Tamarisk Row

by Gerald Murnane

  Augustine keeps in touch with professional punters

  On Friday Augustine comes straight home from work. He leans his bike against the back veranda and reminds Clement not to wheel it inside because he will be riding it to the post office after tea. He reminds his wife that it is only half-past four and here he is home with his family while the men he works with have rushed off to the nearest hotel to fill their bellies with beer. He spends the hours before tea with one of his pens of Rhode Island Red pullets and hens. He hooks a long piece of wire around a hen’s leg and stands for a long while with the bird in his arms examining it for faults. When he finds a bird with a crooked bone or an eye of the wrong colour or a head and comb not of the quality that judges look for in poultry shows, he fastens a coloured plastic ring around its leg. He uses rings of several different colours. A red ring shows that a bird will be killed and eaten as soon as it is needed. Yellow means that a bird will be packed in a crate and sold at the market in Bassett. Outstanding birds get a blue or even a purple ring. Each of these pullets is given a girl’s Christian name which is then written in pencil in some blank space on the fibro-cement wall of their pen. Later they will be moved to another pen where an outstanding rooster will be allowed to mate with them. Augustine has told Clement many times that he is not interested in taking his Rhode Islands to shows even though they belong to one of the purest strains in Australia. The man who first sold him these blood-lines is getting old now, and when he dies his farm might be sold up and his breeding stock scattered anywhere. So Killeaton goes on breeding Rhode Islands year after year in shabby pens in his backyard where no one else but himself admires the one or two birds from each year’s hatching that are nearly perfect in colour and shape and proportions. Augustine eats his tea with the Club racing paper spread out in front of him. As soon as the meal is finished he goes to his bedroom to put on his best suit and tie and hat. He folds the Club neatly into his inside coat pocket, checks the lead in his propelling pencil, fastens his bike clips around his shins, checks the lights on his bike, and sets out for the main streets of Bassett. One Friday night Clement goes with his father, sitting astride the parcel rack behind the saddle of the bike and holding onto Augustine’s waist. Augustine leaves the bike chained to a post on the footpath of Fleet Street and enters one of the dimly lit trunk-line telephone booths on the shadowy pillared veranda of the Post Office. He has to wait while the unseen switchboard operator books his call to Melbourne. He makes Clement stay inside the booth out of the cold. The boy reads all the printed signs, then begins to fidget. When his call is ready Augustine spreads out his Club on the narrow ledge and holds his pencil ready in his hand. He tells Len Goodchild 120 miles away that he hadn’t intended going to Melbourne this week-end but that he’ll be available if he’s needed. He laughs affectedly into the receiver and tells Goodchild that he has brought his young colt with him to the phone tonight. He has to repeat his words and laugh again because the line is bad between Melbourne and Bassett. He asks his friend are they expecting any really good thing to go off in the near future. He says that he is not in any serious bother financially but that he would be glad of a good win to clear up a few troublesome little local debts. He asks is there any mail for tomorrow and holds his pencil poised. Goodchild uses a code to give Killeaton his selections in case anyone is listening to their conversation. While they are talking about a horse whose name starts with the same letter that begins the name of a man they both know who drives a dark-green Dodge, Killeaton has to pay more money for extra time for his call, but he does not complain. When they come out of the phone booth Clement asks to be taken home but his father tells him there is one more important call to make. He takes Clement into an almost-empty Greek cafe. They walk past the tables to a glass-walled compartment where the proprietor sits at a desk covered with racing pages. The man nods at them and goes on muttering into a telephone. Killeaton whispers to Clement – listen to Nicky talking in Greek – that’s what he uses for his racing code but Mr Goodchild’s code is safer. When the man finally puts down his telephone he and Augustine talk quietly together for a long time. Clement sits beside a radiator and begins to doze. On the way home Augustine tells his son that far away to the south beyond the dark bulges of the central Victorian hills in a certain unremarkable square of light within a pattern of squares and rows of lights too vast and complex for any one mind to comprehend, a little band of men sits up until almost midnight talking in subdued voices of their daring schemes. They drink only tea or milk and few of them smoke. Several are bachelors. Others have left their wives safely at home in distant suburbs. The man whose house they sit in lost his wife many years ago and has no time to waste on the complicated business of finding another. Some of them have jobs or businesses that keep them busy on weekdays. Others, the most dedicated and courageous, rely entirely on their cunning and their years of experience and their banks of perhaps a thousand pounds to live for year after year from racing. One or two of these look forward to a series of brilliantly-planned plunges that will earn them so much money that they will never again have to bet for a living, but the others are content to spend the rest of their lives as professional punters, devoted to the game and looking forward to the continual challenge of the Friday night racing papers with their lists of names and predictions of odds that are mostly to tempt the mugs but may yield just one or two value bets.

  Clement and Kelvin Barrett play new games

  On Saturday morning while trucks and floats are still travelling from secluded corners among the knotted roots of trees or from behind thick tangles of weeds towards famous racecourses, Mrs Killeaton calls her son to the front gate and warns him to behave himself while she goes into Bassett on the bus. Clement watches until the bus has turned the corner into McCracken’s Road. When he turns back towards his yard a boy named Kelvin Barrett comes to meet him. Barrett refuses to tell how he got into Killeaton’s yard, but Clement insists that he must have climbed the fence from the yard of the Presbyterian church hall next door and scrambled down through the tall tamarisks. He knows that Barrett sometimes goes to the Presbyterian Sunday school in the old hall and peers through the picket fence of a Sunday morning to see what games Killeaton plays when he is alone. Clement looks around quickly to make sure there is no sign of any road or farmhouse to suggest to Barrett that all around him just out of sight is a countryside whose centre is a racecourse where crowds are already gathering. Kelvin Barrett lifts a few branches of shrubs and peeps around the corners of a few fowl sheds. He tells Clement that a long time before, when the Silverstones lived there, the boy Silverstone used to have a secret hide-out where he played special games with many of the children in Leslie Street. Kelvin himself was invited into the hide-out once, but he cannot remember where it was. He crosses the backyard and opens the Killeatons’ back door. Clement follows him inside. In the loungeroom each boy slips his braces down over his shoulders and lets his trousers fall around his ankles. They shuffle backwards and forwards, facing each other and jerking their hips to make their cocks and balls swing. Clement tells the other boy to wait a minute. He runs to his father’s bookcase and grabs a certain magazine. He is so anxious that he tears some of the pages as he turns them. He finds the bloodstock pages and points out to the Barrett boy a picture of a stallion, one of the ten most successful sires of winners for the current season. The horse stands proudly near a tall white-painted fence between whose railings are glimpses of small paddocks protected by dense plantations of trees where dozens of his mares graze peacefully. Clement runs his finger along the stallion’s belly, then down the powerful drooping thing beneath that his father calls a sheath. Then he looks up into Barrett’s face. Barrett is not sure what Clement means. Clement prances around like a stallion preparing to mate with his mares, and tugs at his own sheath. He takes Barrett’s cock in his hands and tries to shape it into a stallion’s sheath, but the other boy roars with pain and grabs savagely at Clement’s cock to pay him back. Clement runs from room to room wit
h Barrett after him. In the front bedroom the State-school boy starts to climb onto the bed to bounce on the springy mattress. Clement begs him not to mess up his parents’ bed, and has to submit to having his sheath twisted and tugged before they finally shake hands and go back to the lounge-room. This time Clement allows Barrett to decide what game they will play. He has to lie on his back while Barrett lies on top of him so that their things rub together. The other boy presses too heavily on Clement. He pleads with Barrett to get up and go but the boy pins him down and bounces up and down on top of him. Kelvin Barrett tells Clement that their fathers and mothers sometimes do things like this to each other on hot afternoons while their children are away at school. Clement has to pretend to hear the bus coming to make Barrett get off him at last. Barrett pulls up his trousers, strolls outside, scrambles up through the tamarisks, and jumps down into the yard of the church hall.

  The secrets of the State-school children

  Almost every afternoon Clement sees Kelvin Barrett going home from the Shepherd’s Reef State school. He never talks to Barrett because he (Clement) is usually with the crowd of children who dawdle home together from St Boniface’s school. Several of the Catholic children have friends at the State school, but they do not play with them until they have reached home and broken off from the mob of Catholic children. One afternoon when he is walking home alone, Clement hears Kelvin Barrett calling to him to wait. The Shepherd’s Reef boy crosses the street to walk with Clement. With him is another State-school boy. This boy has a pale, almost spherical, head and colourless eyebrows. He says his name is Dudley Earl and that Kelvin Barrett has told him all about his friend Killeaton from the Catholic school. They walk a little way in silence. The round-headed boy chuckles to himself and Clement begins to fear him. The two State-school boys discuss whether to tell Clement something special that they heard the other day at their school. Clement pretends to be unconcerned, but longs to know something of what they learn in their school, where, so he has heard, no prayers are said and no catechism is recited and where for one period each week the children study Australian birds and animals in a subject called nature study. Dudley Earl stops at a corner where a side street branches off McCracken’s Road. He points out to Killeaton a newly painted cream weatherboard house a little neater than its neighbours. Earl tells him that Mr Wormington, a teacher from Shepherd’s Reef school, lives there. The boy asks Clement would he be game to go down and peep into the man’s front garden, but Clement says he has to hurry home. The Shepherd’s Reef boys tell him he is scared because he has never been taught by a man teacher. Near the corner of Leslie Street they decide to tell Clement the special poem they have been whispering about. Dudley Earl recites it, but Barrett has to prompt him at several places. Earl says – John had great big waterproof boots on John had great big waterproof hat John had great big waterproof coat on and that said John was that. He shouts the last few words at Clement and a bead of spit flies out of his mouth onto Clement’s forehead. Clement does not dare wipe it off while the others are looking at him, waiting for him to comment on the poem. Clement finally laughs and says he enjoyed the poem and understood it very well. The State-school boys walk away very pleased with themselves. When they are out of sight Clement hurries back to the corner of the schoolteacher’s street and creeps as near as he dares to the cream-painted house. The front blinds are pulled down against the hot afternoon sun. The front yard is deserted. In a little round window a magpie of royal blue and white stained glass emerges from a thicket of green and gold leaves and fronds. Clement hears a faint cry from inside the house, where the light must lie in green or gold pools behind the glowing glass leaves. In a silent twilight, coloured like the innermost parts of a forest, people who know the secrets of the Australian bush instead of the mysteries of the Catholic religion are enjoying the true meaning of a poem.

  Clement tells the story of Kennie Teague

  At lunchtime a new boy arrives at St Boniface’s school. The boys in Killeaton’s grade stop their games and gather round to stare at the stranger. He backs up against a brick wall and starts to howl. A mob gathers round him. The children at the back press forward so hard that those in the front are pushed up against the new boy. He covers his face with his hands and tries to turn to the wall. Some of the boys at the front start to punch and wrestle the boys just behind them. Somebody punches the new boy. The nun patrolling the yard blows her whistle but it is nearly a minute before the sound reaches the noisiest parts of the mob. The nun asks the new boy what is the matter, but he cannot speak for crying. She sees his nose running with snot and his face streaked with dirt and tears and tells him that at least he can use his handkerchief. She gathers from noises and signs he makes that the boy has no handkerchief. She looks around the crowd that has formed again a few yards away. She beckons to Clement Killeaton and tells him to lend his hankie to the new boy and then to keep him company until the bell goes. Clement gives the boy his clean hankie and the nun goes away. When the new boy has rubbed the hankie a few times across his wet snotty face Clement tells him to come to the taps and wash the hankie clean. A small group of boys still follows at a distance, hoping that the new boy will start howling again. Clement takes his hankie between two fingers and drops it into a washbasin. He tells the new boy to have a guzzle at one of the other taps, but he forgets to warn him not to go near Teague’s tap, the basin that has been disfigured with blue stains ever since the day when a big girl Teague, the sister of Kennie Teague in Clement’s grade, asked to be excused on a hot afternoon and instead of going to the girls’ lavatories went out to the row of taps at the end of the shelter shed, took down her pants, which were filthy and ragged like all the clothes that the Teague family wore, climbed up onto the basin at the end of the row, and did a great soupy yellow flood of piss all down the white sides of the bowl, and which no one else has touched ever since except her little brother Kennie who gets bashed up if he dares to go near any of the clean taps. When Clement looks up from washing his hanky he sees the new boy with his head bent down deep into Teague’s basin drinking with his lips around the tap. The boys who have been following him are so shocked that they let him finish his drink before they start to yell – he drank out of Teague’s tap – the new kid drank out of Teague’s tap. A crowd gathers again and Clement slips back into the second or third row. They force the new boy up against the blue-mottled basin and he starts to howl again. No nun comes to scatter them, but after a few minutes the bell rings and the crowd of boys runs off reluctantly, spreading the story about the new boy as they go. During the next few weeks the new boy keeps trying to find a friend but the others avoid him. Sometimes he tries to talk to Killeaton because Clement was the first boy he met when he arrived at St Boniface’s, but Clement runs away for fear that the others will see them together. At last, when it seems to Killeaton that the other boys have forgotten about the day when the new boy sucked at Teague’s tap, Clement stands still and does not run when the new boy comes up to talk to him. The new boy says – remember how I drank out of Teague’s tap that day when I was still new at St Boniface’s – well what’s up with Teague’s tap anyway? Clement looks round to make sure that no one else is listening, because although he started on the first day in the bubs’ grade at St Boniface’s and has been at the school for just as long as Teague or any of the other boys, he only knows that the reason why everyone hates and avoids the Teague family is something filthy that the Teagues did a long time ago in a part of Bassett where Clement has never been. Only a few boys in Clement’s grade seem to know the true story of the Teagues. Clement has never been privileged to hear it from them. He tells the new boy that the Teagues are a dirty family as anyone can see from Kennie’s long unwashed hair and the patched pants that reach below his black-grained knees and the food stains on his shirt and the scabs and pimples on his big sister’s face and the smell from their pants because they never wipe their bums properly in the lavatory. Then he tells the boy about the day in Sister Canisius’s grad
e when some girl couldn’t find her lunch money and the nun asked – was any person in this room at playtime while I was out? and a boy said – I think Kennie Teague was Sister, and the nun said – hands up anyone else who saw our Mr Teague in here at playtime, and nothing happened for a minute until Clement put up his hand and said – please Sister I saw him too, and thought that perhaps now he might learn what really did happen in some old shed strung with cobwebs or on a back veranda heaped with rusty tins at the Teagues’ disgusting house to make the whole school hate the boy with the flopping hair and his sister who wore her mother’s old dresses to school. And because the new boy follows him around begging to hear the rest of the story, Clement tells how Sister Canisius said – well now we’ve got at least one trustworthy witness, and told Kennie Teague to stand on the platform and turn out all his pockets and show the grade and how Teague clutched his desk with both hands and bawled out in his funny voice that some people said he couldn’t help because he was tongue-tied – I nair stow no muhhy, and some of the girls giggled because he was shouting in school. And because Clement is still proud of the important job he was given that day, he tells how the nun said – I’m sorry Mr Teague but you’re acting like someone with a very guilty conscience, and made the rest of the class go to sleep on their desks while four of the strongest boys dragged Kennie’s hands away from the desk, carried him by his hands and legs to the empty space at the back near the piano, and held him there blubbering and thrashing around while Clement pulled out of Teague’s pocket and held up for the nun to see the old rag that Kennie used for a hankie and some scraps of paper that looked like a note from Mrs Teague that the boy had forgotten to give to his teacher, and how when they found no money in his pockets the nun told Clement to pull off Kennie’s shoes, which were rotten old sandshoes, and peel off his socks, which turned out to be an old pair of woollen khaki army socks tucked under his feet to fit him, and shake them out thoroughly in case the money was hidden in them. And because the new boy seems just as disappointed as the nun and all the children were when they found that Teague had no money hidden on him, Clement tells him the end of the story – how Kennie kicked and struggled so much that he forgot he was in a schoolroom with the statue of the Sacred Heart only a few feet away on its altar decorated with flowers and let off two loud farts that everyone in the room could hear, how Clement and the boys who still had a grip on Kennie’s arms and legs could tell from the bubbling noise of the farts that Teague was shitting his pants, and how the nun said – whatever next – get the dirty creature out of my sight this minute and don’t bring him back until he’s respectable again. But because Clement is not yet sure whether the new boy is one of those who enjoy talking about such things he does not tell how when they got Kennie to the lavatory his pants fell down and they all made snatches at his cock and balls and he lay there without even trying to protect himself until they got tired of punishing him and went outside. And because Clement hardly ever talks about such things to anyone, he says nothing of how when he saw the thin black sausages of dirt in the crease between Kennie’s balls and his thighs and the tiny tattered ribbon of brittle yellow stuff trailing from the loose skin of Kennie’s cock he thought of a tumbledown house almost crushed by the weight of vines with sticky blooms and sap that left brown indelible stains on fingers and a family whose parents were always out in hotels and never home to feed and wash the children. The boy never complains about his hard lonely life but tries to find a boy who could be his friend and come home to the untidy house and hide under a bundle of rags in the girl’s bedroom and spring out and overpower her and tear her clothes off while her brother kept watch at the door. But no boy listens to Kennie Teague. The clean boys punch and torment him while he howls and lies helpless because there is no hope of explaining to them what he might have offered them.