School was a bore. Confining. The other kids had no taste, had no idea – didn’t get it. Some would try to sell him their poxy torn and damaged valueless ‘kiddy’ stamp collections. But he was strategic – the odd twenty cents or dollar to the bullies and he’d keep them sweet, and have protection. He sold stamps – his seconds and trash – to some of the bookish kids at recess and lunchtime. They were pushovers for the attention, yet also wary when it came to parting with money. He honed his sales skills on them. Helped them build their collections: their investments.
But that was before the Henry Stibbons man had called for him. Now he ignored all at school and read his massive Henry Stibbons catalogues during breaks. He ignored the bullies knocking his books to the ground. He picked them back up and continued where he’d been interrupted. They predictably tired of such activities. An aura was evolving, and he felt it emanating from deep within. It’s destiny, he told his mother, who shook her head and left him to it.
Nothing had turned up! No great rarity. He started to fret and to harass his sisters – just little things, like flicking snot at them or smearing their towels with chocolate. His mother told him off for being shirty and irritable. The boss noticed at work on Saturday mornings as well. The boy went on and on about certain rare watermarks, and was told off for spending too much time going through the shop’s stock collection of George Heads. You won’t find anything, said the boss, smiling, We’re pretty good at catching those ourselves.
In his room, long after the light should have been out, the boy went over the same old ground. He even ruined a few stamps – cheap common ones – experimenting with altering watermarks. It was impossible, of course, and he knew it. Neither did he want to get the accolade falsely – that wouldn’t do. There was no glory in being a forger. He knew this instinctively. The shop owner could see an ‘honest’ worker a mile off; that’s how he’d got the job – asking and being character-read, at a glance.
Still, people were always saying he was ‘headstrong’, and he couldn’t help wondering if by willpower alone he could bend a watermark or alter a perforation count just a little. That wouldn’t be forgery or cheating, but fate. He was stuck in church confirmation classes on Thursday nights at the moment – a total waste of time because he thought it was all illogical claptrap. Trust the market, he told the minister to his face. Trust the market. The minister had joked at first, Work on your soul, but grew a little thin-skinned with the repetition, and started ranting about camels and eyes of needles. The boy repeated lines from movies he’d seen about fate and money. He had a memory like that. But he thought he’d throw a sop, and told the minister, The best thing about your Church is that it’s the Church of England, and that’s the home of the first postage stamp – the Penny Black, which appeared in May 1840 – well, it was the first pre-paid postage stamp, ‘adhesive’ postage stamp. It changed everything, though some say there were earlier examples in other countries. It has the head of Queen Victoria on, she was head of your Church, really, and I am saving to buy a mint version. They aren’t as rare as you’d think, not really, though full sheets are. The British Postal Museum owns some, no one else … and on he went, with the minister flexing his feet in his shoes, rubbing his thin hair back off his forehead, starting to say something when it came to Henry VIII and the break with Rome, but then riding it out until the boy’s mother took him away, at least until the next instalment.
So ‘the prospect’ stared at stamps late at night with all his concentration and willpower and headstrong-ness, stared at watermarks to make them change, and got no sleep. He then got in and out of bed, had breakfast, and pretended all was normal. School went by in a daze, and he might have got in trouble but couldn’t remember. He went straight back to his task after school, only breaking for dinner, and to knock off some stupid homework to keep his nagging mother happy. He pushed one of his sisters and got into trouble, and he skipped a bath by whining so much. But at one in the morning, by his desk light, a King George 1d Red face down on black paper, he watched a crown of A watermark become an impossible crown of Y. No such watermark existed till that moment, and he yelled out with joy, as he’d seen on science shows, Eureka!
Someone grumbled – a sister – then quick as a flash his mother was at the door yelling and ordering him to get to bed, there would be ‘consequences’ if this insanity didn’t stop. He tried to explain the immensity of the moment, but she just said, You’re gibbering from lack of sleep. Get to bed now or no Henry Stibbons man! He started to protest but slipped between the sheets as he did so and was asleep before she had even walked over to turn off his lamp.
Wake up, sleepyhead, his mother said, all crooning and soft as if she’d done nothing wrong.
What time is it? he yelled, and leapt out of bed. It was Saturday. A work morning. And then the visit to the hotel to see Mr Henry Stibbons that afternoon. It’s okay, she soothed, Calm down. It’s only 7 am. Plenty of time.
He rushed to get ready. He placed his miracle stamp in a glassine envelope and then inside the stock album he carted everywhere with him. He didn’t have time to check his discovery again – the MTT bus left from the corner at 8 am. He was on it, but though it took half an hour to get to the city, he wasn’t going to risk examining his rarity, his one-of-a-kind stamp, on the bus. He would get to the shop at 8.45 for a 9 am start.
He watched the Saturday morning traffic still thick on the freeway, and saw cormorants hanging their wings on the Como Jetty. He used to paddle his canoe around there a year ago, before stamps had taken over. But he didn’t miss it, and thought the people standing on the jetty looking out into the river would only be looking at nothingness – like praying. Nothing came of it. Only work and investment yielded results.
He thought of showing the boss his wonder, but though excitement raged and boiled underneath, he kept it to himself. It would be the revelation, the big moment in front of the man from Henry Stibbons that would change the stamp world. Once at work, he made unusual mistakes working out change, but the boss was more over his shoulder than usual, half smiling, fixing his little errors.
Don’t get too excited about this afternoon, the old man said. These grandees of the stamp world like everything calm – excitement makes sweat, and that causes stamps to rust! The old man laughed at his own joke, and the boy tried to concentrate on returning some stamps to stock albums, plying the tweezers like surgical instruments, despite his excitement.
It was a busy morning, and the boy melded into the process. He forgot himself, doing what he enjoyed most – giving advice on investments and quality to grown-ups, but especially to kids a bit older than him who came in with a few hard-saved dollars. He was their guru.
During a lull, the old man annoyed him with a further observation: Remember, showing excitement can mean the ruination of a good deal. If a client thinks you are getting something out of them, the better of them, they’ll ask for more or pull out of the deal. Philately is about calm, calm, calm, even when you think you’ve found the Holy Grail. Even when you have the Holy Grail! Even if you open an old book and find a British Guiana 1c Magenta pressed between its pages! And remember, the Latin motto of that stamp is the motto of our trade, Damus Petimusque Que Vicissim. In other words, there’s always something to give back if receiving a gift. Nothing comes for nothing, even if found in the pages of a book!
The boy blocked all of this out.
The boss – such an old man – locked the shop, the boy almost straining at the leash as he did so. Then they were off, heading for the hotel. The prospect is on the way – he has stepped out! And then they were there, and they were in the hotel room with its brass fittings and mounted photographs of the city on the walls. At first the great man from Henry Stibbons was impressed by the boy’s knowledge as the old man displayed him. Something, isn’t he? he said so the boy could hear as he clutched his stock album.
So, have you brought anything for me to see? asked the man from Henry Stibbons.
Yes, I have, sai
d the boy, trying to suppress his sweat.
The old man lifted an eyebrow and looked at the boy. The man from Henry Stibbons asked the old man what it was.
I’ve no idea, said the old man, genuinely surprised.
The boy did everything slowly. Much more slowly than he wanted to or felt. But the old man’s advice had gone in deep. He moved with patience and gravitas. In a mature voice he said to the great man from Henry Stibbons, I have for you today, inside this album, a stamp of such rarity that it will change all the catalogues, all the views on what is rare and how rare comes to be.
The old man laughed nervously, but Mr Henry Stibbons peered red-eyed far into the boy’s head.
Show me, he said, almost impatiently.
The boy looked up at the great man, and said, I will, but let me explain what we have here.
The man from Henry Stibbons shifted in his seat, placed his hand on the boy’s knee and leant close to him: Show me what you have!
The old man cleared his throat. The man from Henry Stibbons was perspiring and a droplet of sweat dropped on the boy’s leg.
I have discovered a new watermark in a common 1913 Australian stamp. Technically, this watermark cannot exist. It means nothing. There are no records of other plates being used and discarded outside what we already know. And the watermark makes no sense – it is a crown of Y and not a crown of A – and yet it exists.
The old man burst out laughing, then felt embarrassed and said, Come now, we’ve wasted enough of the man from Henry Stibbons’s time. We must go now. Turning to the visitor, the old man added, He is very young, I made a mistake, sorry, and adjusted his bow tie, which slipped undone, and which he started redoing, looking into a mirror over the visitor’s shoulder to achieve this.
No, no, let’s see what the boy has.
The boy opened the album, took out the glassine envelope and handed it to the great man, who raised it to the light of his window, the curtains drawn back to reveal a panorama of the river and the war memorial up on the scrubby hill, with city buildings clustered around as if they’d been collected.
The man studied the watermark, cast his bloodshot eyes onto the boy, then looked back at the watermark. He reached to a small table for a pair of soft gloves and tweezers, slid the stamp out and examined it on a black pad under a light. He then returned it to the envelope and handed it back to the boy, who placed it back in the album.
Well? asked the old man. What is it? The bow tie was a mess.
The man from Henry Stibbons was staring hard at the boy, who was studying the cover of the stock album. The great man drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair and said, Well, I won’t deny he’s got something there. Directly to the boy, he said, We will always find if we look hard enough. And sometimes we need to remove the obstacles to our search. And both the boy and the man from Henry Stibbons turned as one on the old man, and focusing all their concentration, all their belief on him, forgot he was there.
*
London. A foggy day but no matter, Londoners were used to it, and the world expected it. Ridiculously far from sunny Perth. The young man walked stiffly in his suit through Soho down towards Trafalgar Square and onto the Strand. Though it was a long walk, he never tired of it. He could smell the sweet and sour of the river as he approached the shop. He could taste the grit of conquest. As the great man from Henry Stibbons’s apprentice, the young man was present when the new rarest stamp in the world was revealed. A 1913 Australian King George stamp with a crown of Y watermark and a distorted King George portrait with a flaw that became known as the ‘loose bow tie’ error among those examples known as errors, freaks and oddities, an EFO more notorious than the 1918 Inverted Jenny 24c US postage stamp.
BULGE
The school trousers were cut tight around the crotch and this made Simon uncomfortable. He pulled at them, and one of the cool girls noticed, and she yelled across the open corridor in front of the library, What are ya playing with, Simon Green? You’ve got nuthin’ there to play with!
Simon reddened, shuffled and pulled a chemistry book from his backpack. He dropped the backpack, picked it up and slung it over his shoulder with one hand, holding and opening the chemistry book with the other, relieved by his own deft move. He studied the periodic table on the inside cover – first with something like blurred vision, then with interest. It was always interesting, no matter how many times you studied it, how imprinted on your mind it was.
Another boy bumped Simon on the shoulder and said, You smell, mate. Simon didn’t even know the boy, who was holding his nose and tilting his head back. To high heaven! High heaven. Simon scrubbed himself twice a day. His mother complained about having to wash his clothes so often when he never got dirty. He had no underarm odour he could detect, unlike the hirsute boys who ranged about and ruled the upper-school change rooms. He didn’t smell. There was no high heaven about Simon Green!
But Simon absorbed the impact, and though appeasing his hater with a look of bewilderment, quickly returned to staring at the periodic table in his book. He so knew it off by heart. He had a large poster of the table at home, above his bedhead. In fact, the two things he liked best about his room were the table and the shelf of weights his mother had given him for Christmas. They cost a lot of money, and his mother wasn’t exactly flush, though Simon tried not to think about their being ‘in financial straits’ because it embarrassed him in a vague, cumulative sort of way.
Just another strike against me, he’d told his mum when he lost it one day. It bothered him that she’d looked astonished. She didn’t cry, just looked astonished. When he was a small boy, a stranger he later understood to be a therapist had showed him pictures of people smiling or crying or looking angry, and asked Simon what he thought the expressions meant. Simon had answered clearly and honestly, but couldn’t remember if he’d been wrong or right. He was in early primary school then, and his mother had never taken him back to see the glossy lady who wore what his mother had called ‘inappropriate’ fishnets and heels. Now he knew what those were, and he liked the thought of them, but couldn’t bring the therapist’s looks into focus no matter how hard he tried. He wondered why.
He was on a mission to build himself up, to propel himself towards growth. He was guzzling protein shakes like they were going out of fashion, yet he wasn’t bulking up as they’d promised. Not yet, said the bloke who sold them to him. All the money Simon earned working in his uncle’s newsagency on Saturday mornings went on bulking up. Protein shakes were expensive.
His mother said, You’re well fed and well looked after, Simon, and you’ll grow when you’re supposed to grow, and you’ll grow as big as you were designed to grow.
You speak in platitudes, he told her in a supercilious voice that made her, she said, pull her hair out. She had plenty of hair. Long, flowing black hair that reminded him of an ebony waterfall. His own hair seemed of no particular colour or luxuriance.
Simon sat down on a distant bench where no one cool hung out. This was where the ‘smelly’ kids dwelt, with their lopsided glasses and torn jumpers, or their overly neat uniforms and too sparkly and sweet-smelling bodies. Whatever their deportment, it was wrong. He mouthed the words of the chemical elements and no one bothered him. He performed them in order of their atomic numbers, then in alphabetical order, and then as units in s, p, d and f blocks and then he’d sometimes yell out, Mendeleev rocks! then look hurriedly around to see who’d overheard. It just came out spontaneously. His mother would just say, You and your tics, Simon.
And other kids he sat with, other smelly kids, kids he didn’t really know and who didn’t really know him and never would, would briefly look up then go back to what they were doing. He sometimes played chess with them, but mainly sat back and daydreamed. He could see the footy team practising at lunchtime from where he sat, but their bodies didn’t interest him. Sometimes he watched the cool girls watching the footy boys, but they didn’t interest him either, not really. Yet the idea of a body, of being powerful, obs
essed him. His daydreams were strong colours and strong sensations.
Mostly the other smelly kids sat at a reasonable distance from him – and at a distance from each other – mouthing their own mysterious words in their own odd languages. Teachers called them immature, and laughed in the staffroom over their ‘antics’ and ‘ineptitudes’, but every teacher wanted one or two in their class to boost their marks and ‘effectiveness’ as teachers. Bottom-end people, top-end marks, a staffroom wag once uttered, and it stuck through generations of teachers in that school.
It was a pretty safe place for Simon to retreat to during breaks, though on one occasion a posse of cool girls and some of their minions, some of their familiars, as he wrote in his journal – which no one had ever read and no one would ever read – ventured down from around the library and up from the footy oval in a pincer movement, on a hunt. He was too busy in his head to notice, busier than the other gits and nerds and four-eyes and stinkers, and so when he looked up they were on him, with one of the footy-playing boys behind them, all puffed up and bouncing a footy on the concrete where he shouldn’t have been bouncing a footy.
This was Greg Fell’s favourite sport – watching the girls attack the puny boys. Better than mud wrestling, he said to the team. It had been Greg Fell who’d bumped into Simon. It was strange that Simon hadn’t registered Greg, since Greg Fell was his primary persecutor. But Simon liked to move on. I am not stuck, he’d told his mother once. I’ve got a lot to do in life.
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