Hoi Polloi

by Craig Sherborne

  And there’s my own grandfather—Winks’ dad, the barber. He was a no-hoper who drank himself to death. I’ve heard it from Heels’ own lips. He hit my grandmother till she was black and blue and nobody ever said he was a hori.

  What about me, taking trays into the phone box? Next they’ll be calling me a hori. Maybe I am. Maybe we’re secretly horis and hating them so no one will catch on that there’s brown in us. We probably have our own version of onions.

  Next time I meet a male adult hori I will shake his hand and address him as Sir as if he was one of us. I will address the men as Sir and the women as Mrs Whatever or Miss Whatever. I imagine myself saying it. It isn’t that easy to think of a hori as a Sir or Mrs or Miss. Especially the denim horis. Perhaps I can’t do it after all. It would be easier to go back to the way things were taught to me. I wish I’d never found Heels and Winks out. If only the next time I met a hori I could imagine spitting in his eye as normal.

  What are they saying over there about the doctor? Heels wants to fetch Dr Murchison. They’ve moved away from the bed for a hush-talk. “Oh, let him ask about the bruises,” she’s saying. “Dr Murchison will understand. He’s from the old school.”

  Dr Murchison. He won’t be fooled by my legs not working. He’ll have all sorts of tests and stethoscopes to check for feeling and expose my lie. I might never be able to lie again. And what a hiding I’ll get. “I can feel something,” I say in pretend pain. I shift my legs beneath the blankets and let out a groan of effort. Heels quick-steps to the bed. Winks strides to the opposite side and lifts the blankets. They sigh and make a phewing-whistling sound. “Darling,” she says kissing my forehead. Winks rubs the crown of my hair and says “That’s my boy. Move some more.”

  I raise and bend my legs, groan and wince, spurred on by the sighs and that’s my boy clucking. I’m lifted very tenderly to a sitting position, Winks’ hand for a chair-back. I relax into his hand, reassured, comforted, warmed. A shortbread and glass of milk are lifted to my lips. I nibble and sip and remind myself that I’m still acting, I’m not giving in to any love.

  To prove it, I’m going to run away. Tonight. I’m almost eleven, it’s time I stood on my own two feet. Winks left home at eleven—those timber yards and gravel pits and one roast potato for dinner Heels goes on about. It must be such a frightening thing and a lonely thing to do. But it seems to be admired in him, all part of having lived a life where you’ve worked hard and have the right to boast about it and criticise others for not having done the same.

  It is expected of me, leaving home, it’s obvious to me. For other boys the time will eventually arrive but for me the time is now. Heels and Winks have successfully weaned me. Is that what has happened? As horses are weaned I have been weaned: first by turning me against horis, then Heritage, and now by turning me against them. I’m ready to go, to step out into the world. I suppose there’s no to-do or ceremony about it. No teary goodbye or the like. Winks never spoke of ceremonies or a great to-do or teary goodbye for him. I just pack my bag and slip out, that’s probably the way I’m expected to go.

  Sydney’s a warm place. A cardigan, two shirts, some sin-glets, underwear, socks. Never that goat coat. Toothbrush. Toothpaste. The shoes I’m already wearing. It won’t all fit into my school satchel so I’ll put on my pants, the ones Heels calls my casual slacks, and wear my good pants, the ones for going out, under them, the ones Heels calls special. I’ll wear my cardigan under my windcheater. One shirt. One singlet. A pair of socks. One lot of underwear. No toothbrush or Macleans. I roll them up tight and stuff them in. An apple. Two apples to tide me over. How will I pay for food and for tickets? Someone will pay. Someone always pays. Has paid up till now. But now it will be different.

  There’s that donation money for the Celtic softball club in the beer mug on the Private Bar bar. It’s not going to be enough and it’s all in coins, heavy coins. The till money is hidden in those calico bags under Winks’ bedside for morning banking. Surely it’s not stealing, not in my case, my being his son. It’s more like initiative. What if it is stealing? Just a few notes out of those calico bags isn’t stealing. Some cigarette packs for trading with someone for something, for food.

  A few bottles of beer for trading or drinking? I can’t cart bottles of beers around. I’ll take a couple or three notes from the calico bag, and the softball club change no matter how heavy.

  A message to say goodbye, in my best handwriting: I’m leaving. Thank you for everything. Goodbye. I don’t put Love at the end of the message as a punishment for the beating and being made to wear the goat coat to the factory.

  Why don’t the trains stop? Every night they clitter-clatter past my bedroom window. They clitter-clatter past on the hour or thereabouts when the clock dongs ten, twelve, one, waking me pleasantly, but they’re not stopping. I stand on the platform, the only person, waving, shouting at the blur of steel boxes and tree-trunks but the blur shouts back an icy wind and then the platform goes quiet and the air settles on me with all the wet chill of a frost. Am I standing in the wrong place? No. This is Heritage Station, a stone’s throw from the hotel, the centre of town. This is the place where trains stop.

  They blur and shout past, blur and shout. I can’t keep awake any more. But I can’t quite fall asleep because of the awful cold. I sit on a slat bench, I lie on it but it’s just a damp bed of cold. I curl up in the doorway, pull up my legs. My eyelids keep closing, so heavy, they’re so heavy.

  “Wee fella. Up you go, wee fella.” The Senior Sergeant. His pyjama collars poke out from his scratchy-wool jumper. His breath is sleep-smelling breath, the way breath gets in the mornings.

  The hotel corridor. My eyelids open and close on Heels. She is kneeling, chin twitching with tearfulness. She is sucking and jutting, rifling through my satchel, the cigarette packs it contained stacked at her feet. The higher the stack grows— three storeys high—the louder she sucks the air.

  “Boys will be boys,” the Senior Sergeant says and thanks Winks for the crate of beer at his feet. Winks is holding me. He tosses me tighter into his chest for a better grip. His chest is warming me.

  Weaning? What’s all this nonsense about weaning?, Heels wants to know. It is morning. She’s jutting and scratching, saying that no one could be so stupid as to expect her to believe such tripe. You’re not a half-wit, are you? You’re supposed to be a clever boy for all your stutter speech. Too clever for your own good. Your weaning story is just that—a story, a cock and bull story, a load of hooey. They have never turned you against others, she says—horis or otherwise. They, as responsible parents, have simply told you the facts as they see them. Don’t try and make your own mother and father feel guilty for opening your eyes to the world. And never ever accuse them of driving you away—this so-called weaning business. As for your stealing, you are a little thief, young man, someone who stole cigarettes and then got it into his head that he should run away from home which is a kick in the teeth for her and a kick in the teeth for your father. No one could know what pain is till they are a mother who nearly died having their child and then are kicked in the teeth by that child running away from home. What shall they do!

  Perhaps a word with Dr Murchison is called for, merely to enquire about seeing someone, one of those psychiatrist types, Winks suggests. Never, Heels flares. Never, never, never. “I’d die from embarrassment. No son of mine needs a psychiatrist,” she says. No use in thrashing you, though she’d like to see it. What good has it done? They’ve decided to do the following: you will go to work after school with old Hugh McPherson washing bottles in the liquor store. You will learn some responsibility. You will learn to pull your weight. You want to make your own way in the world? Start at the bottom and work your way up. Start by washing bottles and flagons with Hugh McPherson. Now, give your mother a hug and say how sorry you are. A bit more convincing please. Now a kiss. A bit more meaningful please. That’s better. Eat your breakfast.

  Start at the bottom and work my way up. I have no inten
tion of starting at the bottom. I’m better than that. I have been given every advantage in life and have been given that advantage so that I would not have to start at the bottom like Heels and Winks. They themselves have always made that clear. Washing beer bottles and flagons for refilling—that’s old Hugh’s job. That’s all he’s good for. How can he be in charge of me?

  “Don’t go easy on the boy,” Winks orders Hugh, old Hugh with his gargling Scottish voice and purple scribble of veins on his nose and cheeks. He’s staff. He’s so bald I can see the thin brown baby-hairs sprouting on his shiny crown. Yet he’s telling me what to do, this old man with a solitary black strand of hair swept over his head and hooked over his ear and around his earlobe. He sweats and loses his breath just from saying hello to customers coming to the counter past the buzzing robotic eye.

  I sit on a crate in front of the bottle-washing contraption in the backroom. The air reeks of washed-out beer. Hugh instructs me to push a beer bottle onto each brush claw then to push this little button here and set the water awhisk. The glass is washed, rinsed, dried with a blow of hot air. When this red light here lights up, pull the bottles from the claws and place them upside down in this rack for refilling with beer.

  At first Hugh resents my presence. “Are they saying an eleven-year-old can do my job?” he grumbles. Yet clearly he enjoys bossing me. “Well don’t just sit there like the landed fucking gentry, get to work,” he orders because I work slowly, sulkily, in protest. After attaching each bottle to the contraption I pause, day-dream. I read the labels on cartons and crates stacked halfway to the ceiling and blend them with racehorse names from the newspaper to make more poems:

  Storm draught dashes the ragtag walker and the white horse that was Napoleon’s honour.

  “For Christ’s sake speed up lad. You’ll get me into fucking trouble with your go-slow,” complains Hugh.

  This man I’ve barely said a word to, who is neither my father nor a teacher nor a relative, is ordering me about. Ordering. He takes his red tartan thermos and stands at the counter pouring himself a lidful.

  I speed up my work as if in a race to fill the drying rack the fastest it has ever been filled. It will show Winks what a slouch shuffle-footed Hugh is as a washer and how cheerfully and efficiently I go about my job so that it’s hardly a punishment at all and therefore there’s no point in keeping me at it.

  “Slow down,” demands Hugh. “Do me out of a fucking job, would you?” But I don’t slow down. “Slow down,” he demands again. “Play the game lad.” I don’t slow down. “Lad-die, laddie, play the game. Play the game, lad. Come on, take a break. Take a break. Come have some coffee.”

  I’ve never tasted coffee. Hugh sits down on an upturned crate and pours splashes of coffee into his thermos cup-cap. The liquid smells and tastes sourly of liquorice yet has been heavily sweetened. My lips are sticky with sugar. After the first few bitter sips the flavour becomes more palatable.

  “Bet that fucking well slows you down,” Hugh sniggers with his jiggling belly. I take longer sips. Heat rises in my face not unlike the feeling I get from the trays in the phone box. I say as much to Hugh. “I f-f-feel like I d-do when I d-drink the d-d-dregs in the ph-phone box.”

  Hugh stops sniggering and swigging directly from his thermos. “So it was you after all, you little cunt. Folks nearly got fired over that.” His mouth purses into a grin. “Well there’s good Scotch whisky in that coffee lad, not fucken dregs. Good Scotch whisky.”

  I try to stand but my legs won’t let me. Hugh’s voice seems very distant and sometimes heard only in my left ear. Sometimes only in my right. “That’s slowed you down, hasn’t it lad? Ay, you sit there quietly and be at peace with the fucking world.”

  I hear buzzing—the robotic eye is buzzing. Hugh hobbles off in its direction. I must go up the stairs to bed. Are these my stairs? This ladder is very like my stairs. Up I go to bed. This is a landing with crates and cartons, it’s not my bedroom. Back down the ladder. Forget the ladder. I can make it to the ground in one stride. I step out. The ground is lifting up. Dark.

  Winks is slapping my face with his fingertips. I’ve woken to his crying and slapping and laughing that I’m not dead, that I’ve fallen all this way and barely have a mark on me. He is feeling my arms and legs again for breaks. None, he says. There seems to be no blood on my head, just a blue bump in my hairline.

  He bends forward to embrace me. Hesitates. Smells my breath. “He’s drunk. He bloody stinks of the stuff. He’s drunk,” he says, muttering at first then almost yelling.

  “There’s your mystery of the phone box solved,” Hugh is desperate to explain. “Little bugger stole my flu toddy right from under my nose.”

  AUSTRALIA IS AN ENGLAND OF New Zealand. If you sell a hotel for $400,000 and you are a pakeha, naturally you will want to leave Heritage. You will want to live somewhere else, want to graduate to a place that is bigger, more serious in the world scheme of things. A city, a great city. Is Sydney a great city? From Heritage it seems to be. Other people leave for England—the real England. Everybody leaves at some time, though they leave temporarily, a year or two of what is called O.E.—overseas experience—in the land where their grandparents or great-grandparents were born, rickety paupers, housemaids, labourers, miners, dockers, those we call ancestors.

  Ancestors. What do our kind, Heels, Winks and me, care about ancestors. Ancestors is hori talk. Only horis and snobs who want to trace themselves back to the Earl of somewhere or other care about ancestors. “What did ancestors ever do for us?” is our opinion of ancestors.

  Australia is our England. Ancestors left England for a better life, and we are going to Sydney where I myself was born. I am my own ancestor.

  “Someone’s leaving for greener pastures,” Mrs Quigley announces on my last day at school. She asks me to stand up in class and explain where, when and why we are going. She hasn’t warned me she would do this and surely she knows I hate standing up in front of people.

  “Up. Up,” she motions with her fingers as if stroking something. “Up. Up.”

  I get to my feet, hands clasped in front of me, trying to close myself off. Mrs Quigley repeats the question. “Now, where are you departing our fair shores for, and when and why?”

  After the fall from the landing a remarkable thing happened. When I sobered up from the bang on the head and the fog of the drink and said my first sentence—“Sorry. I’m sorry.”—the words came out of my mouth clear, with no false starts. The two sorrys had one Seach, not three or four. No stutter. My stuttering disappeared. It’s cured. Dr Murchison has never heard the like. The only trace is a vague, whistly lisp. I’ve never known such happiness. It’s probably not even happiness but a feeling far greater. I can be happy eating the crisp rind from bacon or on Sundays when the hotel is closed and the bars and rooms are silent and empty and mine all to myself. But this is a feeling that swells inside me with such pressure it takes my breath away, it makes me want to laugh though nothing funny has happened, and cry as if suffering from sheer pleasure.

  On the day my stuttering died I vowed to speak as often and as loud as possible all those once feared words with the Fs and Ths, Ss and Ps. I rattled off “feather, father, system, slice of pickled pepper” to Heels and Winks, running on the spot with excitement. Heels hugged me so tight into her bosom my new, pure speech was momentarily muffled and I strained impatiently to get away. And Winks’ eyes—I’m sure they were wet. He turned his face from me and gripped the back of a chair. His shoulders quaked. I skipped around my bedroom saying, “fans and farmers thick as thieves in sport and pirates” as Heels and Winks settled into bickering.

  Her: “We all have me to thank for this. If I hadn’t insisted on elocution lessons he’d still be jabbering.”

  Him: “It was his fall.”

  “I’m not interested in any fall thank you very much.

  Elocution lessons.”

  “He’s been having those lessons for a bloody year.”

  “And now
they’ve finally paid dividends.”

  “He was drunk from stealing from Hugh’s flask and fell off the landing, love.”

  “I don’t want to talk about that.”

  “And it was him in the bloody phone box.”

  “I can’t bear it. The embarrassment. It’s all around town.

  As far as I’m concerned none of it ever happened. My son no longer stutters because of elocution lessons.”

  Her eyes had narrowed as if fighting back tears. No tears came. She buried her fingernails deep into her stiff hair-do and scratched it in time with her heavy breathing. The scratching made a static sound come crackling out of her scalp. She spoke to Winks through clenched teeth. “If you’re so clever then, then, then … what else has the bang on the head cured? Has it cured his being ungrateful? Has it cured his foul-mouthed manners? Or just singled out his stuttering? How nice for him.”

  Winks: “Leave it out, love.”

  “When have you heard him ever thank me? Thank me for elocution lessons, for the lovely clothes, for slaving my guts out in this God-forsaken place? I’ve done everything for him.”

  “This is a big moment for him. Let’s not spoil it.”

  “This miraculous bang on the head, has it cured him from writing left-handed? Has it?”

  I skipped in circles, chanted my Ss and Ps. She grabbed my left hand—“Stop that ridiculous dancing. Stop it and shut up!”—and pinched the string tied to my index finger and held up my hand by this thread. “Has it cured this? Has it? Has it?”

  She pointed me to the chair at my corner desk by the window. “Sit. Sit. Pen. Get a pen.” She pushed me aside, fingered out a slip of paper from the desk pigeonhole and snapped it down in front of me. I held a pen in my hand waiting for instructions. “See?” she hissed to Winks. She gripped my hand, my left hand which held the pen, and shook it. “He still picks up the pen with his left hand. He hasn’t been broken of it.” She snatched the pen out of my hand so fiercely that saliva bubbled in front of her bared teeth and I flinched expecting a blow. She prised the pen into the fingers of my right hand. “Open your paw. Open your paw.” She took a step backwards.