Common People

by Tony Birch

  Pop was also up for a fight back then. He’d take on anyone ready to put their fists up. He’d fought in the carnival tents when he was young and was pretty good, they reckon. But with the drink taking him down for the count, he ended up ruined. He’d open his mouth in the pub, announcing himself like a prize fighter and end up getting belted around like an old dog. The police went after him some days and locked Pop up. They didn’t mind giving him a whack either. He never should have been treated that way, no matter how much trouble he caused.

  Police in our town were as crazy as any drunk and nobody expected better from them. Pop knew as much and was always telling me, You see the Gunjis coming, you run like hell. And I did. Anytime the police drove down our street, or came to the door, I’d race to the swamp by the speedway and hide until they took off, sometimes with Pop in the back of the van, kicking at the doors and swearing his head off. They’d put him in the cells for the night and he’d come home the next morning with blood under his nose and maybe a cut on the head, complaining the fucken Gunjis done this. Maybe they did. It was their way. But then Pop could have gotten into a fight on the way home, too. Like some said, he could find himself a fight in an empty house.

  I got caught with a bucket of chocolate ice cream under my T-shirt at the supermarket one afternoon. The manager called the police and they called a social worker. The Welfare was about to stop me seeing Pop, which meant my mum would have to quit work to take care of me, or give me up. But then she died, with no warning. She had a bad heart from the day she was born with some type of fever. She was always catching her breath between smoking plenty of cigarettes. She had been walking down the road after work at the egg factory with one of her sisters, my auntie Beryl, when Mum said to her, out of nowhere, We had good times when we were kids, didn’t we? Then she fell down in front of Auntie and was dead.

  The only way Pop could make sense of what happened was to blame himself. At the funeral he kneeled on the ground, grabbed two fists of dirt and shovelled them into his mouth, near choking himself. Some in the family were sure he’d gone crazy and tried to stop him, but then his older brother, Uncle Ronnie, stepped up to the grave, put his hands in the air and called out, Let him be with himself.

  Pop lay on his stomach, cried into the earth and screamed. He told the ground he was ashamed of all the drinking he’d done and was to blame for his youngest daughter dropping dead in the street. Ronnie kneeled down next to Pop and told him he wasn’t to blame at all. The years of drinking were his own doing, for sure, but it hadn’t made him responsible for my mother’s sick heart. The doctor at the co-op who signed Mum’s death certificate said her heart had been broken in childhood and no matter what anyone had done she’d have died anyway, sooner before later. Not a word of what the doctor or Ronnie said mattered to Pop. He made a decision to put the blame upon himself, which produced pain for him, but some good also. He gave up the drink that day and never went back to it.

  Pop soon found a way to get himself into a different kind of trouble. He’d march around town telling everyone, blackfellas and whitefellas both, that the grog was sinful, and people had no choice but to stop drinking if they were to become decent. His old mates quickly got sick of his preaching and threw empty beer cans at him and told him to Fuck off home when they saw him walking along the footpath. A couple of famous drunks, Salt and Pepper, who liked to call themselves a national reconciliation project, sat out front of the post office on the bottle most days. They went as far as to throw half a flagon of wine at Pop one time. The bottle smashed at his feet, staining the footpath red. When the police came to sort out the trouble, Salt and Pepper explained that Pop had driven them crazy with one of his sermons.

  Pop had lived on the church mission as a boy, and spent time out with the old men in the bush before and after. His newfound spiritual talk was a jumble of what he’d been taught back then and the Bible verses he picked up again after a fifty-year absence. He made no sense to most people, me included, but he could tell a good story and I never got tired of sitting by his feet listening to one. After he’d quit the grog the Welfare got off his back and I was given permission to spend time with him after school. He’d make us a cup of tea and we’d watch I Dream of Jeannie on the television.

  ‘That woman there,’ he’d say, ‘she’s very strong on the spiritual.’

  I didn’t miss an afternoon with him until the year he had a stroke. It stopped him from moving one side of his body. He couldn’t walk too well and could no longer speak properly. Auntie Beryl wanted to take care of him at home but struggled to keep up with the cooking, feeding and washing as well as going to work, even with me helping out.

  It was decided he’d need to go into the old people’s home beside the irrigation road that ran west out of town. Pop didn’t want to go and became so angry I reckon he would have taken to the drink again, only he couldn’t hold a glass in his hand without dropping it. He was miserable the day we had to leave him there, but when I saw him the week after he was as happy as he’d been in a long time. Blackfellas, yellowfellas and whitefellas, men and women, lived at the Home together. I’d never seen such a mixed-up mob. They all got on like family, singing songs and playing cards, the old boys telling dirty jokes, and the women doing each other’s hair.

  Pop loved the Home. Nobody was bothered too much about his rambling sermons. They enjoyed his company, even if a lot of what he said came out backwards. I enjoyed visiting him so much I’d head over straight after school most afternoons. We’d sit together until his dinner arrived, then I’d walk the mile back to Auntie Beryl’s for my own tea. Pop liked to take me by the hand, propping himself up with a walking stick, and lead me out to the garden. He talked slow and dribbled his words but I got used to it and could understand most of what he said. He told me about constellations and said that blackfellas all over the country had their own names for the stars and their own stories.

  One night he whispered a special story to me, slow and sweet, while tracing the location of each star on the back of my hand. It was a story I could tell no one, he said. My own story.

  ‘Not even other blackfellas?’ I asked him.

  ‘No one. It belongs to you now. Take care of it. There’s nothing more important to you than to remember which star belongs to you in the story. Right up there is your map,’ Pop said, pointing his stick into the sky.

  When I left that night the stars followed me down the road and along the bush track to Auntie Beryl’s front door. Later, I looked out of the window. They were all there, watching out for me. And I could hear Pop, whispering the story in my ear.

  The next weekend I was sitting with Pop in the dayroom and told him I was sure he was right, the stars were keeping an eye out for me, just like he’d said they would. He smiled and shrugged like it was no surprise to him at all. We worked together all afternoon, making our own Aboriginal flag – black, yellow and red – from coloured paper. Others in the room were making their flags too. Families all together. By the time we’d finished the floor was covered with scraps of coloured paper. I collected them and filled both pockets of my jeans. Pop closed his eyes a couple of times while we were sitting together. He’d worn himself out and asked if he could go to bed. I tucked him into his cot and gave him a kiss on the cheek. Afterwards, heading home, I skipped down the middle of the road, feeling happy, looking up at the stars.

  I was not far from Auntie’s place when I seen the Gunjis speed by, two coppers in the front seat and one in the back. I heard the car brake, looked around, and saw the car doing a U-turn. I started to run, like Pop had taught me, but I wasn’t fast enough. The police car pulled onto the side of the road and blocked my path. The driver got out and slammed the door. It was Camel. Everyone knew Camel, and no one, even the other police, had a good word to say about him.

  ‘Looks like you’re running from trouble,’ he said, hitching his pants up. I kept my eyes off him, looking down at the dirt until he poked me i
n the chest, real hard, and barked in my ear. ‘I’m talking to you, you half-caste cunt.’

  The other copper from the front seat got out of the car. He was a big young fella I hadn’t seen before. He smelled of the drink.

  ‘You been charging up?’ Camel asked me.

  I shook my head. ‘Nup. I’ve never done that.’

  ‘Fucken liar,’ he said. ‘All of you drink, young and fucken old.’ He grabbed me by the throat with a claw and shook me. ‘Liar.’

  I couldn’t breathe and wanted to cry.

  ‘We’ll have to take him in,’ the other copper said. ‘The kid needs a lesson.’

  Camel stopped shaking me, smiled and patted me on the cheek. ‘Yeah, why not?’ He put his arm over my shoulder. ‘Let’s head back to the station.’

  He pushed me in the back seat next to the third copper, who was sleeping, his mouth open, a bottle of grog in his hand. He woke and blinked across the seat at me like I was a mystery. Camel looked in the rear-view mirror as he drove. ‘This fella is our little mate. Don’t be a miserable cunt, Murphy. Share a drink with the boy.’

  Murphy grabbed me by the jaw with one hand and tried pouring the alcohol down my throat with the other. Some went into my mouth and I tried spitting it out. Some went over my front, and the rest in the copper’s face. He got angry and punched me in the mouth. I could taste blood, mixed with the grog. Camel called him off and they let me be until we were back at the lock-up. They walked me through the front office, one copper on each arm, with Camel marching out front like he was leading a lynching. Another copper, a lady sitting behind a desk, saw the blood on my face and the grog stains on my T-shirt. She stood up and was about to say something when Camel gave her a shut it look. She backed away and sat down. Camel grabbed hold of the keys swinging from his belt and opened a cell door. An old fella was in there, one of Pop’s mates, Corky, laying on the cement floor in his own vomit. Camel opened a second door. The cell was empty. He threw me inside.

  ‘Tidy yourself up,’ he screamed.

  The cell had no windows, only a rubber mattress on the floor and a toilet in the corner. I walked over to take a piss but saw the toilet was blocked. Messages had been scribbled on the walls, some written in shit, marking who’d been there before me and which copper was a NO GOOD DOG. Corky was moaning in the next cell. I sat down on the mattress, sure that when they came back the coppers would give me a good kicking. Or kill me. Pop had once told me there would be no place worse to die than in a police cell. If that was ever to happen, he told me, everything – his heart, his body – would be taken away from him.

  I was afraid and my body started to shake. It was then that Pop came to me and put a hand over my heart. He whispered the secret story in my ear one last time. As he spoke I began taking the pieces of scrap paper from my pockets, black, yellow and red. I chewed on each piece of paper, rolled it into a ball and stuck the dot to the wall. I had soon made a map of the sky. My own constellation. Pop’s and mine.

  I could hear Camel marching along the passageway towards the cell, followed by the others. The keys rang out like a broken school bell. I stood up and pressed my body to the wall, where my stars were dancing, where my story was waiting to be told.

  Camel unlocked the door. He was shocked to find the cell empty. He picked up the mattress and threw it against a wall. The big young copper got himself so wound up that he stuck his head in the toilet bowl, searching for the escapee. Murphy thought it looked so funny he laughed, pushed the toilet button and flushed his mate’s head. The pair began throwing punches. Camel ignored them. He had something more on his mind to deal with. He stood in the middle of the cell, scratched his head and said, ‘Fuck me, the kid’s vanished.’

  WORSHIP

  Lola inspected the room a final time, about to leave for the supermarket with a list. It wasn’t that Lola was particularly forgetful, just that she hadn’t shopped for a baby in close to thirty years. She looked up at the clock, nervous that she was running late. The morning ceremony had taken more of her time than usual. It was the third glass that did it. She’d long forgotten the medical term associated with her need to worship a cheap unopened bottle of red wine. Addictive association or cognitive association. Something like that. Maybe. She didn’t mind. The treatment worked, which was all that mattered. She had stood before the mantle in her pink dressing gown and matching slippers, focused on the wine as she commenced the morning ritual, envisioning herself picking up the bottle, unscrewing the lid and pouring herself a full glass. She watched as her doppelgänger downed the glass and poured a second drink. Lola had soon polished off the bottle. Some days she added a little excitement to the ritual by visualising herself smoking a cigarette, loud music coming from a speaker above the imaginary cocktail bar and a handsome half-drunk dance partner. With the ritual over, Lola showered and dressed, confident she’d get through another day without alcohol.

  Lola had never been religious, but a woman she met at an AA meeting told her that the reason she hadn’t had a drink for seven years was down to reciting five Hail Marys before she left the house each morning. ‘I swear by them,’ she’d claimed. Lola never had the time or patience for such a lengthy penance, but made a point of making the sign of the cross across her heart each time she closed the front gate and headed down the street, rationalising that it could not hurt her recovery.

  She turned the corner, walked by a park, and stopped at a red light at the intersection. A couple, a young man and older woman, had set up home outside the old hardware store. The shop had closed down the year before. The windows had since been whitewashed over, the front doors secured with a chain and heavy lock. A makeshift notice taped to the door warned passers-by to KEEP OUT. The frontage was favoured by the homeless during winter as there was no shopkeeper around to move people on. It was also well situated. Three doors down a new cafe had opened up that served a dozen different coffees, exotic teas and pastries. Men with beards, neck tattoos and pedigree dogs frequented the cafe and felt better about themselves after dropping a few coins in the bowl of someone sleeping rough for the night.

  Lola had once bought a box of nails from the old hardware store but when she took them home and opened the packet she discovered all the nail heads were missing.

  ‘That’s impossible,’ the beanpole of a shop assistant said, scratching his head when she returned to the shop and handed the packet across the counter. ‘Did you snip them off?’ he asked. It was as stupid a question as Lola had heard.

  ‘Why would I do that?’ she answered. ‘So I could come back here and get into an argument with you? Come on, kid. Just give me my money back and you keep the nails.’

  The boy did as he was told. Lola could be formidable when she needed to be, conjuring bad Lola from the old days.

  As she waited for the pedestrian light to turn green, Lola watched as the young homeless man, a broom in one hand and a pan in the other, swept scrap paper and cigarette butts from the footpath. A pair of single mattresses lay under the awning, a neatly folded blanket at the base of each. A large flat-screen television had been propped up against the shop window. The woman, reclined in a canvas chair, directed the young man chasing rubbish with his broom. She rolled up the sleeves of her grey windcheater and sat back to watch the morning traffic crawl by. She squinted an eye in Lola’s direction as she crossed the street.

  ‘Do you have a smoke on you, love?’ the woman called.

  Lola hadn’t enjoyed a cigarette since the day she quit alcohol. Not sure which addiction might trigger the other, she’d given up on both simultaneously.

  Lola stopped. ‘Sorry. I don’t smoke. Used to.’

  ‘Me too,’ the woman chuckled. ‘Now and then.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Lola repeated. ‘If I had one, I’d give it to you.’

  Lola kept walking on to the supermarket. She collected a basket and stopped at the end of each aisle to check through her list. She ticked off t
he baby wipes with the stub of an eyebrow pencil she kept in her pocket and paused at the disposable nappies, shelf after shelf of them. The list her daughter had provided didn’t specify either the brand or type of nappy. She settled on a twenty-four pack – 10 kilograms +. She gathered a few items not on the list, including a packet of sweet biscuits, Scotch Fingers. Lola was about to leave the supermarket, a bag of shopping in each hand, when she stopped at the counter. A teenage girl with a nose ring and pink dyed hair smiled at her. The girl wore a name tag – Astra.

  ‘Can I help you?’ Astra asked.

  ‘Yes. Some cigarettes please.’

  ‘What brand will that be?’

  Lola couldn’t remember a brand name. It didn’t help that cigarette advertising had been banned. Or that they were secured, like contraband, in locked cabinets behind the counter. She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I don’t know. Give me some of your regular cigarettes. Something that’s popular.’

  ‘You’re not a smoker?’

  ‘No. They’re not for me,’ Lola answered. ‘I’m buying them for somebody else.’

  Astra smiled. ‘That’s what the young kids say when they come in to buy cigarettes. They tell me they’re for someone else. A grandmother mostly. A grandmother at home who can’t get up here and buy her own. My nan would never have sent me down the street to buy smokes, even if she did smoke.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Can you believe it?’

  ‘Yeah, I can,’ Lola said. ‘Started smoking when I was twelve. Loved it.’

  ‘Really?’ Astra replied.

  Lola didn’t keep a wide social circle, but got out enough to know that anytime you made a comment to a person under eighteen they’d answer, Really?

  ‘Yeah, really. It’s shocking, isn’t it? What can I say?’

  Astra opened a cabinet door, brought out a packet of cigarettes and sat them on the counter.