Hoi Polloi (21 page)

The apartment—a two-bedroom whitewash two floors up above Old South Head Road at Watsons Bay—is in effect Mr Hush Hush’s second home. “He stops the night two or three times a week to see Brett and … and … do what you do with a mistress,” Heels giggles, wagging her fingers as if reprimanding herself for saying this.

“Why do you have a friend who is a kept whore?” I sneer. Heels straightens her back in alarm and swallows her mouthful of drink with a loud gulp. “That’s what she is,” I say. “Do you envy her her glamorous lifestyle or something?”

“I certainly do not,” says Heels, placing her hand over her throat in shock.

“Aren’t you afraid she might try and play up with your husband?”

“I hardly think so,” she relaxes. “He’s a bit out of her league. Up against a Judge.”

“Are you saying my father isn’t good enough for a kept whore? What does that make
you?”

“Don’t you dare call Genevieve that awful word, that
whore
word. She’s a lovely person. And I tell you this, she’s a very talented hairdresser. Just look at what she’s done for my hair.” She pats the peach-tinted do on her head. It is wound into her favourite cone-style, a candy floss of hair higher than ever before, twinkling sugary with hairspray. A do she wraps in a turban of toilet paper and hairclips at night to keep it in place. Winks cups its length in his hands and helps lower it onto her pillow like a baby.

“Must be impossible to sleep with that pile on your head,”

I say.

“You get used to it. That’s why your father and I sleep in separate beds, so as I can spread out and he doesn’t roll onto Betty.” Betty being the name she calls the do because since she spends so long in the mirror with it she might as well talk to it like a friend, therefore it might as well have a name.

“You’ve lied to me in that case. You said you had single beds because of the old man’s heart, so his heart wouldn’t get all scrunched up and kill him. He only had five years to live I was told and that’s why I had to be well behaved, because our time together was going to be so brief.”

She lets out a dismissive spurt of air through her lips, then smiles and sips her drink. “Well I suppose we said that. But you know …” Her sentence peters out.

“No,” I raise my voice. “I don’t know.”

She raises her voice. “We said that to make you appreciate us a little more and do right.”

The bathroom door opens and Winks steps out, newspaper under his arm, leaving behind him the sound of the toilet flushing. He’s tucking his singlet and shirt into his pants. “What’s the story here? What are the loud voices all about?” he frowns.

I ignore him and move straight on to my next topic of argument. “Why don’t we use Mr Hush Hush’s real name when we speak about him? Does anybody know his real name? What is his real name?”

“For our purposes it’s Mr Hush Hush,” says Heels.

“Frankly I don’t know his real name.”

“Does anyone call him Mr Hush Hush in his presence?”

I ask sarcastically.

“That would be ridiculous. I’ve never actually met the man.”

“I wonder if Brett calls him Mr Hush Hush?”

“Now you’re being stupid.”

“I’m going to ask him.”

“Don’t you dare.”

“I definitely am going to ask him,” I insist. “I’m going to ask Brett what it’s like to have a kept whore for a mother and how it feels to be the bastard son of a kept whore.”

Heels jumps to her feet and points her finger at me that I’m to do no such thing. Winks says if I use that kind of insulting language in the boy’s presence, or Genevieve’s too for that matter, he’ll clip me so hard. He grips his belt buckle as if to draw it against me and tells me I’m not too old or too big to be given leather across my hide. If I feel this way, if I’ve got this attitude to Genevieve then to hell with me, I shouldn’t come to her place. Who’d want someone in their presence who talks rudely as I’ve just talked, spoiling the party.

But I do want to go to Genevieve’s. She’s no longer the woman she was, she admits that herself. I never knew Genevieve when she was the woman she once was but she doesn’t mind boasting that when she was that woman she would put today’s girlies of the racecourse to shame. She was the girlie of the girlies.
Now
she has to dress up and be a glamour puss. She wears furs to turn heads but the heads she turns are other women envying her the furs. But back
then
, back when she was at her peak, she didn’t need furs, no siree. She put it all on show and didn’t dare cover her god-givens, even in winter. Now she has to apply makeup like a surgeon. She must dye her roots or the blond goes to blazes. And sit-ups. So many sit-ups. Her cleavage is going to jelly before her eyes. “I hate the young,” she curses through clenched teeth. “Hate them, hate them. That’s my mantra.”

But when she’s with me, just me, out of earshot and eyeshot of everyone, she apologises. “I don’t mean
you,
handsome. No, no, no. Not
you
.” She curls my hand in her hand. “I mean, the new batch of girlies with their wiggles in all the right places. They’ll know what I mean when they’re forty. But look at you,” she says squeezing my hand. “You’re quite the beautiful boy, aren’t you! Flesh all firm, and that nice, brown, tight skin you have.” She strokes my arm in one long sweep. One sweep across my hair. One across my cheek. She hooks her finger over my shirt’s top button. “Look at those little hairs coming out on your chest. That’s very masculine but not overly so. We women like that.” Then she waves her hand. Waving away the spell that has come over me? She asks me to pop another cork of champers and give everyone more drinks. I’ve learned to hesitate at this point, not to move off and start uncorking bottles at that instant, but hesitate, a second, two seconds, in case one last sweep from her red-tipped fingers comes my way, a soft graze of her palm. And if it does, there’s a stare from her that comes with it, such a lingering hold of eyes on eyes that I’m sure she longs to tell me something, is about to say something very important but she never ends up saying it. And as she’s in the process of this, this not-saying, an electric sting flares across my skin. My blood misses a beat. When it beats again the throb is so loud in my ears that I can’t believe
she
can’t hear it too.

I never return the sweep of her hand with my own gesture, my own hand-sweep. Why not? Why am I not bold enough to do it? Would I be welcome to do it? Today I am determined to do it. In that moment between the last sweep of her palm and her stepping away to her guests, that’s when I’ll do it. Often, when the party’s over and it’s time for us to go, she pecks me on my lips lightly as she might a relation. When it’s time to go today, if she pecks me I’ll peck back harder than lightly, and longer.

Yes I want to go to Genevieve’s. Of course I want to go to Genevieve’s.

What will I wear? What would Genevieve like me to wear? I scratch my chin to decide for her what she would like to see me wear. My chin is brushy with whiskers. My jaw has sprouted shoots from a shaving ten days ago. I must scrape my face clean with Winks’ safety razor though it makes the tops of three pimples bleed. I must shower, swipe deodorant under my arms, dab on Winks’ stinging cologne. For my shirt I will wear the crimplene T-shirt that clings to my ribs and moulds well to my chest. I must not let on that I’m making this effort for Genevieve. I must complain about having to socialise today of all days with death still fresh beyond the balcony. I must complain at having to shave, at having to wear a piece of clothing such as the crimplene T-shirt which has a label that digs into my neck in an unbearable way.

“You scrub up well, and smell very nice indeed,” Heels remarks sniffing the air as I walk past her up the hallway.

Winks says it’s a proud moment when a son starts to use his dad’s razor.

Aunty Dorothy received a speeding fine on the way to Genevieve’s. She has removed her slouch hat arrangement to fan herself, not from heat, from embarrassment, the outrage, the humiliation of being pulled to the side of the road by a siren, spoken to like a naughty schoolgirl, and breathalysed like a common criminal, told to stop her complaining and just blow. “Not a skerrick of alcohol was in my system,” she wants us to know, fanning. She’s going to write to the Premier. How dare they pull over innocent, tax-paying women.

Winks is boredly admiring a classic ship Mr Hush Hush gave Brett to glue together for his birthday. A woman I’ve never met before, named Prue, has had a terrible experience this week. “Tell us about it by all means,” Heels reassures her half-heartedly. “You’re among friends. I’m sure there’s a laugh in the story somewhere.” Prue, darkly tanned, skinny, wrinkly, begins her tale but her voice soon becomes shrill and unintelligible, a bird chirp of tears.

Heels calls Genevieve from the kitchen to deal with the bawling guest. And here she comes, my Genevieve, gold hair riding her shoulders in rhythm with each stride. White pantsuit, loose, see-through to the bra. She informs us that last week Prue’s husband flew from a conference in Chicago and he sat with some tart on the damned aeroplane and by the time he’d touched down at Mascot he’d decided to leave Prue and shack up with plane-girl.

Genevieve kneels beside Prue, takes the sniffling woman’s hand in her own. She leans forward and kisses Prue as you would to comfort a child, on the forehead. As Genevieve does this, this leaning forward, caves open up in her blouse between the buttons. I can see a breast muzzled in its bra like a snout. Suddenly she turns to me—did she catch me peeking? “Honey,” she smiles. “Do me a favour. Go fetch a wet flannel and bring it. And check on Brett at the same time.”

I nod Sure and go to the bathroom.

“I wish he’d move so quick when I ask him to do things,”

Heels quips.

Brett lies on his bed, knees up, matching the pieces of a new toy ship to a blueprint on his lap. “You OK, Brett?” I ask, trying to sound like a kindly elder. But I don’t care if he’s OK other than to hear him answer Yes, which he does, releasing me from my obligation.

Genevieve’s bathroom is beside her bedroom. I never pass her bedroom without slowing my gait for a look in on her vast frilly bed, its blue, frilly eiderdown, two black, knitted golliwogs with red-button eyes propped on the stack of pillows. Reflected in her wall mirror, her black nightie hangs behind the door. A waft of pot-pourri: orange and cinnamon. This is a room where she is naked. This bathroom is another. Her skin when she’s undressed would smell of these scented soaps. I run water from the shower tap to wet a flannel, a flannel that must have washed her body. I lift the cane lid of the laundry basket. Boy’s school shorts and socks. Beneath them, stringy lace underwear. A bra, white with fake-flower edges. I press my fist into the mesh cups where her breasts have been. A damp towel, hers surely, so feminine with its flower-patterns and yellow. I breathe her in, the spices from her female bottles.

“Here’s the flannel, Genevieve,” I say.

She inhales and sighs out cigarette smoke and says, “I can tell you all because you’re friends. It’s not what I bargained for, this life. I’m cooped up here. I’m so bored hanging around at a loose end now that Brett’s at school all day I could scream.”

She lays her cigarette in a groove of the ashtray. Smoke from inside her pours from her mouth. I move closer so it drifts across to me, into my face, into my mouth. She places the flannel over the sniffler’s eyes. “Mr Hush Hush is saying he’ll buy me my own salon, so that’s something to look forward to I guess.”

Genevieve isn’t drinking enough. By now she should be waving her wrists about flamboyantly. Normally she’d be grabbing anyone’s hands,
my
hands, for an impulsive dance every time she passed my way. She’d be preparing food in the kitchen, sipping from her glass, chopping food and taking longer than food should take to serve because she’s working to the pace of the drink, the numb and drag of gin and wine. She’d be calling for me to come stand here by her and help. Stand here and be good company.

It’s this sniffling woman and her troubles causing it. If it wasn’t for her, Genevieve might already have begun to lean against me in the kitchen, light-headed and dreamy. How lucky she is to have such a strong young man to lend a shoulder, she’d be saying. Not a boy any longer, a young man. She’d roll fiddly bits of ham and cheese and baby tomatoes into balls inserted with toothpicks. My fingers and hers would touch as I did the toothpick part and she the rolling. We wouldn’t be at the arm-stroking stage nor the hair-sweeping stage yet. That is still a way off. We would not be anywhere near the eyes-lingering and blood-banging stage, though these stages would be reached soon enough. Perhaps today will be the day when she says, “Have you got a girlfriend?” I’ll lie that Yes I have. What would she think if I said No? Would that make me more of a boy to her, less of a young man? A No signals I’m available. Which answer would lead her to ask directly, “Have you ever had sex?”