by Peter Twohig
Mario didn’t speak, just looked around and gave me his hanky, which was clean, folded and pressed. It was the first time I had ever seen a boy with a clean hanky. No wonder he looked around first.
‘Who did this to you, Blayney? I’ll thump him for you.’
‘No one. I’m just … unhappy.’ No point telling him I was actually feeling quite good.
He put his arm around my shoulder and walked me the short distance to his home. I kept on crying; I felt no urge to stop. He took me through the front door, and several curious faces appeared at interior doorways, but no one said anything. When we reached the lounge room, there was an Italian record playing, something happy and silly, and a kid accompanying it on a piano accordion. I looked up, uncaring, and saw a boy with flashing eyes and a red and silver accordion the size of a Volkswagen. The music kept on going, as if it was the accordion that was playing him, and his eyes reflected loss to me. Mr Camponi raised his voice in a controlled way, so as not to spoil the recital.
‘Mama.’
Mrs Camponi appeared and pushed Sidewinder away.
‘What’d you do to ’im?’
‘Nothin’, Mum, I found him out in the street.’
‘Stop the music! Can’t you see he doesn’t like it? Now, you just sit here until you feel better.’
Mr Camponi stopped the record player, and the accordion player stopped playing, but his eyes kept flashing. I cried for another minute, though no one was bothered by it, not even me. I no longer cared about appearances. What a place I’d picked to turn into a baby: I reckoned I was washed up as a Cobra. Some other kid would get to call himself Python. It didn’t matter. Mrs Camponi sat with me and put her arm around me. She didn’t try to dong me or tell me to shut up. And when someone new appeared, to gawk at the freak, she shooed them away, the way you shoo chooks. She allowed the TV to be switched on, with the sound down low, and nothing more.
When I felt that there was no more crying to be done I stopped and looked around. The family responded by suddenly shifting into a higher gear, as if they had a special plan for the sudden appearance of crybabies, and they’d practised it a thousand times. It suddenly began to rain piano accordions, Gerry Gee appeared on the TV in front of us wearing a Richmond football jumper, and from another room I heard Buddy Holly singing ‘It Doesn’t Matter Anymore’. Mr Camponi started laughing. I have no idea why.
‘Come into the kitchen and talk to me while I cook,’ said Mrs Camponi. ‘It helps me.’
So we went into the Magic Kitchen, and I told her everything, except for the bits about Granddad, Uncle Seamus, Flame Boy, his dad, the Sandersons, the Creepy Crawleys, and the Briefcase of Mystery.
‘You needa a girlfriend,’ she finally said, stirring something in a way that made Mrs Sanderson look like an amateur, and a skinny one at that.
‘I’ve got one.’
‘So her name’s a big secret or something?’
‘Mona,’ I said quietly.
‘It’s Mona De Coney,’ shouted a girl’s voice, off stage.
I was too tired to be surprised. My normally unreliable brain told me that Tina and Mona probably went to school together.
‘Francesca De Coney’s daughter? Ho-o-o!’ She shook her hand as if it was hot, only in slow motion. ‘Better get used to crying. She’s a go breaka you heart one day.’
Sidewinder stuck his smiling face around the door.
‘She’s a gunna breaka you heart. Ha ha.’
Great.
Mrs Camponi was one of those ladies who asks a lot of questions, then answers a lot of them herself, like Mona and her Aunty Lucky, though I wouldn’t call Mona a lady. I was beginning to wonder if it was something that Italian girls and ladies did. If so, I had made a major discovery. But then I remembered that Mrs Esposito did not answer her own questions, and she was Italian too. But then, she didn’t ask any to begin with. She always knew what was going on in the house, and even outside it, in the world, even though she was home cooking all the time, because of all the babies, and because her family was the size of a small army. The way I look at it, if Mrs Esposito had been fighting against the Australians in Africa, we would have been done like a dinner.
Actually, Mrs Camponi only wanted to know two things: everything about Mona De Coney and me, and Granddad’s phone number. When I told her the phone number she immediately put down her cooking things, and said: ‘Cumma with me.’
We went down the hall to a phone stand, and she rang our phone number.
‘Pronto? Mrs Blayney? Ah Mrs Blayney, this is-a Mrs Camponi — Gabriella Camponi. It’s all right: he’s at our place … Oh, he knowsa my son, Mario … He comes here to play … We live in Yorkshire Street … Yes, that’sa right! We would like him to stay for tea, if it’s all right with you…. My husband Vincent will drive him home … Oh good … Tonighta we have justa gnocchi and pizzaiola. He like. You no worry. He’s a lovely boy. ArriverderLa. Good-bye.’
She turned to me.
‘Your mama is a lovely woman. I tell her not to worry. I ask her if you can stay for tea. I tell her my husband will drive you home. I tell her we have gnocchi and pizzaiola for tea. I tell her you a lovely boy. She say is all right.’
I felt like I was on Mars, which is how I always feel around at the Espositos’: there’s a lot of red stuff everywhere, and noise and fantabulous smells. The place is a lot like Luigi’s, only the lady in charge is shaped like a balloon full of water and has a kind voice, while Mrs Esposito is skinny and little, but has a voice like a sergeant-major.
I thought of the phone call I just heard (twice) and wondered if Mum actually understood all of it. I wondered if she really did want Mr Camponi to drive me home, or just keep me at his place, or simply drop me off at the nearest orphanage. I had become The Boy Who Runs Away. But I had also become the boy who was getting gnocchi and pizzaiola for tea. What a clever spy I was!
But then I thought of Flame Boy, sitting alone in the dark, and I hoped he had found the victuals, and hadn’t been run over by a train, or drowned in a drain, or fallen down a hole, or got lost, or been eaten by rats. And I thought of Mrs K, stuck in the blind people’s home that was, according to Barney, as dry as a nun’s bath mat, with no television to listen to, and no possibilities of having any fun that didn’t involve brushes, and horrible grey socks that Mum wouldn’t be caught dead in. And Mr K, ducking out of sight every two minutes, so he wouldn’t be locked up in the loony bin again — in a fireproof cell — and not even getting to spend time with his son, who was probably the only kid in Richmond desperate to find his old man. The Spirit of Progress was sick with worry about his nemesis, his nemesis’s father and his nemesis’s mother.
41 Bodgie socks
When Mr Camponi dropped me off at home, the first person I met was Granddad. He was waiting out on the verandah for me, sitting on the seat that he and Nanna used to love sitting on together. It was one of those perfect summer nights, when you can smell the air. That night it was a mixture of the garden, which I had taken over as Head Weeder since Nanna died and Granddad went troppo in it, Richmond Hill Panel Beaters down Lyndhurst Street, which you could smell day and night, weekday or weekend, and Melbourne itself, which had its own special air, a bit off but a bit friendly as well.
As I sat beside him on the bench and looked across the road to the wide lawns of the grand house there, I thought about how much I didn’t want to go inside. Since leaving Raffi’s house I had simply allowed myself to be carried along by the stream of events, like a dead dog in the river. I’d had no intention of actually making any decisions, not then or at any other time.
Now, I was sitting outside Granddad’s house, and it was Sunday night, and everything was in a mess. I wanted Tom to come back. I was tired of him not being there, which for me was a new feeling. Up to now I had been able to pretend that Heaven was a place, and that there were ways you could come back from it to visit, even if I knew deep down that you really couldn’t. But now I saw that there were no ways of coming back
and it was more like Tasmania, an island in the middle of nowhere. That was why I wanted him to come back: because it was impossible. And I was angry at God, who had proven time and time again that he was my true nemesis and, in the Nemesis Handicap, could not be handicapped out of the running, because it was he who decided what weights the runners would carry.
Thus, my old earthly nemesis, Wonder Woman, was handicapped by being basically unhappy with her husband Ken (who I had once seen threaten to bash her) and, as far as I could tell, unhappy with life itself (though she had my sympathy there); and my current nemesis, Flame Boy, was handicapped by being a chuckle short of a kookaburra, and having a social disease (I admit it, but only to myself) that needed attention quick smart; while I myself was handicapped — Was I a nemesis? Probably — by being a twin without a brother, not to mention being a nutcase and a pest. My head hurt. I punched my palm. I punched it again. Granddad placed his hand on my fist, to stop me.
‘Did I ever tell you about the time I got buried alive at Gaza?’
I cast my mind back to the war stories I’d heard from Granddad. There was the time he charged the guns at Beersheba, and frightened the life out of the Turkish machine gunners, who’d wished they’d reported in sick that day. And there was the time he saved all the horses from drowning, and took them ashore, even though half of them were blown to bits by mortars. And there was the time they nicked General Bill Grant’s horse and gave him a draught horse to ride, which had almost cost him his corporal’s stripes. But I couldn’t remember him being buried alive. It sure sounded good, but.
‘No, I don’t think you ever told us that one.’
‘Well, after I saved them horses at Gaza — you remember that, don’t you? — we jumped on ’em and charged the town from the sea; but we got nowhere, so we had to take cover in a ditch, while the Turks killed our flamin’ horses with machine guns. I jumped into a bloody great bomb crater and was stuck there all day and all night. There was already a bloke in the crater and he had been hit by a mortar round — he was dying. We chatted about this and that, as you do when you’re in the middle of a battle and getting the shit kicked out you. He said his nickname was Polly.’
‘Like your poetry name.’
Granddad had written a lot of poetry in his life and his poetry name was Polly Beer.
‘Now you know where I got the name from. Anyway, the Turks kept us pinned down all night by firing off parachute flares, so everything was lit up like day, and none of us could move unless we felt like getting shot. But the mortars kept on falling. The next morning I woke up to find I had been buried in dirt and was being dug up —’
‘Like a zombie —’
‘Yeah, like a zombie. And some Aussies dragged me out of the crater and carried me away. When we got to a safe place, the mortars started again. Turned out I had a broken leg.’
‘What happened to the other bloke?’
‘He got buried too; he’s still there, I reckon. He died in the night, while I was talking to him. It was soon after that they gave me the medal.’
It was the Distinguished Conduct Medal. He once showed it to me and Tom.
‘For saving the horses.’
‘That, and a few other things. Anyway, the point of the story is that every now and then something terrible will happen to you. But it doesn’t stop you continuing to live your life. It just changes the shape of things a little bit from then on.’
‘Like you busting your leg: it still hurts.’
‘No, it’s me hip that hurts, and I was born with that. No, I’m talking about getting dug up by those Aussies. They could just as easily have dug up the other bloke instead, and not even known I was there. Or I could’ve got me leg blown right off, and then I’d never have boxed. See? That was a bad day and night, and yet here I am.’
‘Bloody Turks!’
‘That was a long time ago. You know Mr Mustafa down the shop? He’s a nice bloke, isn’t he?’
‘Yeah. Mrs Mustafa makes fantastic lollies — you’d kill for one, Granddad.’
‘They’re Turkish. So no more of that “bloody Turks” stuff. That war ended over forty years ago.’
‘I always thought you hated ’em.’
‘Never, not even when I was in Palestine. Great horsemen, not like us — real lancers. So, where’ve you been, visiting your girlfriend?’
‘Nah, having din-dins with the Camponis.’
‘And how are Vinnie and Gabbie, these days?’
‘You know ’em?’ It was hard to believe, but then again, not really.
‘D’ja see that Admiral TV of theirs?’
‘Don’t tell me it fell off the back of a truck!’
‘I’m not telling you anything. I’m just asking if you saw it.’
‘It’s going like a bought one.’
‘Another happy customer. And Italians have lots of relatives. That means more TVs.’
I got an idea, one of my better ones.
‘Why stop at TVs, Granddad?’
‘I never did, young feller.’ He gave me a nudge with his elbow.
‘Now, you still haven’t told me how that boxing lesson went.’
‘I broke Oby’s nose and got into heaps of trouble. Brother Timothy — he’s the Head Brother — said the moment the Archbishop dies I’m gunna cop it. He mentioned your name … and he said all kinds of nasty things about our family.’
‘I remember that bloke from when he was just another young troublemaker heading for a life of hard labour. I think he’s forgotten where he came from.’
‘Where did he come from?’
‘From the arsehole of Melbourne, boy: Collingwood. I can see I’m going to have to remind him.’
‘Granddad, you won’t make things worse for me, will you?’
‘Never. I’ll always be in your corner, boy. Now, changin’ the subject, a box of these fell off a truck just near here, and I managed to get a pair. All the young blokes are wearing ’em. D’ya want ’em?’
I looked into the brown paper bag he offered me. Inside was a pair of lime-green socks — Day-Glo — that were so bright I swear one of them was still alive. I was pretty sure they were bodgie socks, but I wasn’t going to tell that to Granddad, as I knew he had a low opinion of bodgies, and I wanted those socks like Bugsy wants carrots. The problem was, I couldn’t wear them anywhere in Australia without drawing more attention to myself than a bushranger in a bank queue, and it was necessary for my roles as the Spirit of Progress and special agent of the Olympians that I keep a low profile at all times. For example, if I turned up at school with them on, I would probably be burnt at the stake, Archbishop or no bloody Archbishop.
‘Jeez, thanks, Granddad. They’re bewdies.’
‘Now, let’s go inside and say hello to your mother. She’s been worried sick about you.’
I must have given him one of those looks.
‘Don’t look at me like that. You think I don’t know what you’ve been going through for the past year, but I’ve got a pretty good idea. And you don’t know what your mother’s been going through. Losing a child is a terrible thing for a woman. I’d rather it had been me who’d died, to save you both the pain. I mean that. And I think she was just starting to mend when this happened.’
‘But Dad’s shot through before.’
‘I wasn’t talking about that, though that’s another thing. That’ll work itself out in good time. There’s more, and she’ll tell you about it when she’s ready. The main thing for you to know is that she loves you: you’re all she’s got. She wants to tell you, but she misses Tom even more than you and me put together. You know, when she was a kid, I let her down. I wasn’t there a lot. Her mum, your nanna, wasn’t there most of the time either, because she was in and out of those TB hospitals for years. I think your mum’s got a right to be angry. But she’s not angry at you. Now go on.’
He gave me a little shove, the way a racehorse will when it knows you’ve come to give it sugar cubes.
I went in and left Granddad
outside, where there was at least a breeze. Mum was sewing something, not her best choice of activities, but better than cooking. Aunty Daffy was sitting near her, having a beer. She had a placid look on her face, like her first glass was just a fond memory.
I went up to Mum, and she put the sewing down — I was glad to see it wasn’t something of mine — and kissed me, the way she used to before Tom died, and that was a long time ago. She was crying, and so, not to make her feel the odd one out, I looked as serious as I could.
There are three kinds of crying: no sobs but tears, which is what girls do when you tell them they are beautiful (I had only done it once, and I still didn’t know if I would do it again, or stop pushing my luck); little sobs, which is what ladies do when they’ve been on the turps and someone bungs on ‘Begin the Beguine’ or ‘We’ll Meet Again’; and bawling like a giant panda when you take away its bamboo sandwich. Mum had invented a fourth way: red eyes, which, in Richmond, is the same as letting it all out like a two-year-old in any other suburb.
I still wasn’t sure if she was angry or not, so I waited: Granddad’s Rules for Getting Along with Girls. After a while she looked at me, and I noticed that her eyes were the same as Charles’s mum’s eyes after she’d had a few snifters of Gilbey’s and a couple of Bexes, and one or two other little things she used to take to prepare her for going on television, and then when she was home and just thinking about going on television.
‘Don’t you ever leave without saying goodbye again. I was worried sick. You’re all I have. We have to stick together.’
‘Like’ — I was about to say Laurel and Hardy, but I remembered that Tom liked Abbott and Costello better — ‘Abbott and Costello.’
‘More like the Three Musketeers.’
‘Oh, yeah, I wasn’t counting Granddad.’
‘Neither was I. There’s something I want to tell you, something important. It’s time you were told.’
I knew what was coming, but I pretended I didn’t know what day it was, sticking to the rules.
‘I’m going to have a baby. We’re going to have a baby.’