by Gary Crew
‘Yes,’ Lootie said, ‘in a fortnight.’
She had told him this before, but evidently he had been too taken by her to listen.
‘So you will be teaching there then?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ Lootie agreed, the very model of patience. ‘At Michael’s school. St Xavier’s.’
‘Perhaps,’ Chanteleer said (his tone sly, provocative), ‘you might like to take me with you one day. For show and tell?’
Lootie’s face lit up. She brought the hand that held her lemonade to her lips. ‘Oh yes please,’ she said. And then glancing at Michael, ‘If that would be all right?’
I can’t say that Michael was overcome, but he smiled in a professional I’ll-think-about-it kind of way, and said, ‘Well, I should be going. It is Sunday, after all. School tomorrow…Thanks Sebastian, and Alice, we’ll be in touch.’
He neither looked at me, nor said a word to me when he turned to re-enter the crowd.
‘What a nice chap,’ Chanteleer remarked. ‘I’ll speak to Eve about my coming to his school. I’m sure that a visit from me will look good on your report. And how is uni going?’
Assuming that I was invisible (how, with my bulk?), I took the hint and wandered off. I’d had nothing to eat (or to drink for that matter) and the grog was free.
‘I talked to Eve,’ I said on the way home. ‘His publicity girl. She wasn’t stuffy at all.’
We were in the back of the cab. It had been a big day and I couldn’t tear Lootie away. She was always in a huddle, or someone was yapping to her. And I don’t mean Chanteleer, though he did take the lion’s share. So now she was tired and cranky and her white linen dress was creased and stained where someone had spilled something on her. Tomato sauce, it looked like, although it couldn’t have been, because Chanteleer didn’t serve tomato sauce at his garden party. Nor sausage rolls. Nor saveloys. Nor children, but I have already mentioned that.
‘Who said she was stuffy?’ Lootie wanted to know as she wound down the window. ‘It wasn’t me who said she was stuffy.’
I understood that she was tired and I didn’t want to stir her up, so I said, ‘Nobody said she was stuffy. I just thought that she might be, after seeing her that time at the Redmond Barry. In a black suit and stilettos. And her red lipstick. And working for him, I suppose.’
In spite of my good intentions, evidently this was the wrong thing to say.
‘Him?’ Lootie said, turning to face me ‘Who’s him?’
‘You know who I mean,’ I said.
‘Then say his name,’ she said. I spotted the cabby looking at me in the rear-vision mirror. ‘He might be famous, but he’s still human.’
I said no more.
6
I made a stir-fry that night because it was easy. Then we watched TV. Things turned out better than I expected. We watched some comedy show that seemed to amuse Lootie and soon we were both laughing. Better still, when we went to bed, she wanted to talk.
‘What did you say to Eve?’ she asked, trailing her finger across my chest.
‘I asked her if she thought I was hot,’ I said.
‘Yeah, sure. And did you tell her about your sexy XPress uniform? Huh?’
She knew I hated myself in that uniform but I let it pass. ‘I asked her about her job,’ I said. ‘What she did for Chanteleer, that kind of thing’
‘And?’
‘Why? Do you want her job?’
‘Ha, ha,’ she laughed, pulling a hair out of my chest.
So we talked for a while, until I realised that she had fallen asleep.
About midnight I was still staring at the ceiling, fretting about my future, like would I ever leave XPress and become a famous writer like Chanteleer and have Lootie’s respect but I got sick of that so I grabbed a cask of red and a glass, took a blanket off the sofa to put around my shoulders, and went to sit under the elm. It was nice out there, not too cold and the street quiet. I was settling in to a good session when I noticed a glow coming from a vacant allotment between the houses down from where the little boys lived, in the direction of Ho’s Chinese.
The glow filled the allotment, its yellow light rising from the ground where it was brightest, to fade into the black of night about level with the roof tops. I thought maybe some hoboes had made a fire there, and leaned forward for a better look. But there were no flames flickering against the walls either side, so I stood, and shuffled forward until I reached our stone wall.
Being closer and higher, I could see some sort of ladder, maybe a climbing frame, as in a children’s playground, standing in the middle of the allotment. I could see every rung so plain that I could count each one (there were nine) from the longest at the bottom to the shortest and highest, way up in the dark.
I couldn’t make out what held this structure up. As I said (or as it appeared to me), the thing was standing in the middle of the allotment, rising out of the glow, the uprights apparently unsupported.
I took a grip of my glass and climbed over the wall onto the footpath to take a better look. I must have been unsteady on my feet (already pissed?) because I tripped on my blanket and fell in the gutter. I managed to hold my glass high, and didn’t break it or spill too much, but when I got up, the light was gone, and the ladder, so I picked up my blanket and went to bed.
The next week was pretty average. I went to work on Monday (a bit hungover) and Friday, with uni in between.
I liked uni. I liked to sit in the big lecture theatres surrounded by hundreds of people that I didn’t know and who didn’t know me. I liked to have intelligent and articulate academics lecture to me. I liked to hear their words wash over me, sometimes filling me up until I could cry with what I’d learnt.
Sometimes this happened when I was at St Finbar’s, all those years ago. I remember Father Steven, who was young and earnest, giving us boys sermons about ‘Keeping the Faith’, and ‘The Temptations of the Devil’. St Finbar’s was not a rich school, but it did have a stone chapel, which was vaulted and cool, and I would kick off my shoes and put my feet flat on the stone floor to feel the cool creep up through my socks. I would sit alone, off to one side, so chapel could be my dreaming time.
As I have said, St Finbar’s was not rich, but above the altar was a stained-glass window showing Jesus with little children. This window had been donated by the Kelly family whose boy Joseph had drowned. It said so on a plaque in front of the altar. The plaque also said, ‘In Paradise’, and on another line, ‘Lamented’, which made no sense to me because why would the Kellys lament if little Joe had gone to paradise? There were several things about that window that made a boy think. The eternal fate of Joe Kelly was just one.
Another was, ‘Suffer little children to come unto Me’, the words written beneath the feet of Jesus. Why did little kids have to suffer to come to Him? Couldn’t they come to Him if they were happy? But if you did have to suffer to come to Him, this made me think that I was better off living alone with my mother who was always broke, rather than being like other kids whose parents had money. Even Rory’s father worked in a factory.
And why did Jesus have white feet and a pink face and yellow hair? If He came from over there, and Jews had black hair, how come He didn’t?
These things may sound naïve, even childish (which of course they are, since I was a child), but they have shaped me, remaining with me, creating the persona that lives in my body, who inhabits my mind. And so I accept them (though I struggle with my body, my fat, my flab) and think on them again and again, remembering that chapel was always a good place to dream, or imagine, if you like. It was good to lose myself in a stained-glass window. In the pictures I mounted in my mind.
Sometimes I would stare at the face of Jesus (He was handsome), imagining what my life would be like if I had a father. Especially if my father had yellow hair. My life would be different, I knew. I wouldn’t have a mother with black hair and a moustache. I would have a blonde mother and blondes were sexy. All the ads said that. My life would be different because m
y sexy blonde mother and maybe my yellow-haired father (wearing a business suit or a white shirt and tie), would walk me to school and stop at the gate, and give me a little box with my lunch packed inside and bend down to kiss me. And Father Steven would see us and smile and take my hand and lead me into class. That’s what I dreamed in chapel. Imagining my life. Imagining how my life might be.
But one week Father Steven didn’t turn up; some sour old priest came in his place, and that night over dinner my mother told me that one of her clients had told her that Father Steven had yielded to the devil and left the Church. That he was a whited sepulchre.
I looked down into the pile of mashed pumpkin on my plate, all fiery orange, and saw this temptation very clearly. There was Father Steven in his brown robe, with his wavy blond hair and straight nose, being tempted by a red-skinned devil with black horns stepping out of a mountain of flame. This devil was holding out to Father Steven a chest full of golden coins and Father Steven was smiling.
It was only after my mother died and I was wandering around Victoria Markets one Saturday morning that I saw Father Steven again. This time he was in jeans and a T-shirt pushing a baby in a pram and talking and laughing with a goodlooking blonde on his arm. She was also wearing jeans and a T-shirt. Blind Freddy could see that they were in love, and happy. Which made me think about chapel, and whited sepulchres, and what I had believed to be true was probably not.
So years later I sat in uni lectures alone and thought long and hard about what was told to me. What was preached there, if you like, although not preached exactly. I had never considered myself an intellectual but I did hive away what I thought might prove valuable.
One afternoon, after a very long day of lectures, I came home busting for a beer.
I kicked off my shoes and when I rearranged the cushions on the sofa I saw a pile of books. Putting my beer on the occasional table, I saw that these were all novels by Sebastian Chanteleer. I sure as hell wasn’t in the mood for him, but something made me stop and take another look. For a start, not one of the books was new. Their dust jackets were torn around the edges, the designs old fashioned. ‘Corny’ was a word that came to mind, what with their images of armoured knights brandishing lances and swords in the fire-breathing faces of triple-headed dragons.
I plonked myself down, ripped my beer, and read a bit of one.
I fell asleep.
‘How come my books are on the floor?’ Lootie wanted to know when she got home.
‘Guilty!’ I yelled from the kitchen. ‘I must have dropped them.’
‘Those books are expensive,’ she said. ‘You need to take more care.’
‘Expensive?’ I said, coming into the living room. ‘They look pretty tatty to me.’
‘Tatty?’ she yelled. ‘Tatty? I bought these off the net. Every one is a first edition. Complete with dust jackets, see?’
‘Sorry,’ I said.
‘So you should be,’ she shot back. ‘They cost money.’
I worked too hard for XPress Couriers to let this pass. ‘I thought your money was my money and my money was your money,’ I said. ‘Wasn’t that the deal?’
‘You’re pathetic,’ she said. ‘You have no idea of the value of anything.’
‘I value my time,’ I said. ‘Especially the time I spend on that bike.’
‘Get used to it,’ she said, reverentially stacking Chanteleer’s books. And she shot me a look saying, You’ll never amount to anything.
I did not respond. Why deny it? I was a fat-arsed Monkey Boy, born and bred. The truth was, I probably loved Lootie all the more for reminding me. For affirming who I was.
That weekend, the Saturday after the garden party, we were both at home working when I noticed the VISA receipt for Chanteleer’s books lying on Lootie’s desk. The price was $232.
‘Lootie,’ I said, ‘those books you bought cost heaps.’
I thought she’d bite, but she didn’t. ‘I need them for prac school,’ she said. ‘Sebastian said he might come to my class, you know. I’m going to read parts of them to the boys. Like preparation.’
‘But aren’t there cheaper ones?’ I asked. ‘Paperbacks, from the bookshop down the road? Or Jimmy’s secondhand?’
‘You wouldn’t understand,’ she said.
Since this was the week leading up to her prac at St Xavier’s, I let this pass, figuring that she had a lot on her mind. Besides, while I wasn’t happy about the amount Lootie had paid for Chanteleer’s crappy books, I loved the other stuff that she brought home to prepare for her prac: the coloured paper, the glue and wax pastels. I didn’t care how much that cost.
When I saw her cutting out the shapes of the animals that she was going to get the kids to fill with coloured cellophane and stick on the windows (like stained glass, my favourite), I wondered if I should have been a teacher too. I liked kids—the ones over the road and the brother and sister I met in Ho’s—but I never had the opportunity to get to know them. I thought about that. Maybe it wasn’t the kids that I liked so much, since I never met them, but more the idea of returning to childhood that attracted me, especially if I had stuff like Lootie brought home to play with.
I never really had much chance to play like that when I was a kid. As I’ve said, my mum expected me to be satisfied with the buttons and bits of fabric and hat blocks that littered the floor around her work table. I know this lack of store-bought toys led me to make my own fun, and that’s considered a good thing nowadays, but it would have been nice to be like other kids once in a while and be able to invite a friend home to play (which I hardly ever did), other than Rory, and he only wanted Mum’s biscuits.
But I do remember one Christmas when I had been going on and on about getting a cricket bat with a proper sprung handle. I need to say up front that I never believed in Santa Claus because that myth had been knocked out of me in infancy. ‘Santa Claus is a lie,’ my mother said. ‘A lie invented to keep rich kids happy. I’m your Santa Claus and you can only have what I can afford.’
So I never expected to get this cricket bat, but that Christmas morning, I did—not in a pillow case hanging from the mantelpiece (that would be too silly, for my mother, at least) but around mid-morning when Mum was having a cuppa and a piece of the boiled fruit cake that she liked, she said, ‘Charlie, there’s a parcel for you behind that bolt of black shantung in my workroom. It’s Christmas, you know.’
It’s important that I say we did celebrate Christmas. It’s important I establish that my childhood wasn’t all penny-pinching misery and Catholicism. At Christmas, for example, Mum cooked a chook that she bought from Mr Percy, who lived over the back. Old Perc had a chook house butting on to our fence. He kept Rhode Island Reds and Australorps and a couple of cranky bantams. Sometimes, when I was bored, I went down to stand at his fence and look through. The palings were unpainted and weathered silver. Along the edge were splinters, much like the heavy-duty needle Mum put in her sewing machine if she was working on a thick fabric, or maybe a hat with a leather trim. I could pull off a splinter by hooking my fingernail over the end and dragging it down.
To my mind these splinters were daggers, or sabres, or the spears needed to pin down the chook’s feathers that drifted into our yard. The feathers were red and brown, sometimes black or white, and when they were stuck on the top of one of the splinters, I pushed it in the dirt at my feet to make an Indian graveyard (or lunar landing site, or African village, depending).
I sometimes buried grasshoppers there, or beetles. Once a mouse that Mum had caught in a trap and I stuffed into a matchbox that I used as a coffin. The matchbox lid said the brand of matches was ‘Redheads’ so I figured Indians would like that.
Christmas morning Mum and I would go down the back and Old Perc would hand over one of his birds, alive and squawking, its legs tied with twine. Mum gave him a couple of dollars.
When she had the chook by the feet, and was holding it at arm’s length (so it couldn’t peck), Mum told me to get the tomahawk from beside the
copper boiler in the laundry. (Nobody else had a copper boiler. Ours was a legacy of that boiled-and-starched country cleanliness that Mum brought with her from the bush.) ‘Look the other way Charlie,’ she said (which I did, sort of) and she slapped the chook’s head on the block that she used to split chips for the copper and brought the tomahawk down with a whack.
Come dinner time, Mum would serve the bird up on a plate along with baked potatoes and pumpkin. We had canned peas on the side.
The Christmas that I wanted the cricket bat promised to be the best of all. Behind the bolt of shantung (just as well I knew my fabrics), I found a long, thin parcel done up in red cellophane, with a piece of green ribbon tied around it. (I’d seen this same ribbon on Mrs Faulk’s hat in race week, the month before.) When I took the parcel into the kitchen and untied it on the table, there was my cricket bat with a spring.
It was Rory Whittaker who pointed out to me, when I took the bat over for a hit that afternoon, that it wasn’t a ‘proper’ bat. He was only too pleased to show me that the V shape where the handle was spliced into the blade was only painted on and that the bat was no more than a lump of pine (even a fence paling), which made me wonder if that couple of dollars Mum handed over to Old Perc really was for our Christmas chook, or the bird plus a little more.
‘You been sold a crock, Monkey Boy,’ Rory said, laughing at my tears. ‘This bat’s a fake.’
I never did tell my mother this because I knew that she had given me all she could afford and I should be satisfied with that. But when Mum died, I chucked the bat out. I put it in the wheelie bin with her hat blocks and a million other childhood memories that brought me grief. Which is why I said to Lootie, ‘Do you want a hand with that stencil-cutting?’ since it looked like fun.
7
That first Monday of Lootie’s prac I woke up to see her standing in front of her open wardrobe. She was wearing a pair of cotton knickers.
‘What do you think?’ she said, turning to me as I lounged on my pillow.