Hoi Polloi (16 page)

I drip chains and pearls into a handbag to practise snatching them back. When bored with that I try on the pearls, the necklaces with diamond or red insets. I try on rings with blue glass, gold bracelets with heart-shaped locks, silk headscarves that wrap up my big ears and hair, Chinesing my eyes. I have become a boy-woman: chest hairless and smooth, its muscles forming like flat breasts, nipples brown as two-cent pieces, hardening cold and tingling if I rub them.

Upon Heels’ drawers there is a makeup case which opens like a palette, an artist’s box of lipsticks, eye shadows, creams, powders and scent bottles. I dab and gloss myself with red lips and cheeks, blue-black eyes, eyebrows perfectly arched as brown moustaches. I remove the mink coat’s cover, taking great care not to catch the fur in the cover’s zipper. It is softer than anything I have ever stroked, this fur. Not even horse skin is so soft, or my own skin, my cocko’s wrinkled peel. The coat is wispy soft as dandelion which must be why she or anyone else would own such clothing: as a spare skin softer than human.

What other skins do they keep here? I have the back of my bedhead for secrets. What do
they
have? Winks’ drawer third one down: neatly folded handkerchiefs, cravats and scarves, two wallets with a poor man’s lock of rubber bands which I remove—his birth certificate, marriage certificate, brittle and creased. Paper bundles: bank statements—“$
1000
” written at the bottom of one page, “$
600
” on another.

Heels’ drawer, third one down: bottles of doctor’s pills with
take two after meals
on the label, Bex, Disprin. Her fourth drawer down, the deepest: two spare sets of teeth, Dr Scholls corn pads, ointment for cracked soles, a deodorant spray called Femme Fresh, two little cushions curved like so in the shape of breasts. Winks’ last drawer down: balls of socks, white Y-fronts, stacks of handkerchiefs still in cellophane boxes.

In movies, walls and drawers have sliding panels and hidden safes, false bottoms for code books and rare stones, briefcases full of millions in United States currency to be given in exchange for information. I tap and knock, though Heels and Winks aren’t spies or Sean Connery. There are no secret compartments except layers of socks and smalls. Beneath them a magazine with foreign writing. “Danish” is the only word I can understand. But this isn’t a magazine of words. This is a magazine whose first page is a photograph of two women and two men walking into a living room. Whose second page is one of the men putting his hand under a woman’s skirt, the other man putting his hand down her top which the second woman is unbuttoning. The second woman’s own blouse is unbuttoned, one of her breasts is exposed. On the third page these people have taken off their clothes and are sticking out the tips of their tongues and kissing with them. The two men’s cockos are swelled like little arms and fists. It is a magazine of legs and swelled cocko-arms, breasts, tongues, fin-gers and women’s privates, their cunts. One cocko is halfway in one woman’s mouth and the other cocko is in her cunt while the other woman is licking the tip of her tongue at the top of that cunt above where the cocko is, just at the place where the cunt-hair starts in a V pattern.

I’ve heard boys speak of such magazines belonging to older brothers and cousins. They are thrilling taboo things that shouldn’t belong to a father, my Winks. What is a magazine doing here? I will ask him. But I can’t ask him. He then would know I have been going through his private things. He disgusts me. I want to believe the magazine was here when we arrived in this flat, the shame of a former tenant. Winks has simply not yet disposed of it. He has forgotten about it altogether. Surely that’s it.

Inside my cocko there is an itch, a pleasure-pain. My cocko is moving and bending against my underpants. Its skin-sack has sucked up into itself, tight and filling up with the itch that’s inside my cocko. I’ve forgotten to breathe. My heart thuds as if I have just sprinted a long distance. I’m paralysed by what’s happening in my cocko—it has now swelled as in the photographs in the magazine. The itching and pleasure-pain has spread deep inside my belly, has paralysed and terri-fied me. It has taken control of me—the slightest movement makes the swelling feel worse, feel better. I drop the magazine into the drawer and kick it closed to will the itching and stiffening to stop. To shut the fucking and mouthing people out of my mind.

The telephone is ringing in the lounge. My legs are so weak and trembly they cannot make a stride, but I must answer it. If I don’t answer it and it is Heels and Winks they’ll wonder why the phone is ringing out. They’ll rush home and there I’ll be with my cocko swollen, my head too addled to hurry the makeup from my face and put everything back as I found it.

“Hello,” I try to answer brightly. It’s Heels. She wants to know if everything is all right at home. Yes, I answer. What am I doing? she asks. Watching TV? Yes. She says they quite like the business they’ve seen. They’re excited in fact. They want to sit down with a cup of tea somewhere nice and discuss the proposition. They’ll be home in a short while. Have some ham from the fridge to make a sandwich if I’m hungry.

The sweet pain, the itching, shaking and stiffness have eased. The fucking and mouthing people keep flashing before my mind’s eye but I turn my mind’s eye the other way by concentrating on washing the makeup from my real eyes and my lips, using a nail brush and soap to scrub until my lips taste of the metallic tang of blood. I hang the handbag on its hook, fold the headscarf away, return the jewellery. I sweat so much I wish I could shower but I mustn’t see my body naked like the fucking and mouthing people. I mustn’t see my cocko or touch it even though I want to touch it and want to let my mind’s eye glimpse the remembered photographs. I want my real eyes to look at the real photographs once again. I must somehow let the magazine lie at the bottom of the drawer and cover it with socks and handkerchiefs, and I must do it with my mind’s eye and my real eyes closed.

I
NVITE A NICE FRIEND TO STAY
the night by all means. What a good idea if I’m studying for exams. But Glenn Shivington says he cannot accept the invitation. He has polio, or is in danger of getting polio, it isn’t entirely clear which. He sleeps with his legs in braces, his ankles are manacled to the bed-end. He isn’t allowed to sleep at my place or anyone else’s for that matter because he can’t spend a night away from his braces and manacles, and what an effort it would be to transport them anywhere. I will have to stay at his place instead.

Polio? Can you catch polio from him? Heels wonders. “I don’t want you around people with polio. Should a child in that condition even be at school spreading disease?” She’ll have to make enquiries. She doesn’t like this polio business one bit. She’ll have a cigarette on it. She’ll pour a glass from the cask and have a sit-down with a cigarette and ponder this one and ring the doctor. Mind you, what do doctors know, she mutters. Have they fixed her varicose veins? Look at them. They’ll get where they’ll show even through dark stockings.

Yes you can go to Glenn Shivington’s because you’ve had the whatever-they-call-it that stops it, says the doctor. But go on one condition: that you come here to your mother and give her a big kiss for being such a good mother and protecting you from polio. There’s the boy.

There are rules about being at Glenn Shivington’s house which isn’t a house but a flat in a Randwick khaki block like our stopover home but darker because it’s close up against another khaki block and its windows cannot get the sun, and even if they did the blinds are kept closed always. His father lives in a wheelchair because of polio. I try not to stare at his legs, which are hardly like legs at all but empty trousers bent up from his footrests. Sometimes he can become very angry, Glenn says. He yells for no reason and throws books against the walls. But mostly he stays in his study and reads because he used to be a teacher. Glenn’s mother when she talks, whispers to make less noise and not disturb his reading. I stay in Glenn’s room playing Monopoly and nattering, not studying one iota except practising to sit behind him during exams, reading over his shoulder or glimpsing his answers if sitting side by side.

Has he ever gone through his parent’s things? Has he ever had a peep at what’s under their socks and smalls. No never, Glenn replies. “What chance would I have? My father never leaves the flat except to go to the doctor.” What does he think he’d find if he did look? He doesn’t know. He’s never considered it. I’ve looked beneath my parent’s socks and smalls, I tell him. There was a magazine full of fucking and mouthing people. I even put on my mother’s makeup and mink coat and wrapped a scarf into a turban and paraded in her mirror. Hasn’t he ever done that? No. He asks what it’s like to put on makeup. He watches his mother put her face on but she won’t let him touch her things. She says it’s not for boys, and besides, she has no jewellery except a wedding ring which she only removes for the dishes. He hates being a boy. I ask him if he’s really a Sniff.
No
, he says like a protest and points at me that if I want to wear makeup then I must be a Sniff myself. But I only wore makeup for something to do, I protest back. Just like when I practised pick-pocketing— it was something to do. I’m not a Sniff. Glenn says he doesn’t know what he is. He doesn’t believe for one minute that I’m a pickpocket or have ever known pickpockets, but if I put on makeup then that’s the behaviour of a Sniff. He’s sniggering how he wouldn’t like to see me in makeup because he imagines I’d look ugly with my blunt, chubby features. He’d prefer to look at me as the real boy I am, not as some girl-boy.

He wants to know if I might be able to steal some makeup from Heels for him. I could consider it part of the cheating agreement between us. He makes me promise I will—just an eyeliner and lipstick will do. I shake on it, my squeezing man-grip against his thin, loose fingers.

I’ll sleep tonight on an inflated lilo on the floor beside Glenn’s iron-framed bed. His leg braces are screwed to the bed-end like steel chains with steel splints reaching up to his knees. Leather straps bind the splints in place. He must sleep on his back because his feet are locked in such a way that they can only point upwards. He says there’s not much pain in lying this way though the steel sometimes creates a stretching sensation and makes him dream of walking on stilts a mile above other people, stilts that break and he falls but never hits the ground.

His mother calls him a brave boy and kisses his toes as she ties and clips him into bed like a prisoner for the night. The lights go off. There is static in my eyes from the sudden dark: the room returns to view dimly.

“Tell me what you saw,” Glenn says.

“Saw where?”

“The magazines. The magazines.”

What he wants are descriptions of the fucking and mouthing people. What do they look like with no clothes, with cocks (not cocko: cocko is a child’s word, he says), cocks and cunts showing? Is it like when you stand in the mirror or look down in your underpants and your cock’s gone stiff? Yes, it’s like that, I say, but their cocks are much bigger with veins everywhere and hair.

“How many stiffies have you ever had?” he asks. I’ve had a few stiffies, I say, but not many. He wants to know when I have them. Waking up? He has them when he wakes up in the morning, he says. Same here, I say. But the ones I’ve been having recently are different from the stiffies I’ve had before. The other ones before just went away after a while. I’d wait a few seconds over the toilet bowl for my cock to be soft enough to piss and it went soft. But the new ones over the past month are different. How are they different? he wants to know. Is it that the stiffies stay stiff and your balls ache and make you feel sick? That’s what they’re like for him. Same here, I say.

He asks if I’ve ever woken up and it’s all wet—my stomach, my pyjamas—like a half-piss. I don’t want to answer that and instead ask, Have you? He replies, Yes, and then I say, Same here. His pyjamas dry hard as cardboard. Same here. And it’s salty and smells like paint and detergent. He’s sure he knows in his sleep exactly the moment the wet spurts out of him because he can feel himself waking up, but he doesn’t quite wake up, doesn’t
want
to wake up at that moment. He likes to lay there with his insides tickling and dream of touching his cock and of someone else touching his cock and him doing it to them, touching them, until his cock pulses and spurts in his dreams exactly at the same time as he’s waking up in the wet in real life. He’s started keeping his handkerchief under his pillow to wipe it up. He’s found that if he unmanacles himself and gets out of bed straightaway after he’s wiped himself up and washes the wet off with water the handkerchief doesn’t go like cardboard. But getting to the bathroom without trailing the detergent smell behind him or letting the wet drip onto the carpet and leaving a cardboard patch is the problem. He finds it best to let it dry while still in bed and roll his pyjamas and handkerchief up and place it down the bottom of the washing basket for his mother. But that’s happening every morning now. His mother must know something is wrong.

He asks me, “Do you ever bring it on yourself?” He means by rubbing my cock.

“No.”

“Bullshit.”

“Do you?”

“Once. Twice.”

“Really?”

“Lots of times.”

Sometimes he feels so itchy inside himself that he has to run into the toilet and rub himself till he empties out. Sometimes he does it straight into his handkerchief. “Don’t you?”

“I’ve just started.” I started a few weeks ago but stopped for fear of wasting away. Everyone would know what I’m doing if they saw I was wasting away. No matter how I itch and desperately want the itch and pulsing to go on and on, I don’t rub my cock.

“I’m not wasting away,” says Glenn. “Who told you you waste away?”

I don’t know, I’ve just heard it said. Perhaps it was Winks who said it to someone and I overheard.

Glenn itches so much he was on a bus once, he says, and his cock went stiff and he couldn’t help it and his pants stuck out so far with the shape of his cock that he had to put his school bag over the problem to get off the bus. Same here. But the bag rubbed against it and made the stiffie worse. He had to let the wet go into his pants while he was sitting there with the bus making the feeling worse-better at every bump. Same here. He’s had to walk down the street with his bag over his crotch to cover the wet spot. Same here. He’s sure the hot weather and a rocking bus always make him stiff. The hot weather makes his cock looser and warmer. Same here. His trick before getting on a bus is to rub himself and spurt out a good load into the toilet at home to stop him getting excited on the trip.