Hoi Polloi (17 page)

Every time I rub my cock I pray an apology to God. But Glenn doesn’t believe God exists. His father can’t understand how on earth a God that is supposed to be loving and decent would give anyone polio. “Do you know the answer to that?”

Glenn asks me.

“No.”

“God probably does it too, rubs his cock.”

“You can’t say that.”

“God’s probably rubbing his cock so much he’s too wasted away to bother about polio and do any good in the world.”

How can he utter such mockeries of God and not suffer a punishment either from the heavens or within his own body, a great pain or seizure tuned to respond automatically to God-mocking words or thoughts?

Glenn then asks if I’m stiff now this second. I answer No but he sits up in his bed and peers at my silhouette. I lift up my knees to cover my stiffie. He confesses that he’s stiff—it’s all this cock talk. I can look at his cock if I like, he says. No, I say, I don’t want to, though I would like to compare his cock’s shape to mine, its size, degree of hardness. To cross into another person’s privacy of genitals. He asks if he can look at me, my stiff cock.

No.

I can hear the quick chafing of him rubbing his cock and pausing. Rubbing and pausing.

“Look at this.” His voice is unsteady from his rubbing motion.

I sit up and crane for a glimpse. His cock points towards his stomach like a long finger. I lie back down and rub my own cock.

“Are you doing it?” he asks out of breath.

“Yes.”

He sits up. My feet trample my sheet and blanket down so he can see me.

I stand beside his bed. We watch each other rubbing. His hand reaches out to take my cock in his fingers, lightly, tentative, as if stroking an animal for the first time. This action doesn’t shock me, it’s the obvious, the right action for that moment. I bend down and touch his cock, grip it, rub it. It’s skinnier than mine. Narrower at the top. Its bow in the middle is more pronounced. An electric throb moves through my insides because here are fingers that are not my own, skin that is not my skin touching me down there, exploring the private ridge and the stem as if molding a shape from plasticine.

He gasps. His leg-braces chink on the bed-end from a spasm. A splash heavy as a summer rain-drop lands on the back of my hand and wrist. I stop rubbing to feel his cock pulse the wet out of him.

Now me—an itch and chill from the soles of my feet to my scalp, a shivering. I hear plops on the carpet. My limbs are suddenly weak.

Glenn’s slimy wet is already drying across my skin tight as a band-aid. He dips his fingertips in one of my splashes that landed on his arm. He tastes it on the tip of his tongue then tastes his own splash. They’re both just as salty as each other, he says, urging me to taste for myself. I do. He’s right. He lets me have his handkerchief to dab the carpet clean. “I’m going to sleep. My body’s dead,” he yawns.

Same here.

What am I to think of God now? I can say my sorry-prayers and have my slate made clean over and over, but how disappointing that becomes. God is disappointing, a weak ruler of the world, another adult I can trick, a parent too easy to get around, one too soft to dish out punishment. Even worse, one who tries to get into my good books by letting me get away with Glenn Shivington touching my cock and me touching his. Guilt is soft too, it barely leaves a bruise inside me anymore, barely an ache to register some sorrow. I have lost respect for God. I say it out loud: “I’ve lost respect for you, God.” Nothing happens. Nothing strikes me down. What controls me if God doesn’t? The new itch that controls my body? The bliss of bringing on the wet?

I don’t want to be a friend of Glenn Shivington. There
can be no friendship with him any more than there could be friendship with a girl I have done private things with. I have done private things with him that I would do with a girl. I could never, after that, have something so slight as a friendship with such a girl. There would be too great a bond between us for mere friendship. I’ve no feeling of that great kind for Glenn. I only feel embarrassment that he has this secret of our rubbing cocks and comparing the salt taste of the wet. I never want to speak to him again or hear his voice near me or have him brush against me.

He wants to do it again with me, the rubbing. I want to pretend it never happened but he says that when he thinks about our rubbing cocks it makes him excited. He asks me if talking about it as he’s doing now makes me excited.

“No,” I say. We’re lined up for the mini-bottles of milk handed out before school starts.

Why won’t I speak to him? he wants to know. He asks if it’s because talking to him gives me a stiff. “No,” I sneer.

“Leave me alone.”

He keeps following me, across the playground to the cricket nets to watch the batsman with one pad on, the cork ball’s wide V down the concrete pitch from the bowler. In class I refuse him a seat beside me. He passes me a note through a chain of hands. I tear the note to confetti for the bin. Another note is passed. “Everybody does it,” the note says. I tear it, chew it into spitball mince for sticking under the desk. Another note: “I’ve done it with others before. I’ve done it with Bryce Howe and Ross Quilter.” Bryce Howe is sitting in the row over from me. Does he look like someone who would have rubbed cocks with Glenn Shivington? His father’s an electrician. Ross Quilter mocks Glenn Shivington behind his back for being a conch and up himself.

As soon as class is dismissed I fling my bag over my shoulder for carrying, deliberately clipping Glenn’s head in the process. He shouldn’t bandy people’s names about, I tell him. He shouldn’t have told me or anyone else about Bryan Howe and Ross Quilter. Is that what he’s going to do with me? I threaten to hurt him, kill him if he bandies my name about. But he doesn’t believe I’d kill him. He doesn’t take a step backwards or display the terror I hope for. I’ll have to hit him again with my bag to show him I’m not bluffing. I do. I’ll have to strike the side of his face with the point of my elbow. I do. He makes a fist, ready to fight me. His thumb is tucked inside his fingers, the fist of someone not used to making a fist. I tell him again I’ll hurt him, kill him but it’s a hollow threat met with his defiant gaze and amateur fists.

Next class, another note. It reads like a homework essay. It accuses me of being an Ancient Greek. Me, Bryan Howe and Ross Quilter. Ancient Greeks practised their cocks on boys before they were ready for girls. If I don’t believe him he has the books that say so at home. The Ancient Greeks were aristocrats, say the books. I however, and the two others, are just boys who can’t yet find girls to rub their cocks because
they
are off with older boys. Even if they weren’t, I’d be too shy to lay a finger on them or know what to do with a finger.

I no longer want to cheat on my exams with him. I certainly won’t be stealing makeup on his behalf.

I don’t score enough marks for Sydney High but I score twentieth in the grade just the same.

On the last day of primary school Glenn Shivington hands me a letter marked “love letter”. I throw it back at him and walk off but he picks it up and runs after me and will not go away until I take it from him and read. The letter says he wants to kill himself. He wants to do this because I hate him and therefore he hates himself. I tell him that nobody kills themselves and I tear his letter in half and flick it into his face. I tell him that I don’t care if he does kill himself. He says he intends doing it this afternoon. He’s going to jump in front of the three-thirty bus.

“I’ll make sure I’m there to watch.”

“I love the idea of you being the last person to see me alive.”

I say I don’t want to give him the pleasure of that and won’t watch. He won’t kill himself in that case, he says.

“Don’t then. Who cares!”

T
HE NEW BUSINESS IS A STORE
in Rose Bay North. Yes, a liquor store though that’s hardly a hotel. There’s no drinking on the premises for one thing. There’s wine tasting, with cheese, which is not drinking, it’s
tasting
. Such a
with it
thing to do, says Heels. And I will not be exposed to riff-raff and horis and phone boxes. If Heritage had one Sir Thomas, then it’s safe to assume Rose Bay North has dozens. Perhaps not Rose Bay North itself, which Heels herself admits is not so exclusive. But Rose Bay proper. And Vaucluse, which is just down the road and is considered upper crust with a capital U.

And there’s Watsons Bay, a little further on from Vauc-luse, which is in the same category. These are addresses you really can tell yourself, and anyone else you care to talk to, are
class
. They make people sit up and take notice. This is why we came to Sydney. We really are getting somewhere in life now. “That’s what happens when you fall in with the right crowd,” Winks has become fond of saying lately, tilting his head up as if telling it to the heavens in appreciation. “This is what happens when you’re in the know,” he smiles, tapping the side of his nose three times.

He says when you’re not in the know you come home from the races with zilch. Zero. But when you’re
in
the know, when you’re in with the sportsjacket crowd, you go to the races with a $
1000
in your kick and you come home with double the amount. Sometimes triple. The sportsjackets know when the plunge is on. Last week Winks had only one bet, but one bet was all he needed: Randwick, Race Five, Windburner,
1000
to
10
,
000
to win.

That’s nothing. Last month his yearling, the one that cost a fortune and was gelded to make him race instead of randy, scored at Rosehill at
33
-to-
1
when the first three favourites were ridden to lose. That night Winks trampo-lined on his bed, still in his shoes. He flung handfuls of cash from his body: every pocket of his mackintosh, inside his shirt, down his socks, under his hat. He tossed notes towards the ceiling and they snowed around him. “Yaahoo!” he cried.

“Yaahoo!”

“Yeehee!” Heels shrieked, snatching at the money flakes in the air. “Yeehee!” She heaped them in her lap and admitted to being a little too tipsy to count, so Winks helped her bail the money into a pillow slip for morning. They slept with the bulge safe between them.

Next afternoon when I kissed Heels good morning she breathed whisky without waking. Winks snored with a whistle in his nose. I felt under their beds for any chicken-feed. Ten cents, twenty, thirty.

Rose Bay North has a lovely village feel, Heels says to explain away its cramped, clammy untidiness. The smell of mould and decaying wood, a fishy ocean breeze. Drive up the hill of Old South Head Road, its box-flats and shoulder to shoulder box-houses, synagogue like a dark brick cake- building, and there it is, the lovely village feel—fish and chip shop, hair salon, newsagent, fruit and vegetable store, a supermarket. And the liquor store on the corner. Turn right at either Oceanview Avenue or Military Road and you find your way to Kimberley Street and the new apartment in a white rectangle building with brown fringes. The fourth floor, one from the top.

Here the Tasman Sea is my backyard. Its thick scaly tide collides with Rosa Gully below my window. The collision sends up explosions of spray against the cliff. Giant stones have broken off like columns of an ocean temple. The wind is made visible in the form of a whirling mist that blasts my face when I stand on the balcony, then disappears until the next collision, a rhythmical war of rock and water where rock defends, sea attacks. The gully is tufted with scrub and reached from the road by way of a field of green-brown grass, a playfield each evening and weekend morning for a skinny boy throwing a tennis ball to his yapping Sydney Silky and calling “Pee Wee, here Pee Wee” when the dog gets too close to the unfenced edge.

“Why is this suburb called Diamond Bay?” I ask Heels.

“Did they find diamonds once?”

“It’s Vaucluse,” she corrects me crossly.

“Says Diamond Bay on the map,” I parry, to annoy her.

“Strictly speaking it’s Vaucluse. That’s what it says on our mailing address. We’re on the eastern and southern fringe of Vaucluse.”