Hoi Polloi (10 page)

His bug-eyes stare blankly from their sockets at nothing, then close in a frown, a wince of distaste as if even thinking about those sorts of questions is a dirty act. He makes me feel dirty. I should hate him for that, but how sweet it is to know and be considered by him and everyone else at school his equal, the boy he is helping be orientated and settled in at school.

Stephen’s ugliness makes him even more wholesome. His mouth is upturned in a constant smile because his two front teeth poke out and down and across his bottom lip. His top lip appears thicker than it really is because it is stretched over those teeth like over a mouthguard. His lips can’t close. The gap between his teeth is so big he can almost jam his tongue through it as a trick. He smells of the boiled vegetable fart smell of Randwick. The air of the place, the streets, the stairs and passageways where I live reek at night of cabbage cooking. With Stephen the smell comes through his skin and his breath. If he speaks up close to me I gag from what he calls garlic. His fingertips have a sticky, rubber texture— when he was first made to shake my hand in introduction by the teacher this odour, this garlic, rubbed off onto my skin.

“We didn’t come to Australia to mix with Greeks,’’ says Heels. I explain to her that I have looked really closely at Stephen’s skin and as far as I can tell it’s pakeha skin. Different colour arm-hairs, yes. But olive is just a greyer tint of my own arm colour. And anyway, Winks’ skin is darker than Stephen’s.

She doesn’t want an argument on the matter. “Look at this gizmo,” she says to change the subject. “Have you ever seen the likes?” It’s a cardboard box. “Somewhere in here, if I can work out how to get to it, is a bag.” She peers for the place to tear the box open. “It’s called a wine cask.”

I persist with reporting on Stephen’s skin colour, how he doesn’t have a single freckle. I have freckles everywhere on my skin but he has perfect, undark skin.

“It’s not just about skin,” Heels responds, digging at the wine cask with her thumbnail.

“What is it then?”

“Well, you know …” She doesn’t finish the sentence.

“No I
don’t
know.”

“They’re, you know, different.”

“How?”

“They just are.”

“Different in the way Catholics are a different type of person?”

“Yes. No. Even more so.”

“How?”

“It’s obvious.”

“How?”

She takes a deep exasperated breath and says it’s hard to put into words exactly all of what she means but it has something to do with
standards
. It’s to do with standards of basic things such as how one presents oneself, one’s clothes and one’s grooming. One’s hygiene, one’s tidiness. All that plus if you don’t speak the same language as them you’re not on the same wavelength. You can’t blame them for that, for their language, it’s just the way it is. Not that she’s saying this Stephen person and his family and his type of people are down there with horis.

She tugs and twists the wine-cask teat into position to pour and says she can’t be bothered talking about the subject anymore. She’s made herself quite clear on the matter and wants to relax with a glass of cold white wine and a cigarette. So no more talk about this skin colour or that skin colour and freckles. It’s enough to put her off her drink. And no more using the word
pakeha
now that we’re in
this
country. And do get a
proper
friend, one of our kind. This school I’m currently in, I’ll just have to grin and bear until they can get me into a decent school. I’m to consider where I am now as a holding pattern where I must do as well as I can with my schooling, obey the teachers and impress the right people at the right schools for next year. In the meantime, yes, I will have to mix in circles that I can’t avoid but I don’t have to bring them home and have them in her house.

Stephen is what’s called a Greek Cypriot. He lives in Australia because his parents couldn’t live where they come from, Cyprus, because they feared they’d be harmed by the other kind of Cypriots, the Turk Cypriots. These Turk Cypriots lived in slums and were no better than dogs, he sneers. They would kill him, his parents and all his relations at the drop of a hat. The Turkish Cypriots want to take over Cyprus and have it as theirs, even though there was only a fraction of them in Cyprus compared to the Greek people. His father came to Australia with nothing,
nothing
, but now he owns a fruit and vegetable shop and house and a car and trailer. Stephen tells me this very proudly.

Another boy, Jonathan Jonathan—his last name the same as his first for some reason that is never explained—is a long way from being pakeha, yet for all his brown skin he has fine pakeha features, a sharp end on his nose and a square chin. He escaped from Iraq because the new President there, Bakr, led a coup which his father opposed, and his uncles too, three of whom were killed. Jonathan Jonathan and Stephen seldom smile when they’re together. They talk about how they wish they weren’t in Australia but at home on their ancestors’ soil where their blood is, the blood of their kin which has been spilt and should be avenged and one day hopefully will be by them. Stephen and Jonathan Jonathan say I couldn’t possibly be expected to understand what they are talking about—leaving a country because you fear you’ll be killed; having to live there in the first place among people who are no better than dogs as their families had to live.

Stephen seems much older suddenly, grown up, his lips pursed over his protruding teeth, one end of his top lip curled in a sneer. He’s no longer the wholesome boy who considered me his equal. He’s behaving as if he’s superior to me. Who is he to think he’s superior to me as he clearly does with his “Anglos like you know nothing,” spitting the word “nothing” just as he spits the words “dogs” and “Turks”? I want him back as my equal, his arm around my shoulder, mine around his, secretly wanting to kiss his bucked mouth in the way it feels good to imagine pecking the mouths of girls I get a crush on.

I
do
understand what they mean, I say, putting a higher pitch in my voice to create the effect of being a little offended. My family had to escape the Maoris who were dogs as well and were taking over even though there was more of us than them just like with the Turks. I don’t mention the sale of the Heritage Hotel for $
400
,
000
. I say my family left New Zealand with nothing,
nothing
, just as Stephen’s family and Jonathan Jonathan’s family had left their countries with nothing.

They nod their understanding of my understanding. They nod their sympathy and sit silent on the playground bench. Jonathan Jonathan says he would invite us both over to his place on the weekend but his father only allows Iraqis in his house. Stephen says it’s the same for him at his house with Greeks. I say there’s no such rule at my house. Both of them would be very welcome there. They say they envy me that. Very welcome, but the problem is our flat is too small for visitors because we’re so poor. Perhaps the best thing to do would be for us to meet down at Coogee and do something together, though not this Sunday. This Sunday I have to be baptised or christened because in New Zealand there were no churches or religion. Religion was banned by the Maoris which is another reason my family and I came to Australia, to stop being persecuted for our religion.

So many lies in just a few seconds. All of them black marks on my clean slate. I vow to start my clean slate again, from this very moment. I worry how many times I can start a clean slate over.

T
O BECOME A SOLDIER OF CHRIST
you don’t wear a soldier uniform. It’s a different war from Vietnam on the news with its burning trees, its Americans. Very different from the World War II of drinkers at the Heritage Hotel, rows of medals across their suit fronts for Anzac Day, merry and drunk as if at the races. Christ’s war is a war against being a bad person, Aunty Dorothy explains. It’s yourself at war with yourself. It’s a war of souls. What is a soul? A soul is something, well, no one can say exactly. Think of it as a tiny pocket of air or gas made up of information about you that gets stored up inside you, all the information about your life, what you’ve done and should not have done. When you die this tiny pocket floats away, up, up, into space, past the stars, across to what we call The Other Side. There the information can be deciphered by angels to see if you’re a fit and proper person to enter Heaven.

Can it ever be wiped clean, this information? Can bits of information be scrubbed out to give you a second chance, a third chance, fourth chance, fifth, sixth?

Yes they can. When that happens it is called God’s mercy letting you off the hook if you promise to change and you pray. The start of this war is called the baptism and for this occasion you must wear your best clothes, those new clothes of yours, the blazer, the white shirt, white socks from the brown packages. No bow-tie though. I beg for no bow-tie and am granted a compromise to wear my collar buttoned up instead. My hair is slicked to the side. My black shoes glow from Heels’ elbow grease.

Aunty Dorothy’s church uniform, every bit of which is white except the gold chain with a
t
hanging from it at her throat, includes a big-brimmed hat turned up at one side in what she calls a slouch-hat arrangement. A lace handkerchief is tucked inside her watchband for weeping. Just as well, for her eye corners are welling up and mixing with mascara as she leads me into the church’s dark, wood cave where daylight is like twilight—orange and blurry red through the picture-book windows.

This is my first time in such a place and she, who knows about religion, has the privilege of leading me forward. The honour of feeling my hand press around hers because I’m scared of the horror-movie organ music. I have a shivering sense of being watched, not by some single pair of human eyes, or the human eyes of families in rows of benches, but by God-eyes, Jesus-eyes, Angel-eyes invisible in the air with the power of x-ray judgments that make their owners angry and offended to see me in this place, me with my clean slate dirty.

Along the rear bench, the shiny board-seats Aunty Dorothy calls pews, a baby wrapped in a white shawl begins bawling in its mother’s rocking arms as if being hurt. Beside it another baby joins in with a shriek like a screamed warning. I refuse to take another step. I pull away from Aunty Dorothy to run back into the bright outside. Winks blocks me, grapples my flailing arms until he fastens them in his grip out in front of me. Heels shuffles away from the scene pretending to search for something in her purse, letting Aunty Dorothy smooth my hair down with lick-spit as if my real mother and hush me with “Here’s the Minister. Straighten up. Be a good boy.’’ She twists in the direction of the altar’s gold crucifix and apologises to it with a flick of fingers across her breasts, “Forgive us.”

Winks pushes me down into the pews beside the howling infants as the Minister approaches, his hands suddenly appearing out of hidden sleeves in his white poncho. He speaks, not with words but with a slow passing of his pale hands across the air, directing me to line up over there at the bubbler or is it a birdbath? He then slips his hands into the poncho sleeves and walks in slow motion as if in a trance to the place where we all must stand, the mothers and their babies, fathers, Aunty Dorothy, Heels, Winks, me.

It’s as if he’s washing the baby’s hair. From the cup of his palm the Minister tips water from the birdbath over the first baby’s bald, blue-veined skull. The baby’s face squeezes into toothless screams as if in terrible pain, as if the water is too hot or too cold or not water at all but acid. Yet the Minister keeps cupping and tipping, expressionless, then makes a crisscross sign on the baby’s forehead. He mumbles something I can’t quite hear, repeating the crisscrossing motion with his thumb, down and across, down and across. Now for the second baby. It shudders and screams as if suffering greatly. The Minister’s actions are gentle, and the mother’s shshshing soft, yet how can they be so cruel as not even to flinch at the baby’s cries?

Now for me. Step forward, the Minister signals with his dripping hand. Step forward. Come closer to the water, this water that has been purified in Christ’s name and therefore when it touches me I shall be purified in this act of baptism. Bend to the water, please. It is cool and tickling running through my hair from his fingers. In Christ’s name manfully fight under his banner against sin, the world and the devil. Continue as Christ’s faithful soldier and servant until your life’s end, for you are received into the congregation of Christ’s flock and are signed now with the sign of the cross upon which Christ suffered for our sins. Down and across, down and across. The Minister’s wet thumb slides down and across my forehead as if writing in code with the invisible ink of water. Christ died for our sins? He is like one of those hero soldiers, Victoria Cross winners who died to save their comrades.

The water cross the Minister has made on my skin becomes chillier as it picks up the slightest draught. Goose-flesh creeps over my body. The water cross becomes so burning-cold I’m sure it must be a brand he has made with his thumb, as animals are branded with initials and numbers to mark ownership and year of birth. Water from the birdbath is trickling down my neck but the brand on my forehead is the water that matters. It’s the sign that Christ was here. A sign that I have been accepted and stamped ready for war as his soldier.