let in the sky. The ceiling sprayed in a gravel-paint known as frosting.
Downstairs beyond the gallery, two guest rooms we’ll call the South Wing. The nook for billiards—red walls with redder velvet flower patterns to set off the table’s green baize. A long, low light with tassels just like professionals. A step up to a viewing area. Cane furniture where Feet can watch over games.
The Tudor façade outside with its skinny strips of timber, brown crossed over white. Tin roof fringed with shaggy wood for an effect of faux thatching.
The twitch self orders me to be silent when Feet asks, “What do you think of your room?” It demands I confine my answer to a shrug, an “It’s OK” at the most, and look down, not around me, admiringly. This I do.
The Duke says, “Is that all you can say?” He shakes his head exasperated that he cannot reach me. I do not wish him wounded or soul-sick whether he’s an ordinary or not. But the twitch tells me I should wish it. It says, “Ignore his hurt and soul-sickness.”
Feet is looking to the heavens and wondering where did she go wrong to deserve such an ingrate for a son. The second self is coming for her. She greets it with her bared teeth, her usual claw of fingers.
I do something the twitch self mocks as weak. I feel a poisoning in my stomach which the twitch self dismisses as nothing but guilt. Guilt is a bug not potent enough to make me throw up, but one that sends up waves of mild nausea.
After what Feet did to my letters, guilt is the last bug I should let into my system. Hated is more like it. The twitch agrees. Yet, just as the ghost train is ready to rush her away, I tell her the bedroom is beautiful. Such a view—the great grin of the mountains. I am its audience of one. I feel I should offer it applause. The ghost train leaves without her.
I pass the guilt down to Bettina. If only that peasant gold-digger knew the trouble she had caused. Sending me letters, causing a rift between a mother and her son.
But when Feet asks me if I think her plastic flower arrangement is lovely, and her new flower-stands—Roman columns made of metal that appear to be of stone—I answer No. No too to the fabric hydrangeas that never die or shed a leaf, that need no water, just washing.
I want Feet arrested for stealing my letters. A thief mother. I dig my nails beneath my shirt to go deep into skin. I reinstate the silence.
But then the guilt recurs. Police? A thief? Look at the woman’s pleasure, I demand of the twitch self. “Look at it.” So simple a pleasure in humble plastic flowers.
“Did you say something?” asks Feet.
“Yes. Those columns are quite nice.”
She bought a novelty lamp in Sydney. An ancient naked Greek figure standing in a cage with bars of light. “That’s nice as well,” I say.
But an hour later, seething silence because I think of her reading Bettina’s pages. Pages that might have had crosses for kisses on them, hand-drawn sunshine and hearts. I seethe through dinner. I eat in small mouthfuls as if the food is not to my taste.
By now Feet is exhausted, confused. To be on the verge of many ghost journeys all day and every journey cancelled by me just in time—I have the timing down perfect.
“Will you sing to me?” she asks, wearily, flopping on the new blue three-seater to doze. “Singing would block out that dreadful whoosh-whoosh sound of the washing machine.”
I certainly will not sing for her. Robber and reader of letters. Singing for the sake of clothes washing.
Let her swoon all she likes at the thought of a serenading.
Sung to sleep as if drugged by me, a snake charmer for humans. I will not sing for her.
I sing Love Me Tender.
I sing Embraceable You.
I AM NOT ASKING FOR the plum job at Tudor Park. I have no desire to drive those deformed humans to milking for instance. Let Norman have it. Let William if he wishes, nudging and prodding them forward like a chain gang without chains.
Nor do I want the bottom rung—hosing muck from the shed yard after milking is done. The grass gone to liquid, green custard curdled in stinking bowels. An hour it takes. The hose water so icy my fingers swell and itch with chilblains as if the skin will any second split.
Poached Eye and Sensible have been sent away to trainers with reputation. Churchill gets his five dollars now to paint our post and railings for half a morning. No need for me to oversee him. Let him hate-talk timber. He can curse and kick the woodness all he likes. Fences feel no rancour. They have pine for ribs and eyeless knots for eyes.
No, the job I covet is feeding the new-weaned calves. The females kept to feed up into milkers. The males, called Bobbys, are reared a few days and no more. They are crowded into a tray on the tractor for driving to the roadside. There a truck collects them to be veal meat. The driver checks that the birth cord dangling from under their fur has wizened healthily like a stick of pizzle. He weighs them for the abattoir’s over-58 pounds rule.
When feeding the calves I can sing.
I bolt a vat on wheels to the Massey Ferguson tractor. It has a boom of fat rubber nipples. I pour milk into the vat, add buckets of water to string the milk out, a lukewarm sick-smelling brew.
I drive this sloshing load up the race to where calves are gathered at their paddock gate. Hooves sunk in the mud of their waiting. A steam rising from their mooing moans. Their eyes rolled back with the effort of the noise.
Especially Miss Beautiful. Her eyes go white and shut to moan the loudest. Miss Beautiful. I have named her so for her tawny coat, white socks and matching face-blaze. Taller than a normal Jersey, she shoves her way to the front to greet me and sing her one long note. I mimic the note in reply. Again. Again. As if common meaning has suddenly crossed between species.
I unlatch the gate. It swings out, grates across the race’s stones. The calves dash forward to suck the vat’s edges, tyre nuts, the boom’s nippled elbow, my gumboot toes. I have to shoo them with a wild yell, slap them on the nose. I hold the no
te of the yell by tensing my stomach. I think it is a C I’m making, which when I squeeze out the last of my breath, peters out and becomes a lower note, a B, a B-flat.
I wade through the calf-wave singing, counting to check there are thirty creatures—counting the numbers in song. I have to protect my groin from their butting mouths. I fend off Miss Beautiful—she sucks my fingers, the ends of my jacket, my walking knee though only dry comes out. Once the boom is lowered she scurries in the scrum of them all towards a free teat where milk sprays and tongues poke to the side and foam as they suck.
There are fewer nipples than mouths so I must distract loose suckers until a feeding calf is full. The sign for full is when the bloat of enough drinking puffs out the triangle-dent in front of their hips. Too much bloating and it dies. I let the calves suck my fingers, two fingers at a time—fore-finger and middle for one calf, little finger and its neighbour for another. Twisting the fingers deep past their lipless pout and into their mouths to feel the hot serrated gums, sandy tongue and hard seam where no teeth have formed. The pads of my fingers wrinkle from the wet pull. Heat seeps into me from the frenzied feeders who are certain I have milk on my insides.
That heat and that pull! I bend my groin away from it, out of reach of the suckers because when they push close and touch me with their dripping noses and tongues I can imagine it is a real human doing it, making my penis tingle and swell until it is no longer a penis but a cock. Cock because the senses want a rougher language for lust than penis, a mere medical name.
Squeezing my eyes shut doesn’t help.
It takes more than squeezed eyes to stop wanting the cock out of its trousers and let a calf have its way onto the new finger. Not any calf, but Miss Beautiful, a calf above calves. Not of the cows but an evolved kind, a superior breed. “Someone could be watching,” I say to her, kneeing to keep her at a distance.
I busy myself with pushing a bloated calf from its position on the boom for the next in line.
Miss Beautiful, we are far enough from the milking shed for no-one to see us. But don’t magpies have sight? There are gaps in the hedgerows. An ancestor, dead and floating invisibly, might be above us this instant, checking me, his kin, to be heartened that he is watching the admirable progress of his loins.
I force the me voice to bellow out of my chest and stomach. I force and force. I sing the scales three times. Then mixed notes, randomly from the scale, till the cock has gone back to penis, and the ancestor can leave proud enough with what he has seen.
CLOVER’S TINY GREEN FAN normally has three leaves.
Three leaves like three servings of itself. Four leaves sometimes though it’s rare and therefore means good luck for the humans who pluck one like a soft coin given up to them from the wishing-well soil.
There she is at it again—Feet parting the pasture with her fingers. She kneels stiffly, pushing her palm down on one knee for balance. Four leaves bring great fortune or little blessings, she believes. Good health, much money which is what a life is for.
She keeps them, her treasure, between the pages of her books: the only books she owns—those Nanna recipes with cellotape binding.
“Come and help me look,” she asks of me. “Don’t you want your mother to be happy, healthy and rich? Come and pick clover with me so I won’t be left alone.”
But I am already gone, hurdling a fence, hand on post to spring, scissoring my legs. Gone to feed the calves, to sing and finger their mouths and let them nibble my groin in their huddle of hunger. Miss Beautiful again the most insistent of lovers, until my ancestors-thinking saves me.
Feet is beginning to wonder about four-leaf clovers. We have hardly been inundated with curious guests: “What’s the point of building a lovely manor home if there’s no-one to come and say Wow!? It’s like we add up to nothing for all our efforts in life. That’s the very way I feel sometimes.”
She and The Duke base their arguments on it, whether it’s awfulness in people that makes them stay away in droves. Feet complains that it is, and that when you’re stuck in North Island, New Zealand you are really much too far away for guests who are anyone worthwhile—“We might as well be at the South Pole.”
The Duke makes two points and leaves the arguing at that. One: people just don’t arrive, you have to invite them. We’re not royalty. People don’t ask for an audience. “You’ve been too long going into yourself. You need to go to the world. It doesn’t come to you.” Two: no-one’s ever good enough for her. It’s an off-putting trait. “If you act like you’re royalty, people turn up their nose.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Feet stomps. “I’m the least off-putting person I know. I expected more happiness at this stage in my life and I’m beginning to resent it not coming.”
She now refers to clover as “those bastard things, those frauds” but she still parts pasture unless it’s raining.
Today she has only picked for half an hour and there is a sound. She lifts her head and listens to the air. A ripping 168 sound of car tyres between paddocks on the milk-shed drive. The vet’s car, a grey station wagon with mud doors from the morning’s potholes.
Five four-leaf clovers so far this session and it has delivered someone—a vet visitor. Better than nothing. An educated man, a professional. Thick spectacles and a nodding, smileless manner of speaking to emphasise the confidence of his pronouncements.
He may wear overalls, but they lend him a green surgical appearance—he is no tradesman. He is a science man. So many pens poking from his chest pocket. When he removes his overalls before getting in his car, his slacks and shirt beneath are spotless. His radio plays classical music.
Feet hurries to the kitchen to set out cups and boil the kettle. She will butter a scone batch kept in the freezer for such occasions.
The Duke has not been well today. He is having a lie-down, but she’ll rouse him for welcoming the vet into our house. We can’t have someone sleeping and snoring when there’s a guest to show around.
Today five cows with marks for medicine sprayed on them. Two mastitis; two pessaries for afterbirth still hanging from backsides after calving. A milk fever Jersey who gets the staggers and falls down.
The fallings down are getting longer between the standings, says Norman. His cigarette sore is missing from his lip. He knows a worker should never address a professional man, a vet man, with that ugly sight stuck to his face. A worker needs to answer Yes or No clearly to professional questions and not be disrespectful with the pause it takes to draw smoke and sigh it, to speak with a cloudy mouth. “Doc,” is how Norman ends his answers. “She’s getting weaker by the hour, Doc.”
Doc nods that that is obvious just by looking at her sitting with her legs tucked under in the mud of the culling yard.
“Chewing her cud like she’s taking some sun, but on death’s door if you ask me,” Norman says with a grunt-laugh. “That’s the way of things. They’re a dumb animal.”
Doc agrees that what he says is true—she might indeed not be long for this world. This gives Norman cause to stand up straight in a moment of pride that a vet is not the only one who knows a thing or two. He turns to smile this to his Bill who grins acknowledgment. He turns to smile it to me but I ignore him.
I’m holding my breath till my face hurts from too much blood in it. Norman probably thinks I am red with embarrassment that I lack his farm learning, but I’m in training. I have decided to build up my lungs for singing. I have just walked a full minute down the drive to the milk shed without taking a single breath.
Norman must consider himself the equal of a vet. Just because of one moment of pride he is now equal to Doc and can take charge and grab the cow’s penis-tail and lift to try and urge it to all fours.
Doc waves him to stop: “It’s not a lever that tail. You’re not helping her one bit.”
Norman keeps hold of the tail though stops yanking it erect. His mouth is a hole in his beard as if he’s about to speak. Only a wheeze and grumble come out. He does let go of the tail
but only because Doc is staring at him, waiting for his instructions to be carried through. The tail snaps shut over the cow’s backend.
Doc walks to his station wagon and its cupboards and drawers of drug vials, syringes, kidney dishes, sponges.
Norman takes a sore from his tin, one brown from previous puffings. He leans close to his Bill. “Cunt thinks he knows everything,” he says quietly, striking a match and drawing up light through the lamp of his cupped hand. Bill nods that cunt’s the right word, and shapes to give a quick kick into the cow’s side in time with a repeat of the swearing but Doc is about to return. He carries two bottles of calcium tonic to the cow and sets them down beside her neck. He takes a rubber tube from his overalls’ pocket and a long, thick needle.
He twists the cow’s neck using the backs of his knees to push. He sights the artery groove in the neck skin and throws the needle dart-like. He manoeuvres the dart up, down, sideways, until dark blood dribbles out. He connects the needle to the tube and ask-orders Norman to stand close with the bottle, open the bottle and fit the flanged end of the tube to it. He’s to hold it high and let the tonic gurgle until empty.
Norman does so but not before licking the sore to a fresh sucking spot and working it into a cloud billowy enough for inhaling and blowing in Doc’s direction. He tells Doc the tonic won’t do any good. In his experience a cow down for this long is fit only for the dead cow lorry.
“You could be right,” Doc says.
Norman winks and nods to Bill: some sentence is exchanged between them that needs no speech to be clear to them, a “Doc might not be a dill after all” or “Vets have the learning but I have the years.”
Doc fingers the cow’s eyelids wide open and diagnoses that she’s bright enough in herself.
Norman agrees, she is. “But she don’t stand on her eyes.”He winks again at Bill who covers his mouth against letting laughter out.
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