Hoi Polloi (6 page)

He stands with his legs wide apart, heaving and threading his belt into place. He doesn’t look at me. He inspects Heels’ bite-wound, wets it with spit-kisses.

“To think I nearly died having him,” sobs Heels. She means the operation she had to have me born properly.

I wish she
had
died. What a terrible thing to think. I think it again and then say it in my mind to know if I mean it. Yes I do mean it. I enjoy thinking it. There’s no shock or guilt in thinking it and meaning it. If anything there’s excitement. I mumble it into the sheets. “I wish you had died.” I repeat it to the sheets and say, “The Mongrel Mob are coming and I don’t care.”

Heels and Winks stare at me, probably thinking I’m apologising.

Something freeing is happening. Here I lie, no tears, no pain. Where’s pain? Where’s fear? I’ve passed through these into a state of sleepy peace. The sting-burn-numb sensation has contracted to the base of my spine. It has now become a pleasant tickle deep inside me, an itchy pins and needles at the tips of my fingers. I don’t move a muscle, I can’t move a muscle. My legs won’t shift. Only my mind works, I conjure a force field around me, one able to push Heels from me, a weightless push and drift of her away from my skin, my heart, my being. What about Winks? Is he going to be pushed away too? Not yet. Not quite. I’m still pushing Heels away. But his turn is coming. It’s close.

She’s gone. Now it’s Winks’ turn. I push. He’s up there tightening his belt around his waist. He’s touching Heels’ sore arm, leading her out of the room. The door’s closing. There they go. They’re gone.

A glass of milk and two shortbreads, my favourite. She sets them down on the bedside table. She calls me
darling
. She wants to make up, to get back into each other’s good books as she would say. She expects it to happen just like that. She probably thinks it has already happened by some natural process. Her arm sports a brown strip of plaster. I’ve been alone in my room for an hour on my bed. Is that meant to be my strip of plaster? “Sit up and have your shortbreads,” she urges.

It’s Winks’ turn. He sits on the bed and tousles my hair. I flinch and shrink from the sudden lift of his hand, its warm weight, though I feel myself returning his smiling—I can’t help doing it. He says it gave him no pleasure taking the belt to my hide but bad habits have to be knocked out of us. He even winks and says he’s impressed by the way I fought back. I’m growing up, showing some gumption. Goodness gracious how strong I’m getting. I return his smile again, and Heels’ smile as well, proud of the compliments.

I crave the milk and shortbreads but won’t allow myself to touch them, won’t allow those two hovering over me to have the pleasure of my pleasure in eating and drinking. Winks places his hand gently on my rump. I sniff sharply from the pain. “Sore?” he asks, smiling and nodding so that I understand that he knows what it’s like to be sore.

“No,” I lie, enjoying contradicting him.

“Not sore?” He’s doubting me.

“N-n-no.” How dare he doubt me.

He pats my bum, testing me. I disguise the blood-throb of pain with a cough. “Whatever you say,” he grins.

I want to dig my fingernails into his arms and tear away skin for his grinning. “I can’t f-f-feel anything f-f-from here (meaning my hips) d-d-down to th-th-there (meaning my toes).” How shall I keep up this lie? I have to imitate what it was like straight after the belting, that feeling of no feeling, dead legs. Winks and his sudden grinless look, serious, concerned, are worth the risk.

“Nothing at all? No feeling?” he asks. Heels is concerned now. The brown pencil-lines she wears for eyebrows fidget as she blinks. Winks eases the blankets from my naked body. I play paralysed as he pokes and prods at my skinny legs and feet, my ribby stomach, trying for a response. “No feeling?”

I shake my head. No feeling. He and Heels take careful hold of my hips and turn me onto my side. This will be the hard part. They’re going to start fingering those welts, the ones that look like I’ve been sitting in a cane chair. I’m going to have to withstand the hurting. I’ll recite my times tables to keep a blank face, think of all the best exotic, adventure-sounding names of racehorses I’ve seen in the newspaper, and shuffle the words into poems the way I like doing. “Dashing Star, Ragtag Kingdom, Desert Honour, Tang, Storm Mouth,” equals:

The desert honours the ragtag kingdom
      
With a dashing star and the storm mouth’s tang

Their fingers feel between the marks on my thighs, arse-cheeks, back. They’re being so careful with their touch they almost tickle. I’m enjoying this tenderness. Their fingertips stroke and soothe me. I must harden myself against their affection, against them. Look at their faces, they work so hard to maintain beautiful faces—Winks with his razor and Old Spice aftershave; Heels with her bottles and tubs of scent, lipstick, powder and Ponds. They have lines in their faces deep as the lines in the hand’s palm, saggy, blotchy skin. Heels often admires my skin, “so smooth and without a single solitary blemish. You’re so lucky,” she says. “What a lucky boy to have such lovely skin and have been born in Sydney. You have landed on your feet.”

These ways, skin and Sydney, are not the only ways I’ve become aware of being superior to her, to them both. Heels’ is a butcher’s daughter. I am once removed from a butcher as a relation, from those blood-greasy hands they have, a finger missing, an apron wiped with gore. Heels watches television and doesn’t ever read. For me it’s the other way round—no TV but books, books, books. She says she doesn’t need to improve herself, she’s improved enough, but I noticed that Jane Austen’s
Persuasion
recently appeared beside her bed. I teased her about it but she set me straight. She said, “It’s really just there for show, for when people are coming through to value the place for buying.”

Heels is good at maths and counts coins from her desk two at a time as if dusting fast. I’m hopeless at maths. That, as far as I can tell, is her only victory over me. Winks reads books, thrillers and Westerns, and watches TV but he can’t draw like I can. He can’t spell a word like
philosophical
. He’s the son of a barber. I’m glad Winks’ life stands between mine and a man who would have been covered in other people’s hair.

They don’t know it but I’ve found them out. Horis are no more likely to be drunks than pakehas. What about Charlie Carmichael who drinks till he dribbles and slurs when he talks? Even if horis were, who is it that’s giving them the liquor in the first place? These two right here standing over me. When the phone rings after nine at night—“Horis again, Dad?”—it’s not always horis. What about when the card schools start fighting over cheating? They roll up their sleeves and mark out a boxing ring with chairs but the blood spilled is blood nonetheless no matter how they pretend to fight like proper gentlemen.

And there’s my own grandfather—Winks’ dad, the barber. He was a no-hoper who drank himself to death. I’ve heard it from Heels’ own lips. He hit my grandmother till she was black and blue and nobody ever said he was a hori.

What about me, taking trays into the phone box? Next they’ll be calling me a hori. Maybe I am. Maybe we’re secretly horis and hating them so no one will catch on that there’s brown in us. We probably have our own version of onions.

Next time I meet a male adult hori I will shake his hand and address him as Sir as if he was one of us. I will address the men as Sir and the women as Mrs Whatever or Miss Whatever. I imagine myself saying it. It isn’t that easy to think of a hori as a Sir or Mrs or Miss. Especially the denim horis. Perhaps I can’t do it after all. It would be easier to go back to the way things were taught to me. I wish I’d never found Heels and Winks out. If only the next time I met a hori I could imagine spitting in his eye as normal.

What are they saying over there about the doctor? Heels wants to fetch Dr Murchison. They’ve moved away from the bed for a hush-talk. “Oh, let him ask about the bruises,” she’s saying. “Dr Murchison will understand. He’s from the old school.”

Dr Murchison. He won’t be fooled by my legs not working. He’ll have all sorts of tests and stethoscopes to check for feeling and expose my lie. I might never be able to lie again. And what a hiding I’ll get. “I can feel something,” I say in pretend pain. I shift my legs beneath the blankets and let out a groan of effort. Heels quick-steps to the bed. Winks strides to the opposite side and lifts the blankets. They sigh and make a phewing-whistling sound. “Darling,” she says kissing my forehead. Winks rubs the crown of my hair and says “That’s my boy. Move some more.”

I raise and bend my legs, groan and wince, spurred on by the sighs and
that’s my boy
clucking. I’m lifted very tenderly to a sitting position, Winks’ hand for a chair-back. I relax into his hand, reassured, comforted, warmed. A shortbread and glass of milk are lifted to my lips. I nibble and sip and remind myself that I’m still acting, I’m not giving in to any love.

To prove it, I’m going to run away. Tonight. I’m almost eleven, it’s time I stood on my own two feet. Winks left home at eleven—those timber yards and gravel pits and one roast potato for dinner Heels goes on about. It must be such a frightening thing and a lonely thing to do. But it seems to be admired in him, all part of having lived a life where you’ve worked hard and have the right to boast about it and criticise others for not having done the same.

It is expected of me, leaving home, it’s obvious to me. For other boys the time will eventually arrive but for me the time is now. Heels and Winks have successfully weaned me. Is that what has happened? As horses are weaned I have been weaned: first by turning me against horis, then Heritage, and now by turning me against
them
. I’m ready to go, to step out into the world. I suppose there’s no to-do or ceremony about it. No teary goodbye or the like. Winks never spoke of ceremonies or a great to-do or teary goodbye for him. I just pack my bag and slip out, that’s probably the way I’m expected to go.

Sydney’s a warm place. A cardigan, two shirts, some sin-glets, underwear, socks. Never that goat coat. Toothbrush. Toothpaste. The shoes I’m already wearing. It won’t all fit into my school satchel so I’ll put on my pants, the ones Heels calls my casual slacks, and wear my good pants, the ones for going out, under them, the ones Heels calls special. I’ll wear my cardigan under my windcheater. One shirt. One singlet. A pair of socks. One lot of underwear. No toothbrush or Macleans. I roll them up tight and stuff them in. An apple. Two apples to tide me over. How will I pay for food and for tickets? Someone will pay. Someone always pays.
Has
paid up till now. But now it will be different.

There’s that donation money for the Celtic softball club in the beer mug on the Private Bar bar. It’s not going to be enough and it’s all in coins, heavy coins. The till money is hidden in those calico bags under Winks’ bedside for morning banking. Surely it’s not stealing, not in my case, my being his son. It’s more like initiative. What if it is stealing? Just a few notes out of those calico bags isn’t stealing. Some cigarette packs for trading with someone for something, for food.

A few bottles of beer for trading or drinking? I can’t cart bottles of beers around. I’ll take a couple or three notes from the calico bag, and the softball club change no matter how heavy.

A message to say goodbye, in my best handwriting:
I’m leaving.
Thank you for everything. Goodbye.
I don’t put
Love
at the end of the message as a punishment for the beating and being made to wear the goat coat to the factory.

Why don’t the trains stop? Every night they clitter-clatter past my bedroom window. They clitter-clatter past on the hour or thereabouts when the clock dongs ten, twelve, one, waking me pleasantly, but they’re not stopping. I stand on the platform, the only person, waving, shouting at the blur of steel boxes and tree-trunks but the blur shouts back an icy wind and then the platform goes quiet and the air settles on me with all the wet chill of a frost. Am I standing in the wrong place? No. This is Heritage Station, a stone’s throw from the hotel, the centre of town. This is the place where trains stop.